You come home from a trip energized, proud of all the new habits you upheld for a week, and then your routine eats them alive. Turns out the brain likes vacations because they are short, low-stakes demos of a different you rather than training wheels for permanent change.
If you want more than a glow that fades, treat change like software: ship tiny, repeatable updates. Schedule regular 1–2 hour “vacation windows” where you silence notifications, leave errands behind, try one new habit, and write down what felt different. Those little demos are the only way a trial version becomes the full product.
My vacations (at least since I got married) are actually less relaxing than work. My wife likes to cram tons of activities and stuff into our vacation so we spend a lot of it rushing from one place to the next, getting up way early to get to the airport and so on.
I hashed that out with my wife about a decade into the marriage by explaining the difference between a trip and a vacation.
Now we are clear on which one we are going on. Sometimes I stay home and take a vacation while she goes on a trip with a friend.
That’s smart
My friend describes this as vacation people vs trip people. My husband and I are definitely trip people generally, but with kids in the picture it’s nice to get an actual vacation (relaxing) in once in a while. But there’s so much in the world we want to see!
Just wait until you have kids. Then you have the privilege of taking other people on vacation while you drive, haul, and pay for everything.