Does a Vacation Make You Happier Before You Leave or After You Get Back?

Vacationers were happier before their trip than people who took none, and for most of them the trip did not leave them happier afterward. That is the finding of Nawijn, Marchand, Veenhoven and Vingerhoets (2010, Applied Research in Quality of Life), a pre-test/post-test study of 1,530 Dutch adults, 974 of whom took a holiday and 556 of whom did not.

What the numbers say

Comparison	Result
Before the trip	Vacationers scored higher (2.25 vs 2.07 on an affect balance score)
After the trip	Generally no difference between vacationers and non-vacationers
Very relaxed trips	Extra lift in the first two weeks back, gone by about eight weeks
Merely “relaxed” trips	No post-trip benefit

The authors suggest the pre-trip gap is “possibly” anticipation. They did not measure anticipation directly, and the gap was small.

What to do with it

If most of a holiday’s lift arrives before it starts, the practical move is to get something dated onto the calendar. A booked weekend with friends gives you weeks of looking forward. This is the cheap part of making life more exciting, and it needs no budget.

It also means the return trip matters. Coming back wrecked erases the one benefit the study found, so the night before work is worth planning too.

What this does not show

The sample is Dutch. Holiday type was not recorded, stress and length of stay were single questions, and the stressful (14) and neutral (67) groups were too small to analyze. The study says nothing about non-holiday events. For how rare and everyday experiences compare as people age, Bhattacharjee and Mogilner’s eight studies are the place to start.

The research on psychologically rich lives adds a related idea: variety and new perspectives, not only booked pleasures, are what people link to richness.