The Holiday Mentality

Over the summer, while holidaying on the Greek Island Skiathos, I noticed how differently people acted - a more restful and relaxed approach to living. Holidays are often a chance to escape the hectic and mundane everyday tasks, to breathe and live more freely but what this made me consider was whether this should be the case? Should we as a society be looking forward to the escape from the everyday to such an extent? Which is why I ask you to ponder how can we implement more of a holiday mentality into the everyday.

There’s something about being in a completely new place, where nobody knows you, that allows people to feel more free, to say yes more and to do the things they enjoy. There’s something about being this free that just fundamentally feels better - such holiday freedom allows us to experience more from life and gives us an opportunity for restoration.

Oxford Languages [Google’s English dictionary] defines freedom in two ways - firstly, it defines freedom as ‘the power or right to act, speak, or think as one wants’ - this puts the onus on us, that we must decide what we want, that our freedom is our own responsibility. This is in comparison to the second definition - that freedom is ‘the state of not being imprisoned or enslaved’, implying that in order to have freedom we must liberated by someone/something else and in the context of holiday freedom that we must liberate ourselves from the things we consider to be enslaving us.

So in order to find holiday freedom outside of our holidays, we’ve got to determine what aspects of our lives are enslaving us, before then freeing ourselves of these things and allowing ourselves the power to do and think as we want. However, it is important to note that what freedom is for one person can entirely differ for the next. Even on holiday, one person’s idea of freedom might be allowing themself to laze around all day and do nothing, whereas for someone else freedom might be giving themselves permission to go exploring around the new location.

Finding and permitting ourselves freedom is the first stage of implementing the holiday mentality into our everyday but as always there has to be a balance - there are some aspects of our lives we may want to free ourselves from like a job that’s sucking the life from us or a pile of never ending homework that we can’t just rid ourselves of on the spot but the holiday mentality suggests we try and find solutions which allow us to feel more free even if not entirelyThe second thing I noticed while on holiday is how on the whole most people seemed rather happy and were making the most of the time they have. Whether it was treating themselves to an ice cream or falling asleep on a sun bed, people spent their holidays doing things which brought them joy and spent more time smiling than otherwise.

An image used in my childhood was of a bucket halfway filled and the bucket is often emptied by the things that we do, the the people we surround ourselves with as well as the situations we find ourselves in. So we needed to find things that filled our bucket, things that really brought us joy, things that we knew we could look forward to, things that would make our day and people who champion us, (people who were willing to give as much if not more than they would take from us).

While simple and to some degree cringey, it taught me to learn what my bucket fillers were and to prioritise them. What cheers you up? What has the power to transform your day? What and who are your bucket fillers? Because, in order to make the most of our lives we’ve got to make time for the things we enjoy most, even when life gets chaotic.

The holiday mentality I noticed was allowing ourselves freedom and making room/time for joy in our lives. But in order to be free and experience happiness, we’ve got to be authentic with ourselves, to be honest with ourselves over what in our regular lives are enslaving us and to be genuine about what and who are worth prioritising.

To conclude, holiday mentality is the accumulation of my thoughts and ideas at creating a more restful and fulfilling approach to living, like we experience on holiday. My one request would be that you consider one thing you could do this week which would free you to feel joy. I’d love to hear your thoughts over on my instagram.

Hope you have the best week,

M xx