How To Plan A Return To Routine After The Holidays?
Vacations, although they are an essential element in the life of any professionally active person, also go hand in hand with possible problems that we must be aware of. For example, the discomfort that arises when we land on the first day back to work without having prepared ourselves psychologically for it, an experience that significantly affects many people.
It is clear that as human beings we do not have absolute control over our emotions or our internal psychological processes in general, but it is also true that if we prepare ourselves with the necessary time, we can achieve reduce the chances that the return to work days will destabilize us or make us feel overwhelmed. Let’s see how to achieve it.
Tips for planning a return to routine after the holidays
When psychologically readjusting to returning to work, it is important not to improvise by facing the situation right after finishing the vacation. That is It is best to plan from the first days of that vacation break, so that the “clash” between one situation and the other is not so strong due to the contrasts. Although this does not have to involve a great effort (after all, vacations are about resting and letting go of a good part of our daily obligations), it is advisable to adopt certain simple strategies to prepare for our return.
How to do it? Keep these tips in mind to plan your return to your routine.
1. Don’t neglect your sleep schedule
It is very important to properly regulate your biorhythms without letting vacations be disruptive in terms of your sleep schedule. That means Do not go to sleep too late in the days before returning to your work routine And if we have been getting up and waking up at unusual times of the day for some time, we should try to gradually return to the normal schedule, even if this makes us feel somewhat less rested for a couple of days (that will be better than arriving at the first day of work without having slept barely).
2. If you are going to travel, don’t come back on the last day off
In the event that you have a relatively long vacation period and travel to another region or country, it is recommended that you do not return to your place of residence on the last day of vacation; It is better that in any case you do it one or two days before the end.
In this way, the experience of psychologically “fitting in” with your city and the places you usually frequent in it will be less shocking. It must be taken into account that During the vacation break, your brain has weakened the memories related to the small details of your daily life (for example, where to find certain objects in your house), and although individually these small mistakes or reasons for disorientation affect us little, if they reach us all at the same time, it can be stressful.
On the other hand, creating a time cushion between the trip and returning to the workplace is also a way to enter the mentality of orienting oneself towards work objectives before having to attend to them immediately, something that helps to motivate oneself progressively without reaching to associate these concepts with the discomfort of not being prepared to start working now.
3. Readjust your hobbies and interests to give them continuity after the holidays
Make sure that your new lifestyle after returning to your routine continues to have “spaces” for several daily or weekly moments that you can dedicate to what you like and what you have dedicated yourself to the most during the holidays In this way, there will not be so much difference between those vacation break days and work days.
4. Prepare at least the tasks to be done during the first week
Another way to cushion the return to routine is to create an agenda detailing the sequence of actions that we will carry out during the first morning of the first day. It is something that does not take much time or much effort, and in this way you will face the first hours knowing at all times what to dedicate the next few minutes to, something key to focus on specific objectives and not be intimidated by the apparent mountain of tasks before us.
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