Mind Moves: We do not live one life but many lives. We do not live in one world but move between many different worlds: work and leisure, intimacy and aloneness, stillness and activity, wakefulness and sleep, reality and the imagination.
As we move across and between these worlds, we make transitions from one state of mind to another. Over time, our soul knits together a vast range of experiences and memories to create the particular feeling and texture of what our life is about.
Perhaps, like me, you are currently making the transition from summer vacation back into the world of adult responsibility, re-engaging with work, schools, and the multiple audiences to whom you are accountable.
Or perhaps you've not yet taken a break from work, so are planning a long-overdue transition in the opposite direction. Psychology has always been interested in how we make transitions between one world and another. Recently there has been much discussion in academic and popular psychological literature about the problems of moving between the worlds of work and leisure.
A Dutch psychologist, Prof Ad Vingerhoets, of Tilburg University investigated the experience of over 2,000 men and women who found that they experienced distressing symptoms when they took time off work.
He found that, while some individuals appear to have no problem punching the clock for a 12-hour bout at the office, they displayed a variety of symptoms - headaches, muscle pain, fatigue - during a work-free weekend or vacation.
Displaying the usual flare of psychology to name and diagnose human experience - to turn dynamic states of mind into "problems" we can control - Ad Vingerhoets has called this condition "leisure sickness". This syndrome arises, he says, from the stress some experience when they are unable to relinquish control and relax. He identified two varieties of leisure sickness.
One refers to symptoms - which can include nausea, fatigue, headaches and recurrent infections - that appear whenever the stress of the working week is suddenly removed, either at the weekend or at the beginning of holidays.
The other sort is found among men and women who have become tired of the rat race and have downshifted to enjoy a quieter life, only to find themselves suffering from these recurrent minor illnesses plus boredom and depression - what we might have more eloquently termed "ennui" in olden days.
Little is suggested by way of explanation for why some people find the work/leisure transition difficult. Some practical advice is offered along the lines of modifying your expectations as you move into and out of down-time; building in time to de-compress when you take off on vacation and easing the transition back into work so that you are not immediately back at full throttle.
Perhaps it's not that holidays make us ill but that we encounter, in those rare moments of stopping, a part of us that is already unwell due to prolonged neglect. When we finally press the pause button on our frenzied work lives, we allow ourselves to acknowledge our accumulated exhaustion and stop fighting with it.
As we come to rest, our minds and bodies register their protest for all the ways we have neglected ourselves in pursuit of strategic objectives and corporate deadlines.
We drop less pressing agendas like a walk in the park, conversations for the sheer enjoyment of having them, reading a poem or listening to music that nourishes the soul, because there is always something "more important" to do. We fix our identity to one world and forget that we have multiple selves that require a larger space to breathe and grow.
And when we do take a break, it's often with the intention of immobilising and numbing our minds and bodies, rather than with any consideration for how we can bring alive those parts of ourselves we neglected for too long.
A holiday need not be a painful exile from the world of work. It helps to plan to have regular short breaks during the year rather than pin all your hopes of relaxation and restoration on two weeks in Spain. Where the weather must be perfect and everyone must have a fantastic time because "this is it" folks. And to build into your breaks some element of adventure, some edge of experience that challenges you and restores a feeling of vitality. When you are exhausted, you may need to be stretched, rather than merely stretched out.
As your holiday draws to a close, think about what will help you to make the transition back home, and what you can do to protect yourself in the year ahead from losing touch with those different worlds that bring different parts of you alive. Poetry may act as a gear lever to help you shift between your strategic mind and your soul. So, in the words of Robert Bly:
"When someone knocks on the door, think that he's about
To give you something large: tell you you're forgiven,
Or that it's not necessary to work all the time, or that it's
Been decided that if you lie down no one will die."
Tony Bates is a clinical psychologist.
