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by Ken Budd
Updated August 19, 2022
TSA should stand for “totally stressed and aggravated.” If you’ve ever stood in a 45-minute airport security line, surrounded by cranky travelers, you’ve undoubtedly thought: Forget the vacation. I should’ve stayed at home.
But are staycations less stressful than vacations? Consider the pros and cons.
Staycations
The upsides: The stresses of travel don’t exist in your home. There’s no metal detector at your front door, and your Barcalounger is way roomier than an airline seat in coach. Even the simplest vacation requires research, booking, packing and planning. Managing those details — and figuring out an unfamiliar locale once you arrive — is the most stressful part of travel, a study by happiness researchers Michelle Gielan and Shawn Achor found.
Then there’s the cost. Money is a top cause of stress for most Americans, according to the American Psychological Association’s “Stress in America” report, and we spend about $1,000 per person on summer vacations. By staying home, you can enjoy low-cost, low-stress activities — the kind you rarely have time for — from reading a novel to exploring local museums.
The downsides: You sacrifice brain-boosting novelty and sex-boosting excitement. People feel less inhibited on vacation: Travelers are more likely to have sex with their significant other on vacation than at home, Expedia’s "Heat Index” survey (from 2016) found. Sex increases the flow of nutrient-rich, oxygenated blood to your brain, so vacation sex is good for your mood and your mind.
Leaving home means leaving your comfort zone, and challenging yourself is one of the pillars of brain health, says Adam Gazzaley, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco. So if you opt for a staycation, break your routine. “Maybe stay overnight in a new neighborhood or try a different dish at a familiar restaurant,” says Lisa Niver, founder of WeSaidGoTravel.com.
Another risk? You may overfocus on household projects or struggle to disconnect from work. That’s important because disengaging from your job is good for your health. Extended breaks from email can lower your heart rate and stress levels, according to a study from the University of California, Irvine, and the U.S. Army.
Vacations
The upsides: Vacations are more meaningful than staycations, as 94 percent of participants stated in the study conducted by Gielan and Achor. Traveling exposes you to new cultures, new people and new activities. You learn not only about the world but also about yourself. When researchers at the University of Vermont studied travelers’ tweets, they found that happiness levels were higher the farther the Twitter posters journeyed from home.
Vacations are also good for your heart. The Framingham Heart Study, one of the largest studies ever on cardiovascular disease, found that men who didn’t take vacations for several years were 30 percent more likely to have a heart attack than those who did. In a University of Georgia study published in February 2016, researchers found that taking vacations led to lower stress and blood pressure. The benefits extend to mental health, as well. A resort vacation can have the same stress-reducing benefits as meditation, a study published in the journal Translational Psychiatry found. Research by the Marshfield Clinic in Wisconsin showed that women who vacationed frequently were “less likely to become tense, depressed or tired” and were more satisfied with their marriages than those who didn’t.
“Travel is good medicine,” said Paul D. Nussbaum, a clinical neuropsychologist at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, in a 2013 travel report from the Global Coalition on Aging. By challenging your mind, travel “promotes brain health and builds brain resilience across the life span.”
The downsides: Your post-trip mood boost can be short-lived. People planning a vacation are happier than those who aren’t, a February 2010 study of Dutch adults found. But once the trip is over, their happiness levels are the same. The University of Georgia study produced more positive results — vacationers felt less stressed up to six week after their trips — but revealed another issue: weight gain. It was only about one pound, on average, after a one- to three-week vacation. But that’s a substantial increase for such a short period, says Jamie Cooper, an associate professor in the university’s College of Family and Consumer Sciences.
Which is best?
“It’s 100 percent individual,” says Ryann Pitcavage, a New York-based life coach. “We all have unique stress triggers, so ask yourself: ‘Which option feels less stressful?’”
Whether you hop on a plane or hop on the couch, the key is taking time off. Leisure activities lead to more life satisfaction and less depression, and they can lower your blood pressure and stress hormones, research from the University of Pittsburgh's Mind-Body Center found. And yet on average Americans take only about 17.4 vacation days a year — down from around 20 days between 1978 and 2000 — according to the U.S. Travel Association’s Project Time Off initiative. The association says just over half of Americans did not use all of their vacation time in 2015, so people aren’t even taking advantage of the time that they have.
“Either way, the common thread is to make time for what we love,” Pitcavage says. “It’s about enhancing your quality of life.”
• “ ’A pace not dictated by electrons’: An empirical study of work without email,” CHI '12: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, May 2012. For this empirical study, the researchers stopped the email of 13 information workers (average age 46) at a scientific research company for five workdays. The researchers found that when the email was stopped, the workers had a longer focus on tasks and multitasked less. They also found that the participants’ heart rate and stress levels were lower when their email was stopped than before it was cut off. Read a summary of the study. (A fee is required to access the full study.)
• “A prospective study on vacation weight gain in adults,” Physiology & Behavior, March 2016. This study involved 122 adults who took vacations lasting from 1 to 3 weeks. Researchers measured participants’ height, weight, blood pressure, physical activity levels and perceived stress 1 week before vacation and 1- and 6-weeks post-vacation. They found that short-term vacations lead to significant weight gain in adults, with the weight gain persisting at six weeks post-vacation. Read a summary of the study. (A fee is required to access the full study.)
• “Meditation and vacation effects have an impact on disease-associated molecular phenotypes,” Translational Psychiatry, August 2016. This study involved 102 women between the ages of 30 and 60 who were not regular meditators. They were randomly enrolled in either a 6-day meditation retreat or a 6-day vacation at a resort. A third group of regular meditators already enrolled in a retreat at the resort were used to compare results. The researchers found similar reports of greater well-being in both the meditation and vacation groups right after the study, though the meditation group reported greater well-being over time than the vacation group. Read the full study.
• “Vacations improve mental health among rural women: the Wisconsin Rural Women’s Health Study,” Wisconsin Medical Journal, August 2005. From a survey of 1,500 women from the Marshfield Epidemiologic Study Area in central Wisconsin, recruited between 1996 and 2001, researchers found the odds of depression and tension were higher among women who took vacations once every two years in comparison to women who vacationed two or more times per year. They also found marital satisfaction declined as the frequency of vacations declined. The researchers report the psychological benefits of vacation may increase quality of life and improve work performance in women. Read a summary of the study. (A fee is required to access the full study.)
• “Vacationers Happier, but Most not Happier After a Holiday,” Applied Research in Quality of Life, February 2010. In a survey of 1,530 Dutch individuals, including 974 vacationers, researchers sought to discover if there is an association between taking vacation and happiness. Researchers found that vacationers were happier pre-trip than non-vacationers, although the difference in happiness between the two groups was small. They theorize anticipation of the trip played a key part in boosting pre-trip happiness. The researchers found that post-trip happiness was not significantly different between vacationers and non-vacationers, unless vacationers experienced an unusually relaxing trip—then, their post-trip happiness was boosted for about two weeks before beginning to fade. Read the full study.
• “Association of Enjoyable Leisure Activities with Psychological and Physical Well-Being,” Psychosomatic Medicine, September 2009. In a study of 1,399 participants ranging in age from 19 to 89 years, researchers found that engaging in multiple types of leisure activities helped protect individuals from negative impacts associated with psychological stress. They also found that people who engaged more frequently in enjoyable leisure activities had better psychological and physical functioning and reported more positive emotional affect, more life satisfaction and engagement, more social support, lower rates of depression and negative emotional affect, and lower blood pressure, levels of the stress hormone cortisol, body-mass index and waist circumference. Read a summary of the study. (A fee is required to access the full study.)
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