Every day, as soon as he gets up, while preparing a juice, he crosses off the day he leaves behind on the calendar. “It’s the final countdown!” exclaims Alberto, humming the theme of Europe. He is 60 years old, works in television, in Santiago de Compostela, and a month before the start of the holidays he counts down until the day his summer break begins. He has been with the same company for 29 years and every July is a marathon. “I have to do my homework for the 30 days that I won’t be there,” he explained to La Vanguardia.
It is exactly the same thing that happens to Carmen (fictitious name), 45 years old, who works in a consultancy in Barcelona. She has a seven-year-old daughter and has been working part-time since her little girl was born. “The weeks leading up to the holidays seem like the world is ending. I have to advance everything that I won’t be able to do later, and that implies liquidating twice the work in less time, since we work an intensive day. In addition, we are fewer people in the team, some are already on vacation, ”she tells us.
Carmen adds another factor to the equation: the need to reconcile. “In July all family schedules are altered because there is no school, and some days I have to telework.” The result of all this is a large voltage spike. A burden, an anxiety, and a fatigue that is experienced in many homes, offices and businesses. These days, the mantras of boredom resound. “I can’t take it anymore, I need a vacation.”
This sensation has increased with the hectic pace of life of our times, but it is not new. “It is archaic and has become a cultural or identity pandemic. From school we are accustomed to this rhythm, to take the exams in June or July and rest for two months. The same thing happens in December, when Christmas arrives. In the days before, it seems like the end of the world”, says Xavier Montero, psychologist and member of the Psychology of Organizations and Work Section of the Official College of Psychology of Catalonia, Human Resources consultant.
For him it is a problem of organization of our society. “In Europe the holidays are much more spaced out. Entrepreneurs from Denmark, France or Italy tell me “how can you close four weeks?!” With these long breaks in activity, according to Montero, a kind of “collective paranoia” is reached. Everything has to be closed in July, “there is an unnatural pressure,” he adds. “In addition, there is a mimetic, contagious bias.”
The truth is that those weeks before the start of the holidays can be endless. Does our brain play a trick on us, prolonging the days before the break? “The perception of time is subjective, fun goes by very quickly, boring seems slow to us,” says psychiatrist Marta Carmona, member of the Madrid Mental Health Association (AMSM), and author of the book Malestamos (Captain Swing).
For Carmona, this pre-vacation malaise has to do with the current modus vivendi. “Most of our lives we give to others, we have little sovereignty over our time. We make long hours, expensive trips and we add the reproduction work (cleaning, putting washing machines, cooking, shopping…). The result is very little free time, which works as the promise of something that will come, like the donkey and the carrot. And the carrot never arrives, you work piecemeal and the moment of rest is frankly short”.
Roser Claramunt, is a psychologist and coach, master’s degree in NLP, mindfulness instructor and trainer in personal skills and neuroscience of well-being. One of her main messages coincides with those of Carmona, caution with the aspirations of rest, doomed in a short time. “We arrived at the holidays with high expectations, but very exhausted. This is the accumulation of many too short weekends, in which we also hoped to be able to rest, but which have become an accumulation of appointments, obligations and family responsibilities”.
At the bottom of this problem, among other factors, is the hyper-productivity denounced by Vanesa Freixa, illustrator, disseminator of the rural world and activist for a change in our way of life. “We live hooked on work, and many times it is not because we love it. Work guarantees us to pay rent, eat, a car, the objects that we compulsively buy. We are tied to a wheel of slavery, from which we cannot get out: produce, rest, produce, rest…”. That fast-paced life makes us yearn intensely for the brief vacation respite, which ends up fleetingly passing.
“The happiest days are the ones you don’t have to go to work. My work hasn’t interested me at all for a few years, it doesn’t satisfy me”, admits Alberto, who takes advantage of his four happy weeks to read, rest, be with his partner and his friends and go to a concert. He emphatically vindicates doing nothing, the dolce far niente, and quotes The right to laziness by Paul Lafargue, in which the French-Cuban author proposes to achieve, with the use of machines, labor rights that allow society to dedicate its time art, science and elementary human needs.
Lafargue’s recipe sounds like a marvelous utopia, but the prescription, for employees like Carmen, continues to be small actions. To cope with this pre-holiday burden, “it is very important to learn to relativize and delegate whenever possible, in addition to not putting up with a workload that is beyond us,” he says. He believes that “the right to digital disconnection should be promoted much more, we are still connected outside working hours, and that translates into a feeling of harassment that harms us at all levels.”
According to Xavier Montero, preventing the pre-holiday period from being punitive involves redistributing vacation time throughout the year. “It would be advisable to do only two weeks in summer, which already allows you to disconnect. This would make it easier to readapt when you return, because after four weeks off, it is difficult to even remember the computer password. After these long breaks, many workers need, already on the first day, to scrutinize the calendar in search of the next bridges”.
From the neuroscience of well-being, Claramunt is committed to prioritizing tasks and obligations, to avoid pre-holiday burnout. “One technique is to mark three or five weekly or daily priorities, the tasks to complete yes or yes, with which you have to start. This gives a sense of control and helps combat the burden of “I can’t get to everything.” In the labor sphere, you have to mark the tasks assigned to your position or your role and, if necessary, sit down to talk with your superiors about the tasks or attributions that you do not reach, and that can be delegated. Lowering the level of demand is crucial”.
Claramunt makes some recommendations that “although they are very logical, they are key” to get out of the pre-summer exhaustion loop. He advises doing physical exercise (even if it’s just walking or going up and down the stairs) and taking small breaks of five to ten minutes during the day, to breathe, leave the screens (that WhatsApp from the family mayor can wait!) and talk with other people. He also bets on good sleep habits and asking for help when necessary, both at home and at work.
In another sense, Carmona expresses herself, who claims initiatives to rethink the working day. “We have to regain sovereignty over our lives. The subjective perception of time is inherent to the human being, but the feeling that “life should be something else” is typical of our current moment”, according to the psychiatrist. For a change in this sense, she affirms, great social consensus is required. “As a society, we must rethink the use of time to be able to do what we want, and be with our loved ones, instead of living to work and keep the house tidy. We must reconsider whether salaried and productive work has to define our identity, or whether we are open to other forms of social organization”.
The general advice, for this doctor, is to take advantage of the rest time to imagine what life could be like. “Thinking about who you are working for, who your life is being for, can help you so that the return from the holidays is not so disappointing.” A return that Alberto envisions, singing ‘The Final Countdown’ again, and crossing off days on the calendar, this time the ones he has left to return to work. “In those days I remember The Myth of Sisyphus by Camus, raising the stone again, so that it falls again.”
