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We'd all like to take a great vacation. Let's face it—one of the best prizes on any given game show is an all-expenses paid Hawaiian getaway. However, it's not always possible, either due to financial or vacation time shortages. Making it worse, it seems like everyone else is enjoying the perfect time away while you're stuck at home.
Consider this hypothetical scenario (or maybe not so hypothetical). You’re walking around the office corridors and notice that a colleague has posted on the door “Paris! Be back in 2 weeks.” Paris is on your bucket list, and you’d give anything to be able to go there. For the next 2 weeks, that announcement will leer at you every time you walk by. To make it even more insufferable, this colleague regularly sends selfies in front of the Eiffel Tower, on the Champs D’Elysee, and next to the Louvre.
Of course, vacation envy can be stimulated in a myriad of other ways. Facebook alone can provoke a giant-size dose of FOMO (“fear of missing out”) on vacation (what we might call “FOMOOV”). Endless photos of your near and not-so-near having a great time on the beach, a mountain top, or a sun-dappled cabin in the woods pop out from your Facebook feed at a disturbing rate. If only you could afford the time and/or money it would take to spend a few weeks at your favorite destination, doing what you most like to do.
The stress caused by vacation envy can be particularly pronounced when you’re feeling downtrodden by your work load. You can’t even afford the slightest mental vacation because you know you’ve got to meet urgent deadlines. All the non-vacationing people around you, similarly, are in overdrive as they try to get things out of the door by a certain time. What’s worse is your workplace may be short-staffed due to all those vacationing coworkers, putting even more pressure on the rest of you.
Even if the vacationers are family or friends, the stress you’re experiencing due to heavy demands at work or at home can intensify your FOMOOV. Your in-laws return from a tour of a country you’ve always longed to visit, and they don’t hold back on the photos and stories. They didn’t even bring you back a decent souvenir. The worst part is that you don’t really like yourself for feeling envious. These are people who are close to you, so you should be happy that they had fun.
We often think of stress as caused by situations we create ourselves, but as these examples show, unpleasant emotional reactions can be provoked by other people’s actions, completely independently of our own. Those photos of Paris hanging in the hallway at work are a good case in point. According to Danish researchers Tanja Kirkegaard and Svend Brinkman (2016), the environments in which we carry out our daily activities become “landscapes” in which we try to cope with stress.
The Danish study focused on stress landscapes at work. The authors propose that: “different aspects of the working environment offer or invite the employees to engage in certain ways of appraising and coping with the working conditions and limit the use of others” (p. 13). Without realizing it, our perceptions of stressful situations are shaped by our environments which, in turn, affect the way we decide to cope. To test this proposal, Kirkegaard and Brinkman conducted interviews and observations over the period of a year in the research division of a large multinational company in Denmark. Kirkegaard became a part of the landscape, conducting participant-observation analyses in which she attended staff meetings, ate lunch, and basically hung around the corridors, all the while, taking copious field notes.
What made this study unique was its focus on describing the features of the environment that even the workers themselves may not have noticed as stress-provoking. A poster stated “We are a busy company, but that does not mean that you should forget about your safety” (p. 17). Busyness came before safety, signaling that in fact this is a place where you are expected to keep busy. Other, similar, messages communicated to employees that they don’t have enough time to do what they’re supposed to do and that the most important objective was getting the job done. From the perspective of the employees, “a common theme in their conversations was the degree of busyness they experienced and how it made it difficult for them to perform their work in a proper manner, and they felt it was a threat to their well-being” (p. 18).
In helping their employees cope with stress, the management only made things worse by emphasizing that feeling less anxious was their individual responsibilities. No one acknowledged that it was the working environment itself that caused the stress. Because they perceived their stress as a response to their individual vulnerability, employees at the higher ranks tended not to go to their coworkers for advice and support. In an interesting twist, the Danish team found that workers on the lower rungs of the company ladder developed more robust support systems. Even though they, too, felt stressed by the pressure to keep busy, those with less responsibility seemed to take it all less personally.
This study provides a good framework for understanding why the Paris wall posting becomes so stressful. As part of the “ecology” of your workplace, it serves as a constant reminder of what your coworker has that you don’t. In other contexts, such as the living room of your well-traveled in-laws, or the Facebook posts of your buddies in exotic places, you’re forced to come face to face with the fact that you’re just not as lucky as they are in swinging that great trip.
The first step in coping with vacation envy, then, is recognizing that it exists. Your feelings of discomfort and anxiety come not from some remote territory in your brain. They’re caused by what other people are communicating in their posts, messages, and conversations. Once you locate the cause of stress as outside of yourself, you can identify ways to manage it.
Where you go from there depends on your budget, family situation, and available time. If you don’t have the money or time to go galavanting across the countryside, a staycation may be just what you need. Carve out time to enjoy your favorite hobbies, or find a new one to pursue that will recharge your tired out batteries. If it’s summertime, and you aren’t able to get to the beach or park, then buy some houseplants you can put on your patio or dig out a patch of ground in your background to plant some brightly-colored flowers. Get online and find some great summer grilling recipes. Treat yourself to a pedicure. Go for a run in the park. Start planning a vacation you can afford. You probably need the break.
On the flip side, if you’re the vacationer, be considerate of the people in your “landscape.” Don’t post that sign about being in Paris, be considerate of your less fortunate friends in your Facebook circle, and refrain from retelling every detail of your most recent international escapades.
Vacations are meant to be enjoyable, but once you recognize how closely they can be associated with stress, you’ll be better able to manage (and prevent) the envy of not taking one. Appreciate the many other ways you can take a break, to keep your stress low and your fulfillment high.
Follow me on Twitter @swhitbo for daily updates on psychology, health, and aging. Feel free to join my Facebook group, "Fulfillment at Any Age," to discuss today's blog, or to ask further questions about this posting.
Copyright Susan Krauss Whitbourne 2016
Reference
Kirkegaard, T., & Brinkmann, S. (2016). 'Which coping strategies does the working environment offer you?' A field study of the distributed nature of stress and coping. Nordic Psychology, 68(1), 12-29. doi:10.1080/19012276.2015.1045543
