Post-holiday Blues: Missing the Time off, or Dreading the Return?

By Amrit Sandhar, Founder and CEO, &Evolve

Who doesn’t look forward to their time off? Many of us count down the weeks until we are finally free from the rhythm and routine that takes up most of our waking hours. But for some, the countdown has become more than anticipation. The holiday is the point they are working towards, the few weeks in the year when they can finally switch off, step away from the routine and feel like themselves again.

This year the transition feels particularly stark. According to the Met Office, summer 2026 was provisionally the hottest the UK has ever recorded, with a mean temperature of 16.5°C, and after a summer like that, September’s arrival is an abrupt return to normality. The children are back at school, the traffic is back on the roads, and the evenings are already beginning to close in. The holiday blues, it seems, are inevitable. But what if they aren’t really about the end of summer at all, and are instead about what we come back to?

Lots Of Fun, Quickly Gone

The science of holidays is surprisingly sobering. A meta-analysis by de Bloom and colleagues, published in the Journal of Occupational Health, found that holidays do improve health and wellbeing, but that the benefits are short-lived. A subsequent longitudinal study by the same researchers found that those improvements had generally returned to pre-holiday levels during the first week back at work. Its title captured the problem neatly: ‘Lots of fun, quickly gone’. Nawijn and colleagues, studying 1,530 Dutch adults, found that those planning a holiday were happier than those who weren’t, yet after the holiday there was no significant difference between the two groups. Only those who described their holiday as very relaxing saw a boost, concentrated in the first two weeks back and gone within eight.

If the positive effects of a holiday disappear that quickly, then the holiday itself isn’t the issue. The issue is the contrast. When we are away, we are temporarily removed from the routines, expectations and pressures that shape our working lives, and we have space to notice what gives us energy and what matters to us. A holiday may not change us. It simply changes our perspective.

A More Authentic Self

There is a reason new habits are easier to establish after an extended break. For a short time we are outside our normal rhythm, and the things that seemed urgent before we left no longer seem quite so important. We have spent time doing what we enjoy, connected with the people who matter to us, and had time to think. We return with a clearer sense of ourselves.

Then we go back to work, and suddenly we notice things we had stopped noticing: the meeting that serves no obvious purpose, the process that takes three times longer than it should, the manager who wants to approve everything, the feeling that there is never quite enough time to do a good job. None of these appeared overnight. We had simply become accustomed to them, until we went away.

What Are We Returning To?

People don’t simply return to work. They return to an environment, a manager, a culture and a way of working, and sometimes that environment has gradually eroded their motivation. Nobody joins an organisation intending to become disengaged; disengagement is the cumulative result of the experiences they have at work. According to Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2026, just 10% of UK employees are engaged at work, compared with 12% across Europe and 20% globally.

One part of the problem sits with managers. Too often, talented people are promoted because they are good at what they do, and are then expected to manage people without ever having been taught how. The Chartered Management Institute and YouGov found that 82% of people entering management had received no formal management or leadership training; they called them ‘accidental managers’. The same research found that one in three people had left a job because of a negative workplace culture, and that half of those who considered their manager ineffective planned to leave within the following year.

This isn’t because managers don’t care. It is because they have been promoted for their ability to deliver rather than their ability to enable others to deliver, and the result is a workplace built around compliance rather than autonomy, instruction rather than trust, and activity rather than purpose. Daniel Pink’s ‘Drive’ identified autonomy, mastery and purpose as the elements of enduring motivation, and it is difficult to create any of them where people are constantly told what to do, how to do it and when. It is in the weeks after a holiday, when people have had time to think, that these frustrations become difficult to ignore, and that intentions to leave harden into a job search.

Asking The Wrong Questions

This raises a question about how organisations try to understand their people. Employee engagement surveys are treated as the definitive measure of how people experience work, yet employees can only answer the questions they are asked. If the questions are predetermined, we learn how people feel about the things we have decided are important, and miss the things that matter most to them. Benchmarking makes this worse, as organisations compare themselves with others in their sector despite having very different cultures, people and working environments. And when the results arrive, the response becomes another HR initiative layered on top of the day job.

The Returners’ Window

For a short period after a holiday, employees have something organisations rarely get: distance. The processes that had become invisible look strange again, the meetings that add little value become obvious, and the friction everyone had learnt to work around is felt as friction. For a fortnight or so, employees are looking at their organisation almost as an outsider would. It is a window of opportunity, and most organisations spend it asking people to catch up on their emails.

Instead, what if we asked them what they noticed when they came back, what they found themselves questioning, what gets in the way of them doing their best work, and what they would change if they could? Those answers would tell an organisation more about its culture than another engagement survey, and they would reveal something more important still: where the gap sits between what people value and the experience of work they are actually having.

Don’t Dismiss September As Noise

Most organisations avoid asking people how they feel about work immediately after the holiday period, on the assumption that the time of year will contaminate the data. But that is precisely the point. Given how quickly the effects of a holiday fade, the intensity of someone’s holiday blues isn’t noise in the data. It is signal. It may be the most honest measure an organisation will ever get of how far its culture has drifted from the one it believes it has.

If your people came back this week and the light went out of them within days, the problem isn’t that the holiday ended. It’s what they came back to. The question for leaders isn’t how long the holiday blues will last, but what it would take for people not to need the holiday to get through the year.