Vacation Euphoria

I don't know about you, but when I leave work on a Friday afternoon for a normal weekend, the feelings that generates are far different from the feelings I get when I leave work to start vacation. For a normal weekend I'm always glad that the weekend is here and look forward to spending time with my family. However, when I walk out of the door to start vacation, it is usually accompanied by feelings of euphoria. There's an extra spring in my step and the day seems all of a sudden better.

It's kind of surprising for me to think of how much of a psychological difference the distinction between "normal weekend" and "vacation" time makes on my emotions. I've also realized that it does not take much of a vacation to invoke these feelings of happiness.

Take this past Friday for instance. I took a half of a day of vacation on Friday afternoon. We were not going anywhere, I was just staying home with the kids while Stephanie went to a doctor's appointment. So I extended my weekend only by four hours or so. Yet when I walked out of the office at lunch time, the air smelled fresher, the sky seemed bluer and I could not help but smile big. It did not hurt that it was probably the nicest day of the week, being a fairly warm and sun shiny day.

If I could only train myself to think of weekends as two-day mini vacations, I could be singing the James Brown song, "I Feel Good" every Friday.