The Importance of Holidays for Well-Being and Performance at Work

Intense weeks, complex projects, clients with urgent requests, back-to-back meetings and the feeling that everything requires an immediate response. When the holidays finally arrive, it is hardly surprising that many people feel the need to slow down.

That is precisely the value of taking a break: creating space to restore energy, gain perspective and return with greater physical and mental availability.

And yet, going on holiday does not always mean truly disconnecting from work. Emails keep coming in, notifications remain active and the phone is always within reach. We change location, but not necessarily our state of mind.

This raises an important question: what makes holidays genuinely restorative, and what conditions can we create to ensure they fulfil that purpose?

Why do we need holidays to recover from work?

Work consumes resources. It requires attention, mental energy, emotional availability and, often, physical effort. The greater or more prolonged the demands, the greater the need for recovery.

Rest is not the opposite of working well. It is one of the conditions that allows us to continue working in a healthy and sustainable way.

A meta-analysis by Grant, Buchanan and Shockley, published in the Journal of Applied Psychology in 2025, brought together 32 studies and 256 effects and concluded that holidays have a significant positive impact on employee well-being. The authors also found that these benefits can persist after returning to work for longer than previous research had suggested.

Holidays should therefore not be seen simply as a reward for a year of work. They are also a mechanism for physical and psychological recovery.

Periods of rest help us replenish resources that work itself consumes — and this can translate into greater energy, improved concentration and greater readiness to return to work.

Being away is not the same as disconnecting

When our out-of-office message says, “I’m away, but available by phone or WhatsApp,” we are still, in some way, connected to work.

The research by Grant, Buchanan and Shockley (2025) identifies psychological detachment from work as one of the factors that can strengthen the benefits of holidays. In practice, this means no longer being mentally connected to professional tasks, problems and responsibilities.

And that is different from simply not being physically at work.

We can be on a beach, in another city or at home and still be mentally present in a meeting, a project or an unanswered email.

By contrast, when we are able to create genuine distance, we make room for other experiences, routines and ways of focusing our attention. It is this shift that helps make holidays restorative.

Reading without interruptions. Going for a walk. Sleeping more. Spending time with friends or family. Discovering somewhere new. Or simply doing nothing for a while.

The point is not to turn holidays into a new list of goals. It is to allow the body and mind to shift gears.

The culture of being “always available”

Technology has made it possible to work from almost anywhere.

Email, Teams, Slack, WhatsApp and smartphones allow us to communicate, make decisions and solve problems almost instantly. This evolution has brought enormous benefits to organisations and enabled more flexible ways of working.

The challenge lies in distinguishing between being contactable and having to be available at all times.

An analysis published by Eurofound in 2026, based on the European Working Conditions Survey 2024, shows that one in five workers in the European Union is contacted for work-related reasons outside working hours several times a month — approximately 39.4 million people.

An earlier Eurofound report, published in 2023 and based on a sample of companies and workers in Belgium, France, Italy and Spain, helps explain why we continue to respond. Among workers who replied to work communications outside working hours, 82% said they felt responsible for their tasks, 75% wanted to keep everything under control and 75% felt that they were expected to respond.

More than a technological problem, this is a question of habits and expectations. And here it is important to recognise that disconnecting is an individual choice, but also depends on the conditions around us.

If the team is prepared, responsibilities are shared and ongoing work can continue without depending on a single person, it becomes much easier to truly step away.

There is no need to turn holidays into a test of the organisation. But it is difficult to completely separate individual well-being from the way we work together.

The value of changing pace during the holidays

One of the major differences holidays bring is precisely a change of pace.

For much of the year, our time is shaped by schedules, meetings, deadlines, commitments and other people’s needs.

Holidays give us back, at least temporarily, greater control over how we use that time.

Being able to choose when to rest, when to do an activity or simply when to do nothing reduces some of the pressure associated with a routine structured around external obligations.

And perhaps that is precisely one of the most valuable aspects of holidays: for a while, our calendar stops being the main organiser of the day.

Not every holiday needs to be extraordinary in order to be beneficial. Sometimes, recovery simply means having time again for ordinary things: talking, reading, walking, cooking, exercising, spending time with others or being alone. Rest does not have to be productive to be valuable.

How many days of holiday do we really need to recover?

There is no magic number of days.

We often hear people say things like, “I need a week just to stop thinking about work,” or, at the other extreme, “one week is more than enough.”

The reality is that everyone’s needs are different.

The meta-analysis by Grant, Buchanan and Shockley (2025) found evidence that the length of a holiday influences its benefits, but it did not identify an ideal duration that applies to everyone.

There is also not enough robust evidence to conclude that several shorter holidays are always better than one longer period.

More important than searching for the perfect formula may be ensuring that there is enough time to allow for a genuine change of pace.

Because, often, it is only after a few days that we realise just how fast we had been going.

Restorative holidays begin before we leave — and extend into our return

Disconnecting often starts before the holiday begins.

A clear handover of responsibilities, designated people to follow up on different matters and an unambiguous out-of-office message all make it easier to step away.

These practices do not only protect the person going on holiday. They also reduce that feeling that we need to keep “checking in” on work from a distance.

The goal should not be to find an efficient way to keep working during the holidays. It should be to create the conditions that make this unnecessary.

And the return matters too.

A study by Wang, Song, Guo and Ye, published in Behavioral Sciences in 2025, followed 349 employees before, during and after an extended holiday period. The results reinforce the importance of recovery and also show that organisational support can help make the return to work more positive.

In practice, this may involve simple things: having some space to regain context, reorganise priorities and understand what genuinely requires attention, instead of treating the first day back as a race to “catch up”.

A good break does not have to end the moment we switch the computer back on.

Holidays are part of sustainable recovery

Holidays are important, but on their own they cannot compensate for an entire year without sufficient breaks.

Recovery needs to happen at different levels: during the day, between working days, at weekends and, of course, through longer periods of holiday.

Holidays are therefore one of the foundations of a more sustainable way of working.

And this does not diminish the value of holidays themselves. Quite the opposite.

It reminds us that stopping, gaining distance and recovering are not unwanted interruptions to work. They are part of the cycle that allows us to maintain energy, concentration and availability over time.

Organisations and leaders also have a role to play in this balance. Cultures that respect periods of rest, teams with autonomy and well-distributed responsibilities make it easier for people to genuinely disconnect.

At Bright Concept, we help organisations and leaders create these conditions by working on areas such as leadership, collaboration, team autonomy and healthier, more sustainable ways of working.

But, above all, holidays should remain what they are meant to be: a space to stop, recover and return with renewed energy.

Because working well also means knowing when to stop.

Sources

• Grant, R. S., Buchanan, B. E. & Shockley, K. M. (2025). I Need a Vacation: A Meta-Analysis of Vacation and Employee Well-Being. Journal of Applied Psychology, 110(7), 887–905.
• Eurofound (2023). Right to disconnect: Implementation and impact at company level. Publications Office of the European Union.
• Eurofound (2026). The never-ending workday in flexible-working Europe.
• Wang, Y., Song, K., Guo, M. & Ye, L. (2025). Back to Work, Running on Empty? How Recovery Needs and Perceived Organizational Support Shape Employees’ Vigor Upon Return to Work. Behavioral Sciences, 15(7), 889.