The standard line on holidays is that the lift is real but brief, mostly a matter of mood, and gone within weeks. Two researchers point out that almost every study behind that line ran for a year or less, which is too short to see anything slow. So they took eight years of from a representative Dutch sample. What shows up at that length?
Over eight years, both halves of well-being moved. People who vacationed more often reported higher and less negative feeling than people who vacationed less. The average participant also reported slightly higher life satisfaction and positive feeling after a year with more trips than usual. And the arrow ran both ways: a rise in life satisfaction predicted more vacationing the following year.
The received view of holidays is that they lift your mood and that the lift fades fast. Look at where the view comes from and a pattern appears: almost every longitudinal study of vacation effects ran for a year or less.
A year is long enough to catch an affective bounce and far too short to catch a slow change in how someone judges their life. So these authors used eight years of panel data from a representative sample of the Dutch population. They fitted random intercept , which separate stable differences between people from year-to-year change inside one person.
Both kinds of effect showed up. Between people, more frequent vacationers had higher life satisfaction and lower negative affect. Within a person, a year with more trips than usual was followed by slightly higher life satisfaction and positive affect. The second of those is harder to explain away, because the comparison is a person against their own average.
The surprise sits in the other direction. Rising life satisfaction predicted more vacationing the year after, which the authors read as an : pleasant experiences accumulate, build resources, and make further pleasant experiences easier to arrange. It also means causation cannot be pinned down one way here. Nobody was assigned a holiday, and something unmeasured could be lifting both ends at once.
wat. Stretch the window to eight years and holidays stop looking like a mood blip. Life satisfaction and travel appear to feed each other.
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If the short studies were simply too short, then the familiar advice that holidays do nothing durable was an artifact of the measuring window rather than a fact about holidays.
How do we know?
Mitas and Kroesen fitted random intercept cross-lagged panel models to eight years of data from a representative sample of the population of the Netherlands.
What is still unknown
Panel data is not an experiment. Nobody was assigned a vacation, and the two-way pattern means an unmeasured third thing, income or health being the obvious candidates, could be lifting both ends.
Learn something?
Where to next
Does feeling understood by your partner change how you feel ten years later?well-being
Does a vacation with meditation in it leave anything behind once you are home?well-being
Does the way you praise a toddler matter five years later?longitudinal