Vacation
Sonnentag & Fritz (2007) develop a framework of four attributes you might want your time off work or other "recovery experiences" to have:
- psychological detachment, not thinking about anything work-related
- relaxation, being in a state of low activation
- mastery, experiencing competence by doing activities that are challenging but not overwhelming
- control, being able to decide what to do
They develop some survey questions to ask about these attributes and check that each is a generally coherent thing to ask about and no two are overly similar, though they don't claim that the framework is exhaustive, explicitly mentioning that they're not considering the social aspect of activities. They do some surveys (a few hundred people) that suggest, unsurprisingly, that your "free evenings" having these attributes correlate with your well-being on a variety of measures, with psychological detachment correlating more strongly than the others. They also find little correlation between these attributes and personality traits or different coping strategies among people.
Bennet et al. (2017) is a meta-analysis that accepts this framework and measure the four attributes' correlations with various kinds of causes at work, as well as two attributes of outcomes, fatigue and vigor. Psychological detachment is the most strongly correlated with reducing fatigue and control is the most strongly correlated with improving vigor, though both by only a little.
De Bloom and collaborators ran three studies studying some different kinds of vacations: winter vacations, short vacations, long vacations. This is of course a gross oversimplification and rather than individually cite them I'll just refer to de Bloom's 2012 dissertation, which includes all three studies alongside a fuller overview of the field. Some qualitative summaries of takeaways from squinting at tables and discussion sections:
- Relaxation was significantly correlated with well-being improvement in all studies: both short and long vacations, both during and after the vacation.
- So was having pleasant activities (probably the least surprising finding).
- Psychological detachment was significantly correlated with well-being improvement during and after short vacations, but not during or after long vacations. Control was the opposite: it was significantly correlated with well-being improvement during and after long vacations, but not during or after short vacations.
- Mastery was only measured by the short-vacation study and didn't have significant correlation with well-being improvement.
- Vacation duration didn't have significant correlation with well-being improvement (except for a weird spike exactly 4 weeks after a long vacation).
The studies also asked about how much vacation time was spent on one of a few types of activities: passive, physical, social, and work. The correlations between these and well-being improvement were messy and mostly nonsignificant.
- Passive activities were negatively correlated with well-being improvements in the winter vacation study, but positively correlated in the long vacation study.
- Physical activities were positively correlated with well-being improvement in the winter vacation study, but nothing else.
- Social activities were positively correlated with well-being improvements during the long vacation, but nothing else.
- Work-related activities were negatively correlated with well-being improvements after the vacation in the short vacation study, but nothing else.
Some things measured by only one study that were correlated with well-being improvement, and seem like good ideas anyway: Savoring pleasant experiences, sleep duration, sleep quality, good conversations with one's partner.
Negative incidents (e.g., illness, injury, bad weather) were negatively correlated with well-being, but the effect was nonsignificant after the vacation.