Making Your Holiday Last

Hi there and welcome to you all,

This month we want to help you start thinking about holidays. In my last post I wrote about the joy of planning your holiday. In this offering I’d like to suggest ways you can hold onto the positives from your adventure—long after you’re back home.

There are two keys. First, impress the best moments on your memory, and second process any hitches or hiccups so they’re no longer distressing. Research suggests you need to approach each of these differently. Let’s start with the hitches and hiccups.

Sonya Lyubomirsky at the University of California Riverside is one of the world’s leading researchers on the science of happiness. She’s found the best ways to neutralise negative experiences is to write them down and/or talk about them. This is because writing and talking about your experiences involve organising, integrating and analysing them so you can make sense of them, accept what happened, and learn to avoid it happening again.  

But making sense of something delightful rather takes the wonder out of it, don’t you think? When it comes to positive experiences, just thinking about them encourages you to remember and feel good—better, surprisingly, than you’d feel if you write those experiences down. 

Therefore, the best way to remember your holiday and associate the best feelings possible with it is to bring a notebook with you, as well as a sketch pad and/or a camera.

When things go wrong, write down what happened and what you learned so you can ‘let go’ of the negativity and figure out how to avoid the same calamity in future. 

But when wonderful things happen—you come across an amazing sunset or beach walk with your dog, or enjoy a fantastic meal—you don’t need to write them down. Instead, take a photo, sketch the scene, or pick up a reminder such as a seashell or menu. That way you’ll have a memory trigger to help you bask in the joyful memories of your holiday, over and over again. 

Until next time,

Linda