I Couldn't Remember My Password. That Was the Best News of the Trip.

Before we had kids, my wife and I made a list of countries that are easier to visit without a toddler. It started as a bit of a joke. Then we actually began ticking them off, and in 2012, that list took us from China to Pyongyang, North Korea.

At the border, they took my passport, phone, and laptop. Someone asked about my job, and I wasn’t sure if 'consultant' would make sense or cause trouble, so I said I was a doctor. The next morning, they brought us to a hospital, where I met the head physician. He asked how I’d treat a patient with shortness of breath, then chest pain, then a stubborn headache. The questions were simple enough for me to answer. I passed. It actually felt a bit more stressful than my final exams, but we did get to see a North Korean hospital from the inside.

We spent two weeks there with a driver and two guides, following a route we didn’t pick, in a place with almost no phone signal anyway. For the first few days, I kept reaching for my pocket, only to find it empty. By the third day, I stopped, and my mind finally quieted in a way it hadn’t for years.

That sense of calm happened within a tightly controlled system. We followed a set itinerary, always with our guides and driver, and paid to be part of a state-run tourism program. I don’t want to make the regime sound better than it was (it’s bad, and we saw enough to judge even on a tightly controlled trip), but the quiet is what stayed in my memory.

Fourteen years later, no holiday I’ve picked has given me that same distance from work.

How would you even know

That bothers me more than it probably should, because I honestly can’t say if any holiday since then has really worked. I usually come home saying I feel better, even after a week where I checked email twice a day and spent six out of seven days thinking about a budget decision.

Feeling rested is a terrible measure. It depends on things like the last morning, the weather, or a good breakfast, and it often just tells you what you want to hear. So I started looking for something else.

The password test

On a family holiday, in a place with no reception or somewhere so new I’d stopped checking, I opened my laptop for something and couldn’t remember my password. The whole thing just vanished. I typed something, got it wrong, and stared at the screen. I’ve entered that password loads of times, usually without even thinking about it.

My company made us change our passwords every few months, so it never really became automatic. Do you know that little shock, and then a feeling almost like satisfaction when this happens? The part of me that remembered those characters had finally let go.

Researchers have a name for the state I had stumbled into. Sonnentag and Fritz call it psychological detachment, one of four parts of recovery alongside relaxation, mastery, and control [1]. Your head leaves the job, which turns out to be a completely separate event from your body leaving the office. They measure it by asking people whether they have stopped thinking about work, and I should be straight with you: nobody has validated password recall as a measure of anything. People forget passwords for dull reasons.

I took that blank screen as a personal sign that I’d finally let go of a work habit, and I’ve used it ever since. I’ve also stopped trying to plan the perfect destination. Grant’s meta-analysis couldn’t say if location matters, and it did find that trip length makes a difference, but didn’t say how much or in which direction [2]. So I’m going beyond the evidence when I say I don’t worry about either anymore. In 20 years, I haven’t seen an executive come back changed just because they stayed in a nicer hotel. Now, I just pay attention to whether my mind let go of work at all.

Nobody is going to reward you for this

Eva Buechel and Elisa Solinas did 16 studies on how detachment is seen at work, and their findings surprised me [3]. Managers say detachment is good for their teams when asked directly. But when they see an employee actually switch off, they rate that person as less promotable. This was true for out-of-office replies, vacation requests, and even when the reason for disconnecting was valid. Managers seem to see detachment as a sign of low commitment.

There’s another surprising result. In a meta-analysis of 89 samples with 39,085 employees, the six studies that measured work performance found that people who worked during their off-hours actually scored higher [4]. But these studies were mostly self-reported and cross-sectional, so no one was independently assessed. We can’t say if the extra work really caused better performance.

If you find it hard to switch off, it’s probably because of the incentives at work, not a flaw in your character. The tricky part is that if you’re in a senior role, you help set those incentives. Your out-of-office message is a policy statement. The email you send at 11pm from an airport is, too. Your team pays more attention to that than to any wellbeing presentation.

Somebody in this house is still working

I’ve never asked my wife if she’s ever forgotten her password on holiday. I think I already know the answer.

Musick, Meier and Flood analyzed 12,163 people across 36,036 activities, asking how they had felt during three randomly selected activities from the previous day [5]. Parents reported more positive affect in time with their children than in time without. Mothers reported less happiness, more stress, and more fatigue in that same time than fathers did.

Some of the difference had to do with context. Mothers spent twice as much time on basic care as on play, while fathers split those activities evenly. A partner was present for 31% of mothers’ time with their kids, compared to 61% for fathers. But even after accounting for activity type, solo parenting, sleep, and leisure, mothers were still more tired. That’s the part I keep thinking about, because avoiding fatigue is the whole point of a holiday.

Holiday-specific research is thin and mostly qualitative, though it exists. A study of self-catering trips found that mothers’ domestic roles largely persisted through the holiday [6]. A more recent interview study found women, and mothers especially, still did more of the housework in home-like accommodation, while hotels shifted couples toward a more equal split, because somebody else does the cooking and the cleaning [7].

Thinking about our own holiday trips, not just the data. A family holiday takes away the school run, the office, and the usual bedtime routine. But it also removes the structure that decides who does what, so the usual patterns take over. Someone still has to find the pharmacy, pack the bags, remember what each child ate, and handle bedtime in a room without blackout curtains. That person is running a household in an unfamiliar kitchen with worse tools and no schedule to lean on. It feels more like a business trip than a real break.

This is part of the Recover part of my Upward ARC framework, and a holiday is usually the biggest chunk of recovery time you get all year. Many executives spend it feeling refreshed, while someone else in the house is running an under-resourced operation in a place where they can’t even find the scissors.

What the trip does to you

The good news is that holidays do work, and they work better than I once thought. Ty Ferguson’s team tracked movement using Fitbits on 308 Australian parents of primary school kids, over 13 months and 9,778 holiday days across 806 trips [8]. The average age was 40, and most had two or three kids at home.

During holidays, they slept about 21 minutes more each night, did about 5 more minutes of moderate-to-vigorous activity, and sat about half an hour less each day. The extra sleep lasted even after the trip, staying 8 minutes above normal in the first week back and 7 minutes in the second.

Their light activity dropped, though. All the small movements that fill a normal day went down by about 10 minutes a day in the first week back and stayed about 10 minutes below normal even four weeks later. So they came home sleeping a bit more, but moving less, and that lasted a month.

Where this gets shaky

In an earlier edition, I said a holiday doesn’t fix burnout, and last summer I called that idea complete “bullshit.” I still don’t think two weeks in Greece will cure a burnt-out executive. But I underestimated the effect. The evidence I used came from seven studies [9]. A much bigger analysis last year looked at 32 studies and found a larger benefit that fades more slowly [2]. Another analysis, which reworks the original data instead of testing it independently, still finds the benefit gone within a week [10].

There is more uncertain ground. Detachment is the best sign researchers have that you’ve left work behind, but calling it the main driver of recovery is a stretch. In one Dutch study of 54 people, detachment didn’t link to health or wellbeing during or after the holiday [11]. The biggest review found it lowers exhaustion, but doesn’t clearly boost engagement or performance; relaxation and mastery do that instead [12]. Most of this research is based on self-reported questionnaires, and the holiday-specific studies on households are just a few interviews.

Try this today

Divide up the responsibilities before you leave, and write them down. Give each parent two hours completely off and unreachable by anyone under 140cm, then switch. If you just play it by ear, the usual patterns take over, just like in Musick’s study [5]. No one has tested this, so it’s my practical suggestion, not a proven method. Have this talk at home on a Tuesday when you’re both calm.

Consider choosing a hotel instead of a rental. This is the most useful thing I learned while writing this. In the interview study mentioned earlier, staying in a home-like place kept the usual domestic roles going, while hotels led to a more equal split, mainly because someone else does the cooking and cleaning [7]. It’s a small study with just ten couples and wasn’t meant to test your family, but it’s still worth considering.

Take care of the month after you get back. Schedule some movement before you leave. Ferguson’s study found people were still about 10 minutes a day below their usual light activity four weeks after returning [8], and most don’t notice. As a doctor, I recommend adjusting your wake-up time gradually over the first few mornings and keeping your caffeine intake close to your usual amount and timing until you’ve settled in. That’s standard circadian hygiene, and it’s what I do myself.

Deal with the mental loop in your head. Airplane mode is the simple fix. What really predicts a rough return is negative work reflection. That’s the technical term for lying by the pool and thinking about everything wrong with your job. In a study of 221 employees, those who did this came back with more health complaints and more exhaustion, even two weeks later [13]. If you catch yourself going over a decision, write down the one action you’ll take when you’re back, put it somewhere you’ll see it, and then let it go.

Pay attention to your first login when you get home. If your password doesn’t come to you right away, take it as a personal sign that you really let go of a work habit. It won’t tell you if the holiday worked, but it’s an easy thing to notice.

If you are in a senior role, say it out loud. Tell people you will be unreachable, then be unreachable. Buechel and Solinas found that a formal no-weekend-email policy may reduce the promotion penalty [3], and detachment turns out to be learnable, with the biggest gains in older people and those who began with health or recovery-related issues [14].

The price of the quiet

It took eleven days without work on my mind, a surrendered passport, a driver, two guides, and a skills test from a stranger in a Pyongyang hospital to get that kind of mental break. That’s a ridiculous amount of effort for something we’re supposed to manage on a regular holiday.

The “wild places to visit before kids” list is in a drawer now. We have three children, the holidays are louder and shorter and considerably more negotiated, and I have stopped expecting any of them to feel like North Korea.

What I want to know is whether at some point my hands forget the password, and whether my wife’s do, too.

One question, and I read every reply. What is the one thing your head refuses to put down when you are away? Name it in a sentence.

Stay healthy.

Andre

PS: If you are the one in your house who books the pharmacy run and knows which child ate what, this edition was written with you in mind. Send it to the person you are on holiday with. That’s the way this newsletter grows, and it’s the only way I want it to.

PPS: If a friend forwarded this to you, you can get Under Load, my Sunday edition, here: https://www.andreheeg.com.

References

[1] Sonnentag, S., & Fritz, C. (2007). The Recovery Experience Questionnaire: Development and validation of a measure for assessing recuperation and unwinding from work. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 12(3), 204-221. https://doi.org/10.1037/1076-8998.12.3.204

[2] Grant, R. S., Buchanan, B. E., & Shockley, K. M. (2025). I need a vacation: A meta-analysis of vacation and employee well-being. Journal of Applied Psychology, 110(7), 887-905. https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0001262

[3] Buechel, E. C., & Solinas, E. (2025). The detachment paradox: Employers recognize the benefits of detachment for employee well-being and performance, yet penalize it in employee evaluations. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 188, 104403. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2025.104403

[4] Kühner, C., Rudolph, C. W., Derks, D., Posch, M., & Zacher, H. (2023). Technology-assisted supplemental work: A meta-analysis. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 142, 103861. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jvb.2023.103861

[5] Musick, K., Meier, A., & Flood, S. (2016). How parents fare: Mothers’ and fathers’ subjective well-being in time with children. American Sociological Review, 81(5), 1069-1095. https://doi.org/10.1177/0003122416663917

[6] Mottiar, Z., & Quinn, D. (2012). Is a self-catering holiday with the family really a holiday for mothers? Examining the balance of household responsibilities while on holiday from a female perspective. Hospitality & Society, 2(2), 197-214. https://doi.org/10.1386/hosp.2.2.197\_1

[7] Yao, X., Hua, C., & Jordan, E. J. (2025). Housework stress in home and travel living spaces: A gender space and housework industrialization perspective. Annals of Tourism Research, 112, 103937. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2025.103937

[8] Ferguson, T., Curtis, R., Fraysse, F., Olds, T., Dumuid, D., Brown, W., Esterman, A., & Maher, C. (2023). How do 24-h movement behaviours change during and after vacation? A cohort study. International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity, 20(1), 24. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12966-023-01416-2

[9] de Bloom, J., Kompier, M., Geurts, S., de Weerth, C., Taris, T., & Sonnentag, S. (2009). Do we recover from vacation? Meta-analysis of vacation effects on health and well-being. Journal of Occupational Health, 51(1), 13-25. https://doi.org/10.1539/joh.K8004

[10] Speth, F., Wendsche, J., & Wegge, J. (2023). We continue to recover through vacation!: Meta-analysis of vacation effects on well-being and its fade-out. European Psychologist, 28(4), 274-287. https://doi.org/10.1027/1016-9040/a000518

[11] de Bloom, J., Geurts, S. A. E., & Kompier, M. A. J. (2013). Vacation (after-)effects on employee health and well-being, and the role of vacation activities, experiences and sleep. Journal of Happiness Studies, 14(2), 613-633. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-012-9345-3

[12] Headrick, L., Newman, D. A., Park, Y. A., & Liang, Y. (2023). Recovery experiences for work and health outcomes: A meta-analysis and recovery-engagement-exhaustion model. Journal of Business and Psychology, 38(4), 821-864. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10869-022-09821-3

[13] Fritz, C., & Sonnentag, S. (2006). Recovery, well-being, and performance-related outcomes: The role of workload and vacation experiences. Journal of Applied Psychology, 91(4), 936-945. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.91.4.936

[14] Karabinski, T., Haun, V. C., Nübold, A., Wendsche, J., & Wegge, J. (2021). Interventions for improving psychological detachment from work: A meta-analysis. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 26(3), 224-242. https://doi.org/10.1037/ocp0000280