There are many lovely things about stepping away from your day to day.
Whether it’s onto a beach, the snow, or wondering around a new country, it can be the best of times.
There is the physical: the relaxing, the much needed sleep, the pleasure of the food and the drink.
There is the mental: the decompression and reconnection, that feeling that you are returning to being more of yourself, unshackled, untroubled by the day to day grind.
There is the relational: when you are with someone close to you, it can often be an opportunity to reconnect with them and others, to be more present, to see the other more than you do when distracted by work and daily life.
We each have preferences for the balance, we each have a sense of what a great holiday means.
I did too, until I heard Daniel Kahneman’s now famous TED Talk: ‘The riddle of experience vs memory’.
It spoke to me as a person, but also as a Cognitive Psychologist.
His argument goes something like this:
In order to understand the value of a holiday, you have to differentiate the ‘Lived Experience’ from the ‘Remembered Experience’.
Let’s say you have a two week holiday, where you are lucky enough to spend most of the days in the same way: nice breakfast at the hotel, then sitting on a lovely sun-bed reading a book, a nice evening dinner.
Your ‘Lived Experience’ is one of deep relaxation and you are left feeling satisfied with your holiday. Boxed ticked.
Alternatively, you have a week long holiday where you spend each day differently, one day sitting on the beach, another exploring the island, another on a day trip to see another one etc etc.
You return from holiday, relaxed, but probably not quite in the way you would have been with the two weeks of samey beach-ness.
But you also return with something else, a different ‘Remembered Experience’.
The brain processes novelty differently from the known, the familiar. When you do lots of different things, it gives your memory different things to hang on to, a richer source of ‘memory hooks’.
What that means is that in the days, the weeks, the months (and often the years) after, in a more ‘memory rich’ experience, the holiday echoes more strongly. It ripples out, so that you are more likely to remember the joy it brought.
It means you arguably get better long term Return On Holiday.
What you sacrifice in short term deep relaxation, you may benefit in the longer term of how you feel about that experience.
My wife Amelie and I certainly find this to be true.
We always try and balance the more passive and the more active.
So that we return feeling like we have had a relaxing time, but also that there is a diversity and richness to the experience, allowing it to remain with us long after the holiday is over.