Last year, Madison Winey, 29, wanted to use her vacation days to drive from San Francisco, where she lives, to Bend, Oregon, to visit her family. But taking time off from her job as a lawyer always felt like “more stress than it’s worth, especially if you’re just going away for a couple of days,” she said. She would have to start planning for her absence weeks before leaving, and she was expected to provide times when she would check emails.
Dr. Rebecca Brendal, president of the American Psychiatric Association, likened the experience to the Sunday scaries, a term that has become popular on social media to refer to the dread one feels at the end of the weekend about going back to work. It is a cause for concern during this holiday season because it dovetails with a sharp increase in burnout among workers in recent months, she said.
Morra Aarons-Mele, author of “The Anxious Achiever,” said she hears about this phenomenon often as a consultant for corporate teams. “So few work cultures actually encourage people to unplug, and most view working all the time as a badge of honor,” she said. Prepare everyone around you before you leave, Dr. Brendal said. “Effective managers and leaders who I try to emulate will start putting their out of office message up a week before they actually go out,” she noted. “When I first saw that, I would think, ‘Why are they signaling their vacation a week in advance?’ And then I realized it’s to set reasonable expectations.”
Now, Mr. Hy uses email filters to keep his inbox from becoming overwhelming. “I always filter out a message where I’m not in the “To” line. It doesn’t mean I don’t read it, but I won’t prioritize reading it,” he said.As counterintuitive as it sounds, if the emails at the other end of a vacation are keeping you up at night, you can schedule pockets of time during your vacation to just clean out the inbox, said Ms.