The Success Paradox in Rest: Why Vacations Make You Anxious

REST & RECOVERY • March 21, 2026

This article is educational and reflects patterns I see in clinical work. It isn’t therapy, diagnosis, or a promise about your particular anxiety, and it can’t tell you what any single vacation will do for you. If your distress on rest feels severe or unrelenting, please reach out to a licensed clinician who can meet you directly.

The Terrace, the Sea, and the Spreadsheet She Couldn’t Close

It’s the second morning of the trip, a little after nine, and the light coming off the water is the kind people fly across an ocean to sit inside of. Kerrie is on the terrace in a linen robe, a cup of espresso going cold on the tiled table beside her, the sea flat and bright below the villa. She’s 47, a VP of operations who negotiated three weeks off for the first time in a decade, and by every external measure she is exactly where she wanted to be.

Her thumb is on her phone. Not on anything, just on it. She’s already refreshed her inbox twice this morning “to stay ahead of it,” already opened the shared spreadsheet she promised herself she wouldn’t open, already felt her chest tighten at the quiet the way other people flinch at noise. “I keep thinking I’ll feel it kick in any minute,” she tells me later, back in my office, turning her wedding ring around and around. “The relaxing. Everyone says just let go. And I’m lying on this gorgeous terrace with my whole body braced like something’s about to go wrong, and nothing is wrong, and that’s almost worse, because then it’s clearly me.”

Sitting across from Kerrie, I felt something I’ve felt with hundreds of driven women over more than 15,000 clinical hours. Not concern that something was broken in her. Recognition of a pattern with moving parts. She’d taken “I can’t relax” as evidence of a defect, when what she was describing has structure, and names, and an actual research literature behind it.

So let’s take it apart, because “something’s wrong with me” is doing a lot of quiet damage in that sentence. The trouble she’s having with rest isn’t one thing. It’s a body that reads calm as a warning, a mind that uses worry as a seatbelt, a benefit that may or may not last, and an invisible load waiting for her back home. Lumping all of that under a character flaw turns a workable situation into private shame.

One thing plainly first, because it frames the rest. The careful research on this doesn’t point to anything dramatic or permanent inside you. What we do have is humble, testable work about relaxation, worry, recovery, and who gets to put work down. That’s the terrain we’re standing on, and it’s more hopeful than the scarier version.

Why Does Rest Make Me Anxious?

Let’s start with the most disorienting part, the one that makes so many women feel like they’re malfunctioning: sometimes the attempt to relax is exactly what sets off the alarm. This isn’t a metaphor. Researchers have studied it directly, and they’ve given it a name that I find quietly validating to say out loud.

There’s a companion idea that’s just as useful, from a different lab. Some people don’t only get anxious in the moment of relaxing; they’re afraid of relaxing before they even begin, wary of the sensations and the consequences of slowing down. Christina M. Luberto, PhD, a clinical psychologist and faculty member at the MGH Institute of Health Professions, and her colleagues built and began validating a scale to measure exactly this, which they call relaxation sensitivity (Luberto et al., 2021). The measure separates physical, cognitive, and social worries about letting go.

I want to be honest about what this research is and isn’t. Both studies were done in college students, not in the accomplished women I sit with, and neither one proves that relaxing “causes” vacation anxiety or tells us how many people feel this way (Kim & Newman, 2019). So I don’t hand these findings to a client as a verdict. I offer them as language, because the woman who’s been calling herself broken for twenty years can finally set that word down and pick up a more accurate one. If you recognize yourself in this, you might also see the pattern in what I’ve written about why your anxiety, perfectionism, and burnout actually make sense.

Why Does Calm Sometimes Feel Like a Threat?

Now to the mechanism, because naming the phenomenon isn’t the same as understanding the gears. Why would peace, of all things, read as a threat? The most useful answer I’ve found comes from that same experimental study, and it turns on a single, surprisingly ordinary idea: contrast.

Rocio is in my office on a gray Tuesday in January, coat still on, a travel mug of coffee she brought from the car cradled in both hands like it’s keeping her warm. She’s 42, runs a busy pediatric dental practice she built from nothing, and she has just come back from a long holiday break. “Everyone kept saying I should feel recharged,” she says, not quite sitting back. “But the quieter it got, the worse I felt. Like the second I actually stopped, my brain went, okay, now what’s coming? I’d rather be busy. When I’m busy I don’t feel the drop.” She looks at the coffee. “My abuela worked until she was eighty. Rest was never really on the menu in my family.” She takes a sip. “So maybe I just never learned.”

Watching Rocio, I noticed how precisely she’d described something researchers have measured. In the Kim and Newman study, what statistically explained the jump in anxiety wasn’t relaxation itself but sensitivity to negative contrast, the jarring shift from a calm state into a distressing one (Kim & Newman, 2019). For people high in that sensitivity, the drop from busy to still isn’t relief. It’s a runway with nothing at the end of it, and low-grade worry becomes a way to keep the plane from ever having to land.

Here’s the honest fine print, and I hold it firmly. This was a small experiment in undergraduates, the outcomes were self-reported, and the authors themselves say the design can’t establish cause; the models explained only about a fifth of the variance (Kim & Newman, 2019). It doesn’t tell us anything about vacations specifically, and it certainly doesn’t tell us Rocio’s story. What it gives us is a plausible, testable mechanism instead of a scary one. Rocio didn’t need to hear that her calm was dangerous. She needed to hear that her mind might be using worry as a buffer against a contrast it hadn’t learned to tolerate yet. One is a life sentence. The other is a skill she can practice.

Does the Vacation Glow Really Fade, or Did We Get That Wrong?

There’s a second worry I hear underneath the first one, and it’s more strategic than emotional: why bother resting if the benefit evaporates the second I’m back at my desk? A lot of driven women have quietly concluded that vacations don’t work, so pushing through is the rational choice. The research on this has actually shifted, in a hopeful direction, and the shift is worth understanding.

For years the headline finding was a little deflating. A 2009 meta-analysis led by vacation-recovery researcher Jessica de Bloom and colleagues, pooling seven studies, found that vacations do lift health and well-being, but only modestly, and that the lift tends to fade out after the return to work (de Bloom et al., 2009). The authors were careful about their own limits, noting that this was a small evidence base and that what people actually did on vacation had barely been studied. Still, “it fades” became the takeaway, and it gave a lot of women permission to stop trying.

Then the picture got more interesting. A much larger 2025 meta-analysis in the Journal of Applied Psychology pooled 32 studies and hundreds of effect sizes and found something more encouraging: the benefit of vacation is actually large, and it doesn’t drain away as fast as the earlier work suggested (Grant et al., 2025). What predicted the biggest lift wasn’t the destination or the price tag. It was whether people could psychologically detach from work and move their bodies, with vacation length and even national vacation policy shaping the effect too.

I want to name this honestly as a live scientific update, not a contradiction to flatten in either direction. The 2009 and 2025 analyses looked at different, overlapping bodies of evidence, and the newer one is larger and more recent, but neither can promise that your next trip will stick. What the arc suggests is genuinely useful, though: how you rest may matter more than whether the calendar says you’re off. Detachment and movement aren’t luxuries layered on top of a vacation. They may be the working parts of it. That reframes rest from a passive reward you’ve earned into a set of skills you can actually practice, which is the whole hopeful turn of this piece.

When I walked Kerrie through this, her posture changed. “So the villa wasn’t the problem,” she said, turning the ring again, slower now. “I brought the spreadsheet with me. I never actually left work in my head.” She hadn’t detached, and she hadn’t moved her body; she’d refreshed an inbox on a terrace and called it a break. I didn’t correct her toward optimism. I just noticed, with her, that the evidence pointed at the very things she’d treated as optional. It landed less like a scolding and more like a door.

Why Do the Most Driven Women Swing the Hardest?

Here’s a pattern I watch so often it’s almost predictable: the women with the most impressive engines have the roughest landings. The same intensity that builds the career makes coming down feel like a crash. And there’s a small, honest study that puts language to it.

In a 2014 field study with a memorable title, vacation-recovery researcher Jessica de Bloom and colleagues followed 54 employees before, during, and after a long summer vacation to ask whether the most compulsive workers go “cold turkey” when they finally stop (de Bloom et al., 2014). What they found is that the most compulsive workers swung the hardest in both directions. Their well-being rose more on vacation and dropped more sharply on return, and the baseline gap in rumination between compulsive and non-compulsive workers actually disappeared during the break.

Rocio heard that finding and exhaled. “So it’s not that I can’t rest,” she said slowly. “It’s that when I finally do, it hits harder, and then landing back in real life hits harder too.” Close, I told her, with one caution I always add. This was a small study, only 54 people, and it’s correlational, so it shows larger swings, not an inability to rest and not anything specific to women or to anxiety. She sat with the caveat, then said the thing I’ll remember: “I’ve spent years treating the swing as proof I’m doing rest wrong. Maybe it’s just proof I run hot.” She didn’t have it solved. She just, for a moment, stopped indicting herself.

It helps to remember that recovery isn’t one undifferentiated thing you either achieve or fail. Sonnentag and Fritz’s recovery-experiences framework separates it into parts, and the part most of the women I work with find hardest is psychological detachment, the mental switching-off, precisely the muscle that a high-torque engine keeps overriding (Sonnentag & Fritz, 2007). If the swing feels familiar, you may also recognize yourself in the quiet breaking point of the strong friend or in how childhood compliance becomes adult burnout. These aren’t separate stories. They’re rooms in the same house.

Both/And: Your Rest Is a Skill You Can Build and a Culture You’re Fighting

Here’s the both/and I want you to hold, because collapsing it in either direction keeps driven women stuck. Both are true at once. Your difficulty resting is partly personal, a skill you genuinely can strengthen. And it is partly cultural, a pull toward busyness that nearly everyone shares and that you did not invent. Neither truth cancels the other.

Collapse it into “it’s all on me, I just need more discipline” and you turn a shared human tendency into a private failing, the shame spiral that keeps the phone in your hand on the terrace. Collapse it the other way, into “it’s all the culture, nothing I do matters,” and you hand away the real agency the research says you have. The honest place to stand is in the tension: you’re up against something bigger than you, and you still have moves.

The cultural half has a name too. Christopher K. Hsee, a behavioral scientist at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, and his colleagues ran experiments on our pull toward activity and named it idleness aversion (Hsee et al., 2010). Left without a reason to be busy, people default to activity, and they’ll seize almost any excuse to justify it.

I offer Hsee’s work not as an accusation of your ambition but as a mirror. If almost everyone reaches for a reason to stay busy, then the little voice that says “just answer the one email, then you can relax” isn’t proof of a defect. It’s a human pull, sharpened in women rewarded their whole lives for being useful. Naming it as shared doesn’t excuse it. It just moves it out of the shame column and into the workable one.

Kerrie sat with the both/and before she spoke. “I keep wanting you to tell me which one it is,” she said. “If it’s me, I can fix it. If it’s the world, I can be angry about it.” She almost laughed. “And you’re saying it’s both, and I have to hold both without picking.” Yes, I told her. That’s usually the shape of the truth. Her jaw did a small thing, half relief and half protest. She didn’t resolve it that afternoon. She just stopped needing it to be only her fault.

The Systemic Lens: Who Actually Gets to Rest?

We can’t have this conversation honestly without widening the lens, because “why can’t I relax on vacation” is almost always asked as if the whole answer lives inside one woman’s willpower. A great deal of it lives in the ground she’s standing on: the structural, uneven distribution of who is actually free to put work down.

Start with the sheer arithmetic of the load. According to the OECD’s 2025 report on gender gaps, women still do almost twice as much unpaid work as men each day, and once that invisible “second shift” is added to paid work, women work on average about 24 minutes per day longer than men across OECD countries, roughly 12 hours a month (OECD, 2025). These are country-level averages, not a portrait of any single woman, and they measure hours, not anxiety. But they name a terrain most women feel and few name out loud: rest isn’t waiting on the far side of the to-do list, because the list structurally doesn’t end.

The texture of women’s leisure differs too, not only the quantity. Sociologists Marybeth Mattingly and Liana C. Sayer, analyzing decades of American time-diary data, found that for men, more free time reliably meant feeling less rushed, while for women, by the late 1990s, that link had broken: more free time no longer reduced the feeling of being rushed (Mattingly & Sayer, 2006). I hold this as an association from older U.S. data, not a mechanism and not a causal claim. But it reframes a client’s self-blame. When a woman tells me she rested and still felt frantic, I don’t assume she did it wrong. Her leisure may genuinely be more fragmented, more interruptible, more haunted by the mental list than her partner’s is.

This is the ground layer, the terra firma beneath the personal patterns, and it changes the question. If you were trained to carry the invisible load, and the culture rewards busyness, and your leisure gets interrupted in ways you didn’t design, then of course rest feels effortful. That isn’t a flaw in your wiring. I’ll hold the limits honestly, though: these are Western, population-level and older datasets, and plenty of men carry real load. The point isn’t to blame “society” and stop. It’s to stop locating the entire problem inside your own supposedly deficient character, and to notice which parts are yours to move and which were handed to you.

How Do You Actually Learn to Rest?

If you’ve read this far, you already understand more than most of the internet does about why rest can feel like a threat. Calm reads as contrast, worry works as a buffer, the swing runs hardest in the highest-torque women, and the load is unevenly distributed. So what do you actually do with that? Here’s the honest answer, and I’ll hold it lightly, because I never want to promise more than the evidence supports.

The single most hopeful finding I can offer is that the capacity to detach from work appears to be trainable, not a fixed trait. A 2021 meta-analysis in the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology by researchers in occupational health psychology pooled 30 studies and found that interventions aimed at psychological detachment produced a real, if modest, improvement, with longer and higher-dose practice working better (Karabinski et al., 2021). I have to be precise here: that is a workplace-recovery finding with a small-to-moderate effect. It is not a treatment for anxiety, not a cure, and not a promise about your outcome. Frame it as evidence-informed and trainable, nothing more.

With that guardrail in place, here’s the shape of the work I do with clients, translated into practices you can try.

Practice landing, not just leaving. Because contrast is part of the trigger, a hard cut from full speed to full stop can backfire. Build a transition instead: a short, dull ritual between work and rest, a walk around the block, ten unhurried minutes with tea, so the drop from busy to still becomes a ramp rather than a cliff.

Detach on purpose, in small reps. Since detachment and movement predicted the biggest vacation benefit, treat them as the active ingredients, not the garnish (Grant et al., 2025). One genuinely work-free window, phone in a drawer, plus something that moves your body, will likely do more than a longer trip you spend half-checking email.

Give rest a justification, then let the justification dissolve. If idleness aversion means you need a reason to stop, use that instead of fighting it. “I rest so I can think clearly” is a perfectly good on-ramp. Over time, as the calm stops feeling dangerous, you may find you need the reason less.

Name the systemic load out loud, and renegotiate what you can. Some of your restlessness is structural, so treat it structurally. What actually goes back on your plate the moment you return, and what could be handed off, shared, or simply dropped? You can’t relax your way out of a genuinely unequal load; you can only redistribute it.

Be patient with the swing. If you run hot, expect a bigger climb and a harder landing, and stop reading the landing as failure. The goal isn’t to feel nothing on the way down. It’s to know the drop is coming and to give yourself a softer place to land.

Kerrie didn’t come home from that villa transformed, and she didn’t quit her job to go find herself. That’s not how this goes. What changed was smaller and more radical than any grand gesture. She built a fifteen-minute landing ritual between her last meeting and her evening. She started putting her phone in another room for one protected hour. She caught herself, on a later, shorter trip, reaching for the shared spreadsheet, and this time she noticed the reach, breathed through the contrast, and set the phone face down on the tiled table. The sea was still there. So was she. If deeper patterns are in the mix, that’s what individual therapy is for; for the leadership-and-life side of the same squeeze, some people use coaching; and my course, Fixing the Foundations™, walks this foundational repair work at your own pace.

Of course you’re tired. If you’re reading this braced on a beautiful terrace, convinced your inability to relax is proof of some private defect, that isn’t evidence of how broken you are. It’s evidence of how hard you’ve been running, how much you’ve been carrying, and how little of it was ever only yours to carry. You’re allowed to be ambitious, and to learn, slowly, how to come to rest. And you’re allowed to believe the resting will get easier, because the research says the muscle is real, and muscles can be built. Come sit down. Learning to rest is still work, and you already know how to do hard work. This time, the hard work is letting go.

Warmly,
Annie.

Medical Disclaimer