We’re almost halfway through summer and many of us are in the midst of vacation excitement. However, as much fun as we’re going to have laying out on the beach, or exploring a rainforest, or visiting friends in Omaha, the vacation will eventually come to an end and we will have to resume our normal day-to-day lives. In fact, there’s a fair amount of research showing that shortly after you return from a vacation, your happiness level bounces back to where it was beforehand.
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We recently looked at some helpful tips on slowing time down and getting more out of life; and in the same way, we found this article on maximizing your vacation happiness to be equally inspiring. Here are three recommendations that can help you maximize the amount of happiness you get from your vacation—even if that peak vacation high is inevitably going to dissipate:
1. Seek out unique vacation experiences
Studies suggest that experiences in general provide more happiness than material goods because humans have more of a tendency to talk about experiences than mere stuff. In other words, vacations continue to provide happiness even after they’ve long since passed is because they live on in the stories we tell. However, some research has shown that conversations that involve comparing a given experience to others like it can reduce the happiness benefit those purchases provided. (For instance, “their cruise boat was bigger and had seven pools, while ours had four.”) So it might be worth seeking out unique vacation experiences—the sorts of stuff that can’t really be compared to your friends’ experiences. But even when the vacation experience itself isn’t unique, you should try to focus on the unique aspects of it.2. Start off on the right foot
There’s evidence that the first few days of a vacation leave the biggest, most lasting imprint. If those days are happy days, the vacation will be both anticipated and remembered with more fondness overall; if they aren’t, then they’ll drag down the whole thing.3. Plan your vacation in advance
People are excited when they’re able to look forward to and anticipate their upcoming vacations; so one way to extend these pleasurable feelings is by increasing the amount of time—and hence the number of opportunities—to think about, to talk about, and to savor these future experiences.ForMen takeaway:
It’s important to view vacations as not just as a distinct period of time, but instead as something that you will talk about and think about beforehand and, hopefully, for years after the fact.Curated Article and Photo Credit from New York Magazine
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