If you get the “Sunday scaries” at the end of every week, or have a sinking feeling in your stomach during the last few days of every vacation, it might be because you are thinking of your time off as a special and unique time separate from your “regular” life.
We think doing that makes a ton of sense – after all, who doesn’t want their holiday or weekend to feel special, right? The problem is that when we frame our time off as very unique, pleasurable, and distinct from the rest of our lives, implicitly we are telling ourselves that the rest of our lives are ordinary and unpleasurable.
So of course the closer we get to the return of our non-vacation life, the more we dread it. Not to mention that we end up spending a good chunk or our time off in dread as well.
That doesn’t mean we should stop liking our time off. Instead, we can cultivate thoughts that re-frame how we look at the time we are not taking off.
What if we saw every day (vacation or not) as an opportunity to just experience life, which is always ~50/50 positive and negative emotions? And what if we looked for what’s pleasurable and freeing in our non-vacation time and practiced infusing every day with a little more space and ease?
Appreciating the time we spend outside of weekends or vacation will not make our time off less fun or valuable. But it will help us approach every day of our lives with more ease.
