A change is as good as a rest' and over the coming months hundreds of thousands will take to the roads, to the skies and even to the rail tracks in pursuit of their change.
While very few people go on holiday anticipating that they won't enjoy it, there are things that make it more or less enjoyable.
Surprisingly, even the tourism industry now scientifically studies the aspects of holidays that make them enjoyable.
However, I could only identify one study that measured the impact on psychological well-being. The study, published in the Journal Of Travel Medicine in 2005, was conducted by Austrian researchers and identified characteristics that predicted the psychological health outcomes of the annual holiday.
One hundred and ninety one, mainly white-collar workers, were administered a questionnaire one week after completion of their annual vacation, evaluating five broad areas, including: physical characteristics of the holiday (eg, duration, distance travelled to reach destination, time zone, temperature, etc), structuring of the day (eg, number of meals provided, planning of the day, etc), health and social activity (eg, amount of sleep, physical activity, making new acquaintances, etc), stress during the vacation (eg, rows, health problems, etc) and, finally, the physical and mental strain of work and basic characteristics, such as age.
Subjects were asked to rate their subjective feelings of recuperation and exhaustion in comparison to before the holiday. Some of the results were unexpected and counter-intuitive. A proportion of the outcome (27pc) could be predicted by measuring the variables.
The higher the mental strain of work, the greater the feeling of recuperation. In addition, a warm temperature at vacation site, the amount of time vacationers had for themselves and for their needs, engaging in physical activity, good quality of sleep and making new acquaintances all had a positive effect.
Interpersonal conflict was negatively associated with recuperation, but only to a very small extent (two per cent), while health problems during the vacation, number of hours slept and number of meals provided had no impact.
Turning to the predictors of improvement in levels of exhaustion, only 15pc of the variance could be explained. Time-zone differences, temperature and health problems during the holiday predicted improvement but, surprisingly, the duration of the holiday and the travel time to the destination did not impact on this.
The finding that the duration of the holiday did not effect exhaustion levels might seem surprising, since it is assumed that the longer the vacation, the greater the time to sleep and unwind.
However, other leisure research has shown that the greatest improvement occurs in the first three days of holiday and peaks by seven.
On the other hand, the extent to which leisure time predicts recuperation is proof of our intuition that freedom from obligations is central to a holidays restorative value.
Surprisingly, self-determination of daily activities or some scheduling of daily activities was not related to recuperation as other studies found, but the mood-enhancing effects of physical activity and also of social interaction were clearly demonstrated in this study.
source:http://www.independent.ie/health/tips-to-ensure-a-happy-healthy-summer-holiday-1402382.html
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