After Months of Non-stop Work, Truly Unplugging Can Become Incredibly Difficult

The long-awaited, well-deserved holiday season has finally arrived for millions of employees. Modern workplaces demand a state of constant mental availability. Driven by rapid technological advances, we find ourselves endlessly tied to work through group chats, social media, and e-mails, making total disconnection a challenge.

This technological complexity is also associated with greater emotional exhaustion at work and in our personal lives. Along with daily and weekly breaks between shifts, annual leave periods are designed to be one of the most effective tools for essential rest and recovery. Research consistently shows that time away from work can improve wellbeing, reduce exhaustion and support recovery.

It actively lowers stress, improves sleep quality, and reduces the risk of chronic illness. The stakes are incredibly high: according to estimates by the International Labour Organization, over 840,000 people die annually from health conditions tied to psychosocial risks, including, among other, long working hours, excessive demands, and poor shift scheduling. Switching off from work is not easy, and a change of location is often not enough.

Whether we travel or remain at home, unfinished tasks can continue to occupy our attention. We may feel anxious about what has been left open or compelled to finish everything before leaving. These experiences form part of an ongoing research project at the University of Zurich’s Center for Leadership in the Future of Work into how perceptions of time, unfinished work and feelings of urgency shape people’s experiences in organisations.

Psychologists describe part of this impulse as the desire for closure: the motivation to complete a goal for the sake of resolving it, even when finishing immediately carries additional costs. Completing our goals is satisfying and feels good. Unfinished goals, by contrast, can interfere with other aspects of our work and life by creating intrusive thoughts during unrelated tasks.

A recent study showed that people have a stronger desire for closure before a vacation (compared to a normal workday). Specifically, people showed more impatience to finish off tasks before taking holidays, even without a pressing deadline, and even when that meant working overtime. The logic is simple: we don’t want to think about work during our time off.

Naturally, this poses a challenge for those of us who anticipate a post-vacation workload, as vacations may prove less restful than expected if a backlog of tasks awaits in our inbox. These unresolved demands can make it harder to disconnect and weaken the restorative benefits of time off. This is not solely a matter of individual self-discipline.

Employees may struggle to detach because workloads, communication norms and inadequate vacation cover make disconnection unrealistic. Employers therefore shape whether leave is genuinely restorative: they can arrange cover, redistribute urgent work, clarify that messages do not require a response and avoid allowing large backlogs to build while someone is away. So, for holiday periods to be truly restful and restorative, both the departure and the return need to be considered.

And both employees and employers can help. In the days before leave, distinguish between tasks that genuinely need to be completed and those that can safely wait. For unfinished work, write down the next action, who is responsible and when you will return to it. A clear handover and restart plan can provide a sense of closure without requiring you to finish everything.