I Always Need a Vacation From My Vacation

Nothing in this episode is medical advice. It is education and lived experience. Anything you are weighing for your own health is a decision to make with your own healthcare provider, who knows your history and your whole picture.

I have been a nurse for almost forty years and a board-certified health coach for the last several, and I still come home from vacation needing a vacation.

A few years ago I went to a yoga retreat in Yelapa with Baxter Bell. I chose it on purpose, because it was the kind of trip that exists for exactly one reason, which is to put you back together. The retreat itself was wonderful. Then I picked up a stomach virus in the last few days, and I walked into my house more depleted than when I left it.

You could call that bad luck, and a good part of it was. But here is the part I had not said out loud before: even on the trips where nobody gets sick, I come home tired. I love to travel, and I am good at it, and almost every time I still arrive home with a body that needs a week it is not going to get.

I know the research, and I still feel this way

In March I sat down with Adriane Berg for an episode called Your Passport to Longevity: Why Travel May Be the Best Medicine After 50. We went through the research on travel and heart health, cognitive function, and what social isolation does to a body. I believe every word of it, and I still come home from vacation needing a vacation.

Last week I wrote about the difference between self-doubt and imposter syndrome, and how the evidence and the feeling can sit right next to each other without either one canceling the other out. So I am not going to hand you a method here. I am going to say the gap out loud and start working on it, because I suspect I am not the only one.

Travel is a health intervention

I use that word deliberately, as a nurse and a health coach. A trip changes your sleep, your movement, what you eat, how long you sit, who you talk to, and how much your nervous system has to manage, all in the same week. In any other context, a week that changed all of those at once would get our attention. On vacation, we call it a break.

Travel is also one of the very few chances you get to set down who you are at home and find out who else you might be. The setting down is what opens the space, and what you do with that space is where the health happens, or does not.

Five honest guesses

These are not answers. They are guesses from a woman paying attention to her own pattern, and you may recognize a few.

The first is that I want more out of a trip than my time and energy can hold. What I actually want is downtime built into the days, healthy meals I can count on, and time to move. None of that survives an itinerary built on wanting the trip to be worth it.

The second is the rules nobody hands you and everybody follows, starting with getting your money's worth. That is not how many sights you can squeeze into a day. When we broaden our intentions for a trip and stay curious, we become more open to what unfolds, including the things we never planned. Part of the joy is noticing that.

The third is that my self-care is the first thing to go. At home, my walks, my strength training and my kitchen are already set up. On a trip every one of those becomes a decision, made while I am tired, usually with other people waiting on me. So I skip it, and then I skip it again.

The role I most need to set down

The fourth guess is the one I find most interesting. I go to set down my roles, and something rushes in to fill the space. If I have not decided what I want that space for, the trip fills it for me, usually with logistics and with making sure everyone else is having a good time. On most trips to see my children and grandchildren, I do not set the roles down at all.

There was one recent exception. The most restful trip I can remember was with my children and all four granddaughters at the UC Santa Barbara family camp, where someone else planned and made every meal. That tells me the role I most need to set down is not the mother or the grandmother. It is the one who plans every meal.

The fifth guess is that some of it is not mine at all: the virus, the delayed flight, the family thing that happens while you are away. The wellness world has a bad habit of implying that if you had only prepared better, nothing would have gone wrong. That is not true, and it is not kind.

What I know, pointed at a suitcase

I know what happens to sleep, blood sugar and muscle when a woman in her sixties stops moving and starts eating differently for a week. I also know the most useful thing behavior change science has to offer: a decision you make before you need it holds up far more reliably than willpower in the moment you need it.

That is why I can hold a strength-training habit at home and lose it on the road. At home the decision is already made. On a trip I am relying on willpower at seven in the morning in a hotel room, and willpower is the weakest tool in the box. I am not a beginner at the body, and I am not a beginner at change. I am a beginner at pointing those two things at a suitcase.

The Tuesday after

Here is where I have landed. What if we stopped measuring a trip by what we saw, and started measuring it by how we felt the Tuesday after we got home?

If the measure is what you saw, rest is always the thing you sacrifice, because rest does not show up in the photographs. If the measure is how you feel the Tuesday after, an afternoon spent doing nothing is part of what you came for.

I am not telling you to do less. I love the seeing. I am asking whether we could decide differently, and decide before we leave. On my trip to Los Angeles next month, I am going to decide my minimum for movement, sleep and food at my kitchen table, put at least one restoring thing into the plan, and decide what I want the empty space to be for. Deciding in advance is not the opposite of staying open. It is what makes staying open possible. I will report back, including if it does not work.

Your turn

Think back to your last trip, past the photographs and the part you tell people about. The Tuesday after you got home, how did you actually feel? Then ask yourself one question. What would have had to be different?

And then tell me. Do you come home from a trip rested? What is the thing that wrecks it for you? Reply to my newsletter or write to me at [email protected]. I read every one, and what you send will shape where this goes next.

One more time because it matters. Nothing in this episode is medical advice. Any decision about your own health belongs with your own healthcare provider, who knows your history and your whole picture.

Listen to the Full Episode

Episode 45: I Always Need a Vacation From My Vacation

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About Dvora Citron

Dvora Citron is a Registered Nurse, National Board Certified Health & Wellness Coach, Lifestyle Medicine Practitioner, and the founder of slant2plants®. She hosts Sexy in Your 60s to bring women the real ingredients of vibrant aging through science, story, support, and soul.

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