Science: The Perfect Vacation Is Exactly This Long
Scott Dylan February 17, 2019
How long would your ideal vacation last? It turns out that you don’t actually need something as long as a 10-day getaway to enjoy the benefits of a vacation. A new study is revealing that eight days is actually the perfect length for a vacation. This same study shows that the average traveler may actually become bored if a vacation lasts any longer than that. Researchers at the University of Tampere in Finland are claiming that eights days is the optimal length for a holiday if you’re seeking the right balance of relaxation and happiness without growing bored or becoming homesick during your travels.
The bad news about the new study that was conducted at the University of Tampere is that the positive impact of a vacation doesn’t actually last long. It turns out that the length of your vacation doesn’t have any impact on your overall mood once your trip is done and you’ve returned home. In fact, you’re likely to pretty much forget about all of the good vibes you experienced while on vacation once you return to reality and get back to work.
You might be wondering if taking a vacation is really even worth the trouble at all. Anyone who has ever tried to block off some time for a getaway knows that the hassles of requesting time off and the cost of booking airline tickets can be intimidating. What do researchers say? Researchers at the University of Tampere do have some important evidence in favor of taking vacations consistently. It turns out that the risk of premature death actually goes up when people don’t take annual vacations. The same goes for the risk of illness.
Researchers insist that taking longer vacations infrequently won’t help you much when it comes to improving your health. It’s necessary to take vacations annually in order to see the benefits. That means that you’re better off taking shorter, cheaper holidays every year than you are saving up for one big holiday once a decade. You won’t be able to get away with simply taking some weekend trips if your goal is to see some long-term health benefits. Research shows that weekend trips just aren’t long enough for people to see the benefits of having some time off. Do you have eight extra days to take off from work? It could mean the difference between life and death if you believe researchers.
[Image: pxhere]
5 days in the Caribbean is like medicine for me. However I took a 5 week trip and never got bored. Every new destination was great. I could have gone on for another week with no problem.
This study is useless for world travelers. There's no point to going to a country on the other side of the world you've never been to before with 2 weeks of stuff worth seeing there and only spending 8 days, thus having to return a second time. This study might be fine for people who just vacation at a beach, or a state/national park, stuff like that. Perhaps in those cases the travel is short enough that 8 days makes sense. But halfway across the world, when it takes a day or two to get there and again about the same to come back, 8 days of travel may mean only 4 or 5 days of being there. I don't see how that' ratio of travel time to destination time can possible be all that healthy. But since only a fraction of the public at large (this wasn't a study of FTers, was it?) does such world vacation travel yearly (or more often), but many FTers do.
8 days? Science has failed me. 2 weeks minimum for a vacation with 3 weeks minimum for anywhere it takes me more than 16 hours to travel to.