How the happiest people spend their weekends: Treat them ‘like a vacation,' happiness expert says

If you're like me, you probably spend your weekends tackling the tasks you didn't have time for during the workweek. By the time you're done doing the laundry, washing dishes, mopping the floors or even finishing up more work — it's already Monday again.

That's no way to live, says Cassie Holmes, a happiness researcher and author of "Happier Hour: How to Beat Distraction, Expand Your Time, and Focus on What Matters Most."

According to Holmes, you should actually treat your weekends like a vacation.

"People associate vacations with a break … Whereas our weekends tend to be a routine where we are moving through our activities," Holmes recently said on the "Everyday Better with Leah Smart" podcast. Treating your weekend like a vacation helps break you out of the "routine of doing, and it allows you to just be."

In 2017, Holmes ran an experiment on over 400 working Americans. On a Friday, she told some of the group to treat the time like a vacation and told the others to spend it like they would any other weekend. When measuring their happiness afterwards, she found that those with a vacation mindset showed more satisfaction and positivity when they returned to work.

The vacationers were "doing less housework and work for their jobs, staying in bed a little longer with their partner, and eating a bit more," she wrote for Harvard Business Review in 2019. But the real differentiating factor was that they were "more mindful of and attentive to the present moment throughout their weekend's activities."

For some people, it's hard to stop going through the motions after work. 78% of American workers don't take full advantage of their PTO, according to a May 2024 Harris Poll survey. And when they do take time off, 54% say they can't completely unplug from their jobs, a 2022 Glassdoor report found. 

If you find yourself feeling time poor once the weekend rolls around, you can ease into Holmes' happiness mindset by starting with spending just one day like a vacation, she says.

"Some people are like, well [the weekend] is when I get my chores done," she said on the podcast. "Why don't you carve out Saturday? And then Sunday, you can do all the stuff that you have to do.

Spend 24 hours doing the things that make you feel the most relaxed and disconnected from your normal routine. Take a day trip to a local nature reserve, try out a new restaurant or spend the day at a spa. And if you've got a lot on your plate, reward yourself with a cocktail after doing the dishes, or listen to your favorite podcast as you fold clothes for a similar mental break.

Many highly successful people use a similar method to make their Mondays more productive. Mark Cuban spends his weekends surrounded by his loved ones, he said at SXSW in 2014, as his work weeks are usually jam-packed. Richard Branson prefers to party on Saturday nights and spend Sundays doing activities like rock jumping and paddle boarding, he told the Telegraph in 2011.

However, Holmes warns that there is one caveat to the vacation mindset. Spending all of your weekends like vacations can reduce the exercise's emotional and mental impact. You won't feel as rejuvenated and rested as you would if this wasn't the norm, so act like a vacationer only on the weekends when you really need a break.

"Given that the vacation mindset and resulting happiness stems from mentally breaking from routine and the day-to-day grind, this intervention cannot itself become a routine," she wrote for HBR.

"When used judiciously, this simple reframing allows you to enjoy some of the happiness from a vacation without taking additional time off."

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