If you have two weeks off, don’t stay away from home the entire two weeks. Give yourself a day or two before going back to the grind to unwind, do the laundry, grocery shop and check email


Be mindful while building memories Bryant says actively building memories is a savouring strategy that’s universal across all cultures. “When people are in a happy moment, they build memories. It’s not just a memory of what’s going on, it’s also a memory of how you feel in that moment.” Here’s one easy way to do it: collect objects from your travels


and note the way each makes you feel when you’re collecting it. “When I climb a summit, I’ll take a small rock from the top, close my eyes and smell it,” Bryant says. “When I get home, all I have to do is take the rock off the shelf and sniff it and it brings back a flood of memories. I can get back the joy of any vacation I want if I have built the memories and encoded the feelings I had at the time.” Being mindful — or paying attention and being consciously


aware — is crucial to this technique. “We can smell the tropical earth, taste the local cuisine and be fascinated by the novel culture,” says Krismer. “When we attend to the holiday — that is, truly immerse our full being in it — we deeply enjoy the expe- rience, and when we return from vacation, we can savour that experience.”


Leave a buffer One reason studies show there are few (if any) prolonged effects on our post-vacation happiness, says Kurtz, is because we don’t leave a buffer to ease back into our regular life. “We think that if we have, say, two weeks off, we should stay away for the entire two weeks, especially if we’re spending a lot of money on a plane ticket or travelling far from home. But studies show that a hasty return can counteract the stress-reducing properties of a vacation.” Your best bet is to give yourself a day or two before going back to the grind to unwind, do the laundry, grocery shop and, sure, now’s the time to check your email.


Reminisce Months after returning from a fishing lodge on BC’s Haida Gwaii last summer, Kerry Reinke, chief risk officer of the Ca- nadian division and group head of enterprise risk at Manulife Financial, gleefully recalls not only the camaraderie at the cottage where he stayed with his father, father-in-law and two friends, but what it was like being aboard the fishing boat. “We’re in the middle of the North Pacific. There are hump-


back whales swimming by and bald eagles above. We were pulling in 15- to 25-pound salmon that gave us the fight of our lives,” he says.


44 | CPA MAGAZINE | MAY 2016 That ability to reflect and recollect is perhaps the most impor-


tant tool to help keep your vacation happiness going strong. Remember those pictures you took and the souvenirs you brought back? Do something with them. “A postcard, napkin, matchbook, a shell from the beach — don’t just put it in a drawer and forget about it,” says Bryant. “Put it on the coffee table at home or on your desk at work. Make yourself a menag- erie of memories and they’ll remind you of when you were on the trip.” Reinke brought each of his three kids a stuffed animal that


was related to the local wildlife on the islands. Plus, he brought back the pièce de résistance — the fish he caught, smoked and packaged. “It was delivered to my door a few weeks after I returned. When the fish arrived it gave me another opportunity to engage in telling stories about the trip,” he says. That’s another great way to reminisce — tell stories. “Invite


people over and bore them with your slides,” Bryant says with a laugh. “Collect stories to share with friends and colleagues the same way you collect memorabilia.” This technique rings true for Reinke. “I was looking for


excuses to talk about the trip. I still look for excuses to talk about it,” he admits. What’s important here is actively engaging in reminiscing about your trip, which is different from simply posting photos with short descriptions on Facebook or Instagram, for example. “Posting images on social media would be a nice way to augment real-time, interactive storytelling, and it would help prolong the post-vacation joy more than doing nothing at all,” Bryant says. “But without the telling of the experience to others in one’s own words and the perception of their reactions to one’s shared stories, it’s harder to relive the positive feelings, to go back in time to re-experience the best moments of the trip.”


When it comes down to it, Bryant says our capacity for mental time travel is a skill we should be taking advantage of before, during and aſter our vacation. “If you approach it the right way, recognizing that nothing lasts forever, you can keep enjoying the moment aſter it’s happened,” he says. So your holiday is over and you’re back at the office sitting in


endless meetings, but that doesn’t have to mean your trip is long gone. As Bryant says, “The vacation has to end at some point, but the effects of it don’t have to.”


LISA VAN DE GEYN is a Toronto-based freelance writer


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