How to get the best time out of your downtime

The joys and perils of taking time out for summer holidays.

Roger Bretherton

Roger Bretherton is Associate Professor of Psychology, at the University of Lincoln. He is a UK accredited Clinical Psychologist.

A pair of sunglasses beside a swimming pool.

Jakob Owens on Unsplash.

For the first few days of any summer holiday there seems to be something wrong with my brain. Having looked forward for months to the moment when I can finally down tools and get some rest, having yearned for weeks to be free of the relentless schedule of emails and meetings, the moment finally arrives and I, well… hate it. I’ve wanted to stop for ages and then when I get the chance, I don’t want to. The flywheel momentum of the to-do list somehow carries over into the holiday and turns the first few days into an obsessive nightmare of drivenness.

This usually manifests in the agitation of wanting to rest while being unable to do so. My schedule says stop but my mind hasn’t got the memo. Instead of gently sculling across the pool, I’m swimming time trials through an obstacle course of inflatable beds and dayglo sea creatures. My family is quick to remind me that the languid currents of the pool were designed for relaxation, not for achieving a personal best. ‘It’s called the lazy river, Dad, not Verstappen at the Nürburgring.’ It makes me laugh, but it doesn’t make me stop. Nor does it stop them shouting things like ‘He’s taking the apex’, and ‘Dad’s got DRS’ from their sun loungers every time I sluice past.

In the old days, psychiatrists used to call it the Sunday Neurosis, the mild state of agitated low mood that afflicted people on their day off. The inescapable feeling that we should be doing something on days when there is nothing to do. The realisation that we’re not quite sure who we are when we are freed from the daily demands we can easily resent. I don’t know what you have planned for the summer- a beach party in the Bahamas or an Airbnb in Bridlington or the classic post-Covid staycation- but if you’re planning to take a break of any kind there are a few things you should perhaps keep in mind to make the best of it.

If we must work full throttle to the final hour – we may have to accept that we’ll spend the first few days on holiday getting used to being on holiday.

First. Slow down slowly.

We have a tendency to think that life can change at the speed of thought. Just because our diaries say holiday, doesn’t mean that our bodies are working to the same schedule. The autonomic nervous system that governs our state of physiological arousal largely operates automatically. It isn’t synched to our Outlook calendar and can’t deliver relaxation on demand, no matter how much we would like it to. Psychotherapist Deb Dana likens changing our state of physiological arousal to taking a lift down a few floors. It takes time to move from a highly active state, to a more relaxed and connected way of being. It doesn’t happen at the flick of a switch and we only agitate ourselves more thinking it should. She says we should befriend our nervous system. Instead of impatiently asking ourselves why we aren’t more relaxed, we should simply ask whether we need to be this agitated right now. And if we don’t, accept that it may take us some time to adapt to a less demanding environment.

When it comes to holidays, this suggests we should allow ourselves some time to acclimatise. Our bodies don’t automatically relax the moment they hit the beach, or hike the mountains, or lie under canvas - they need some time. We can do this before the holiday starts, by slowly decelerating as time off approaches. Like a car approaching a junction, if we want to stop smoothly, we might want to hit the brakes long before we reach the stop sign. And if we can’t do that – if we must work full throttle to the final hour – we may have to accept that we’ll spend the first few days on holiday getting used to being on holiday. It may not make us a pleasure to be with, but we can at least understand that it’s just how our bodies work. We are not droids, there isn’t an off switch on the back of our heads.

On holiday, we can take time to savour the experience of living- to be in our bodies, not just use them.

Second, get into your body (and out of your mind).

There’s a reason people spend so much time on holiday exercising their bodies: surfing, climbing, walking, riding. And weird stuff too, that you’d never dream of doing at home. One time in Normandy we booked a hand-pumped locomotive and huffed/puffed our way up and down a railway line for an afternoon. If I didn’t have the blisters to prove it, I’d think I’d dreamed that. Why do we do these things? Because it feels good to be aware of our bodies. Even my laps around the lazy river had a certain logic to them.

Many of us spend most of our time in disembodied thought. We can sometimes feel like the involuntary participants in a workplace time and motion study, in which worth is measured by output. It doesn’t matter where you work – home, school, office, a boat, the woods – sooner or later a spreadsheet will find you. You can run, but you cannot hide your data. And the impact this has on us is that we tend to be more aware of whether we have hit our targets than we are of the toll these targets take on our bodily wellbeing. Just recently I was asked to support a management team going through a stressful restructuring. One guy claimed he didn’t feel the stress of it- he just got on with the job. But when I sympathetically suggested he might be paying for it with his body, the litany of physical ailments he produced sounded like the list of side effects in a 1980s pharmaceutical commercial. He didn’t think he was stressed, but his body kept the score.

Let’s face it, going on holiday itself is stressful. It’s ranked 42 on the Holmes-Rahe Life Stress Inventory, just above ‘minor violations of the law’. Apparently packing for Marbella is more stressful than being pulled over by the cops. But it’s worth it if it creates a space in which we can de-stress, a space in which we can remember that we have a body, a body that needs to be looked after. Of all the benefits of bodily awareness – the positive sense of how our body feels, not the crippling consciousness of how it looks – perhaps the greatest is its capacity to turn off the hyperactive judgement of our minds. On holiday, we can take time to savour the experience of living- to be in our bodies, not just use them.

If we are defined by our output, who do we become when our output drops to zero?

Third. Make time to connect.

What happens when we slow down and learn to live in our bodies again? We become open to connection: socially, emotionally, even spiritually. Back to Deb Dana. She notes that when we take that slow elevator down from the souped-up state of busyness to a more relaxed and open state of mind, we activate the ventral vagal nervous system. She calls it our ‘home away from home’- which seems especially apt for being on holiday. In this state we are happier to be seen by others and therefore to be in relationship with them. Whether it’s a conversation while walking, or an evening card-game, or a meal together, all of them offer a chance for us to dwell in our home away from home in connection with others.

One of the things that can keep us so obsessively busy, is that we are not always sure who we would be if we stopped. We’re not certain we have a right to exist when we’re not being productive. If we are defined by our output, who do we become when our output drops to zero? This is why for thousands of years the practice of rest has been enshrined in spiritual practices. Without space to detach ourselves from the hectic pace of life we will inevitably confuse who we are with what we do. The Judeo-Christian tradition called it sabbath, not just a day of rest, but a way of being in which there is nothing left to prove. Holidays can offer us that opportunity, if we are willing to take it. Because after all what do we call someone who becomes more relaxed and embodied and connected? I think: more human.

Column

Character

Confession

Culture

Psychology

18 September 2024

8 min read

‘Yet All Shall Be Forgot?’ Saying sorry has never been more difficult

Acknowledging wrongdoing is vital for any society to flourish. So why do we find it so difficult to apologise, especially online?

Roger Bretherton

Roger Bretherton is Associate Professor of Psychology, at the University of Lincoln. He is a UK accredited Clinical Psychologist.

On a street, two men confront each other face to face.

Darwin Boaventura on Unsplash.

People in the UK don’t like to apologise. At least that’s what a recent poll reported by the Daily Mail claims. Of a thousand British people surveyed, about forty percent of them claimed they didn’t like to apologise because they were never wrong! At least that’s what the headline said. When you actually look at the survey itself, things get a bit more nuanced. 18 per cent don’t feel ‘comfortable’ making an apology. 15 per cent don’t like admitting they’re wrong. 23 per cent feel embarrassed at the thought of apologising. Sorry does indeed seem to be the hardest word. And Elton John seems to be the hardest person to avoid quoting whenever these things come up. Which they do - a lot!

We shouldn’t really be that surprised by the findings of this study. Contrary to the popular belief that the world is divided between goodies and baddies, upstanding citizens and immoral rotters, the ethical picture is much more complex than that. The line between good and bad, as Russian dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn noted, runs through people not between them. Many moral qualities like kindness, forgiveness, gratitude, humility and so on, are trait-like. There are relatively few pure saints and absolute villains, most of us linger in the muddy moral middle, neither exceptionally good nor reprehensibly evil. And this is what the survey indicates. Despite all our reservations about apologising, the average 20 to 50-year-old says sorry about three times a week, totting up an annual total of 150 apologies per year. We may not like apologising, but we get there in the end.

Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as all that. Because while we may apologise, we don’t always mean it. If the need to apologise is a spectrum it not only includes those who NEVER apologise, but also those who ALWAYS apologise. If the non-apologisers sit at one extreme, the super-apologisers dwell at the other. These are the people who over-use apology, who never stop apologising for their existence. According to this survey, 41 per cent of us are first to apologise whether or not we think we are in the wrong, and 38 per cent apologise without meaning it. Ever found yourself inexplicably blurting out a sorry to the person who bumped into you at the supermarket? or gratuitously apologising for your emotions in an attempt to appease the workplace bully who caused them? I have. If that’s you, please pull up a chair and join me at the table of compulsive and unnecessary apologies- assuming you can sit down without apologising for taking up the air space.

With the wisdom of age most of us will learn to let things lie. Which is to say we will learn to forgive. Which is also to say we will learn to accept apologies.

It does seem, from this survey at least, that people are a bit confused about the nature of apology. ‘Sorry’, is a necessary part of the social vocabulary that makes community life possible. To say sorry is to acknowledge that we are embedded within a rich social network upon which we rely for our existence and without which human life would be untenable. It belongs alongside other basic words like ‘please’ and ‘thank you’, that recognise our social dependence. This applies everywhere: at home, at school, in the office, down the high street, at church. When we say Please, we acknowledge that there are things we cannot do and cannot know without the help of others. When we say Thank You, we accept that even our greatest achievements were team efforts, not wholly down to us. And when we say Sorry, we accept that this community of trust, this web of promises and fulfilments, is fragile. We can act in ways that fray or even break the threads that connect us to others. Sometimes we don’t show up when we said we would. Sometimes we lie to avoid shame. Sometimes we take far more than we should from those who can’t afford to give. Sometimes we are rude, hurtful, even hateful. Saying sorry is the way we recognise, renew and repair our damaged connections to the people on which our lives depend.

One of the most interesting findings in forgiveness research is that as people get older they generally become more forgiving. Now we can all think of exceptions to this - we all know people who seem to have become bitter rather than better with age - but that’s not the rule of it. Most of us will mellow and become more tolerant as the years pass. Partly because the passing of time diminishes our energy for grudges and plotting petty retaliations. But mainly because the older we get the fewer friends we have left. If young adulthood is awash with weddings, then later life is filled with funerals. To put it bluntly, as we get older more people we know have died. We increasingly realise that our connections to family and friends are priceless and irreplaceable and hardly worth severing over minor grievances. With the wisdom of age most of us will learn to let things lie. Which is to say we will learn to forgive. Which is also to say we will learn to accept apologies.

Why say sorry if there is no hope of social connectedness? This seems to be the zero-sum game played out in our digital lives.

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This by contrast sheds some light on why it might be that some people (the maligned 40 per cent of the survey) simply do not apologise. Admittedly it is likely that the tendency to offer apology varies alongside other personality traits like Agreeableness- our general tendency to get along with people. Those high in Agreeableness are more sensitive to ruptures in their relationships and therefore more likely to resolve these with a well-timed apology. And given that women tend to score more highly than men in measures of agreeableness and social intelligence, it seems equally likely that the league of super-apologisers who say sorry too often (like me) is predominantly populated by women (unlike me). By contrast those who do not apologise are likely to be at the tough-minded end of the personality spectrum, more ferociously individualistic, less emotionally aware, and not particularly sensitive to the fabric of social life into which they are inescapably stitched.

The apologiser and the non-apologiser then inhabit different universes. If apology belongs to a social network that needs to be tended, then the refusal to ever apologise is to deny the relational fabric of human life. Why say sorry if there is no hope of social connectedness? This seems to be the zero-sum game played out in our digital lives. Anyone can trawl the elephant’s graveyard of our online history and find things we said or did in our least thoughtful moments. And if they do, no amount of apology seems sufficient to rectify the mistake. Online apologies cannot erase online offences. It’s hard to imagine a better system for teaching us the futility of saying sorry.

There‘s a timing issue too. Quite often people who do not like to apologise assume their apology will result in humiliation. If they admit to being wrong, they will be publicly shamed, not restored to connectedness but excommunicated. As a result, if they ever do get round to apologising, they do so reluctantly or halfheartedly or under duress or just way too late, and consequently receive exactly the kind of vicious reaction they assume apologies usually receive. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy: if we believe our apologies will be met with hostility, we tend to apologise in ways that make hostility more likely. It’s no wonder some people don’t see saying sorry as a viable social strategy.

To confess is to acknowledge and turn from our self-absorption, distraction, ignorance, inconsistency and whatever else detunes us from this heavenly wavelength.

It is a pity, because for those who care to look apology can address the deepest needs of the human soul. Apology restores us to the human community, reweaves the threads of trust that connect us to family, friends, colleagues, and neighbours. It assumes there is an invisible world we can rely upon, in which we can place our faith, and to which saying sorry can restore us. This is not just the logic of social apology but also the logic of spiritual apology, or to use the more traditional term, confession.

Just as we seem to be confused about apology, we are also pretty confused about confession. For many of us it belongs to movies where gangsters seek forgiveness for heinous acts through the screen of a confessional booth. Or even worse to the humiliation of being forced to publicly reveal our most shameful character flaws. But these are caricatures.

Confession, like apology, ultimately belongs to a benevolent view of reality. A view suggesting that, at all times and in all places we are in the presence of an utterly attentive, absolutely constant and unfailingly loving God. A God who is closer to us than we are to ourselves. A God who cannot help doing whatever it takes to close the distance between us, whose gentle presence hugs the contours of our lives the way the sea hugs the shore. And this divine reality is so permanent, so consistent that, like white noise, we live in complete ignorance of it most of the time. We tend to think that we are here and God is elsewhere, but actually it is God who is here and we who are absentmindedly elsewhere.

In this universe we don’t confess in the hope that our abject humiliation might possibly eke out a morsel of compassion from an otherwise indifferent deity. No. When we confess we acknowledge that while God may be unfailingly aligned with us we are less so with Him. We don’t seem capable of flying in formation with Him. If He moves in straight lines, our lines waver. To confess is to acknowledge and turn from our self-absorption, distraction, ignorance, inconsistency and whatever else detunes us from this heavenly wavelength. If apology restores us to a wider social reality than confession restores us to the deepest reality of all.