When time off is awful

Why resting can feel terrible, and what to do about it

Here's something that used to happen to me at least twice a year as a professor.

The last few weeks of the term, I'd be exhausted and desperate for teaching to end already. I'd have these visions of how glorious it was going to be to have time for myself, to read for pleasure, to have conversations with friends about something other than how many essays we’d managed to grade.

Then, term would finally finish, I'd wake up the next day to a quiet house, a day completely to myself, and a stack of novels I'd been saving for this moment.

And did I feel that glorious sense of leisure and repletion I anticipated? Reader, I did not. I felt lost, empty and, honestly, a bit sad. I felt like I'd dropped off a cliff into a weird wasteland when I'd been anticipating a paradise. And what was worse, I felt like I had zero justification for feeling that way. This was what I'd been waiting for. What was wrong with me that couldn't I enjoy it now that I had it?

This unexpected emotional let-down is what I call the time-off trough, and you don't have to be on a semester schedule to encounter it. I've seen high-achieving, high-anxiety clients fall into this trough on vacations, sabbaticals and even a stray unscheduled Saturday morning.

Of course, anyone can feel at a loose end when they exit their usual routine, but people with what I call self-eating brains are particularly prone to this dynamic, for a few reasons:

1. High-achievers tend to be extremely dopamine-driven. Although dopamine most often is spoken about in terms of craving and rewards, it actually governs our brain’s relationship to what is not present.¹ (This is why it's connected to craving, which is fundamentally about something we aren’t yet consuming.) Wondering what's on the other side of that hill? Dopamine. Setting some goals? Dopamine. Figuring out how to go from kids-asleep-in-bed to kids-exiting-car-with-all-their-school-crap in under an hour? Dopamine.
   
   This is why high-achievers become used to being on a dopamine conveyor belt. Going from This major long-term result doesn't exist for me yet to Hey, I've achieved it! is a dopamine-process par excellence. Which means that when we stop accomplishing things for a minute, our brains can feel like like a pinball machine that's gotten suddenly unplugged mid-game. No more flashing lights and dinging bells and sparky chemicals zipping around. It’s about as fun as an unplugged pinball machine, too.
   

2. All that activity distracts us from whatever we're trying to avoid thinking about. Although high-achievers tend to have a lot of anxiety about goals and the possibility of not hitting the mark every single time, we also often manage our anxiety by going after big goals. Even if the reassurance when we achieve doesn't last long, it's at least present to provide some kind of counterweight to the constant fear-mongering performed by our brains. Unplug the achievement machine, and it can feel like all we're left with is the anxiety.
   

3. We think we haven't done enough yet. When you are constantly scanning your life for things you’ve failed to do, resting just seems like an opportunity for your brain to yell at your more, while in the background the to-do list keeps expanding. From this perspective, it just seems logical to wait until we can actually feel good about taking some time for ourselves. Which might be reasonable if that day was ever going to come. But this kind of brain can always find something we should be doing that feels more important than resting. So there's pretty much zero chance that this fabled day of well-earned leisure will arrive.
   

4. We don't know and/or don't like the person we are outside of being good at things. This one is a doozy, and it's not going to be solved in an internet article. But it's definitely worth thinking about, because it can be be shifted over time. When you've grown up getting rewarded by adults for being smart or talented, it's very easy for your positive sense of self to become fused with those skills and capacities. Without our being fully conscious of it, the time-off trough can feel like a confrontation with the limits of that accomplishing persona. It may not have even occurred to us that we could be anyone else. Definitely this was my experience for a long time. Years ago a therapist asked me where I could find value in myself outside my capacity to do certain things well, and not only could I not answer—I didn’t really even understand the question.

Given all this, it’s not that surprising that we wind up tumbling into the time-off trough. If anything, this experience is what academics like to call over-determined—i.e., it’s one effect with a whole bunch of causes. Despite all the reasons why we understandably expect resting and leisure to be enjoyable, there are pretty predictable reasons why sometimes it’s not.

Which brings us to the single most important thing I think we can do about the time-off trough: plan for it.

So much of the grimness of the trough comes from comparing our actual feeling to the delight we think we should be experiencing. But if we know our mood may dip and why, we can treat ourselves with a bit more gentleness and dial down some of the self-judgment.

We can also decide in advance how to handle the time itself. This takes a bit of thought, and also some care when it comes to our tendency to race onto the next achievement. Rest does need to happen, even if we don’t always like it. And trading frenzied work for frenzied leisure isn’t going to give us the break we actually require.

What works for me and many of my clients are things that are simple, engaging and often social in an undemanding way. So rather than hosting a five-course dinner party, you schedule a long lunch out with a close friend. Or maybe you book a session into that axe-throwing place you’ve been curious about, or drop by the knitting group your neighbour told you about. I had a client who started scheduling an easy hike for the day after she finished any big project, because that way she knew she wouldn’t try to manage the dopamine crash in ways that would make it worse (like watching Netflix until 3 am). Little islands of planned activity that pique our curiosity and interest—ideally in the real world, not online—go a long way toward making the time off feel enjoyable rather than dispiriting, while still leaving room for the spontaneity that is part of what makes time off feel different from work.

Creating this kind of balance between plans and space also gives us the chance to encounter that mysterious non-achieving part of us—the one my former therapist tried to tell me about. They’re the part that loves to sing or water ski and used to be really good at climbing trees. They know how to play, even if we don’t let them practice it much any more. Spending some time with this part can be disorienting, in the literal sense that they ask us to orient toward other things. Once we let them direct us, though, it’s possible to remember what actual fun feels like. Which enables us to notice how different it is from the self-numbing we often resort to instead. If dopamine is about craving and what’s not present, this playful part knows something about satisfaction and enjoying what’s actually here. We just have to withstand the experience of stillness long enough to let them surface. Then the time-off trough can become more of a blip—something to take in stride on our way to having fun.

1. Most of what I know about dopamine I learned from The Molecule of More by Daniel Lieberman and Michael Long, which is one of the best neuroscience books for a non-specialist audience that I’ve read.