Why it’s time for you to ditch taking long annual holidays

We’re now approaching that pointy time of the year when turning over a fresh calendar is well within reach. And with every new year come questions about where you might go on holidays and how much time you should take off.

The usual way of thinking for most Australians is to save up as much annual leave as we can and then use it all at once on a long holiday. Roy Morgan data shows the average worker currently has 14 days of leave saved up, and with our geographical placement at the bottom of the globe, this usually makes sense.

However, there’s a better way of getting the most out of your holidays and it involves taking more frequent but shorter breaks to get the most out of it.

Aim for shorter and more frequent breaks in 2027 and your work and personal life will really thank you.

There is some serious science behind this. Research published last year in the Cureus Journal of Medical Science found that employees who take multiple short breaks throughout the year exhibited higher levels of energy and motivation than those who took only one long annual holiday.

The reasons for this, they concluded, is that regular breaks reduce burnout and enhance job satisfaction. The longer we work without a break, the more our stress accumulates.

We like to think that holidays recharge our batteries to full and then we slowly run out of energy over time. But many studies have shown that when you return to a high-stress environment after a vacation – no matter what the length – you return to the same levels of stress within a week. In other words, the holiday high doesn’t hang around for very long.

This doesn’t matter if you’ve been out of the office for one week or three, so taking more regular breaks means you’ll get more of the benefits of taking time off. In fact, the science says that our health and well-being levels peak around the eighth day of holidays and start dropping after that.

So although that’s not a magic number, it does give a guide that just a week of time off will give you a meaningful amount of the positive benefits that we get when we step away from the workplace.

Taking a brief holiday about every two months is the recommended dosage in order to “mitigate stress accumulation”, says the research. Add your leave entitlement to Australia’s healthy amount of public holidays and you can plan out a decent number of week-long breaks that gets you close to this cadence.

All of this will only work, however, if you’re able to properly switch off. You need to disconnect completely from work to get the benefits. The more breaks you take, the more normalised this becomes for the workplace to continue without you.

Remember as well that travel is not just about the physical days you’re not working, there’s also an immense amount of pleasure gained from planning and dreaming about what you’re going to get up to when you clock off. Having more-regular holidays means more of the enjoyment before and after the trips.

So as you start thinking about what your calendar looks like next year, and blocking out dates for annual leave, don’t just default to the same few weeks in the middle of the year that every other Australian does. Aim for shorter and more frequent breaks in 2027 and your work and personal life will really thank you.

Tim Duggan’s new book, Clear in Tension: How to get better at conflict, is out now from www.clearintension.com.au.

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