Photo: Usman Omar / Unsplash

I don’t always find myself to be good company. Like a friend who only talks about his own hang-ups, my inner monologue can get pretty tiresome. Honestly, that again? Can’t we give it a rest?

I think most of us feel this from time to time, this desire to get away from ourselves. But all the usual remedies — entertainment or exercise, alcohol or drugs — tend to work only in small doses, if they work at all. Rely on any of them too regularly and they become habits, which is often just a gentle synonym for compulsions.

I’ve written before in this space about the brain-dulling effect of an overly routinized life. The novelist Rachel Cusk put a finer point on it when she wrote that “habits kill what is essential in ourselves.” If you’re feeling worn out by the stuff going on in your head, that’s a sure sign you need to change its inputs — give your mind something new to chew on so that it stops chewing on itself.

Here, the research on vacations can be instructive.

A vacation, by definition, is a respite from the humdrum monotony of daily life. A 2019 study from Australia found that the more vacationers were able to be “mentally away” from their usual habits — especially habits related to work and technology (email, social media, etc.) — the more restorative their vacation tended to be. Excising these activities from your leisure hours may pay similar dividends.

Less intuitively, another study (this one from 2021) found that the more time vacationers spent watching TV, movies, and other screen-based entertainments, the less rejuvenated they felt following their time off. These forms of media may require too much focused attention, which could interfere with a vacation’s revivifying qualities, the study’s authors wrote. I think it’s also true that, for most people, these entertainments are too much a feature of everyday life. They’re a continuation, not a break, and so they’re likely to guide your thoughts back onto they’re well-worn tracks.

If you want a break from yourself, you need a break from your routines

Finally, some researchers have compared staycations (holidays at home) to vacations that involve travel. That work has found that travelling leads to a greater drop in “ruminative” thinking, which is a term psychologists use to describe the repetitive worries or negative thought loops that fuel anxiety, depression, and other mental health problems. Physical distance, one study team observed, seems to provide mental distance from both everyday stressors and problematic ruminations.

There’s a lot more peer-reviewed research I could mention here — studies on habits and their ties to environmental cues, or papers on the hedonic benefits of novel experiences. The lesson I take from all this work is that if you want a break from yourself, you need a break from your routines.

Do new things in new places. Shake yourself up, if only for an hour or two at a time. If insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result, it follows that doing the same thing over and over and expecting to think differently is a form of insanity. You can’t change your mind unless you change your behavior.

Where I live in southwest Germany, it stays light out now until nine o’clock. On a balmy Tuesday evening last week — a time when I’d normally be at home checking email, watching TV, or doing laundry—I decided to bag all that and ride my bike. I ended up at a small lake. I took a swim and air-dried, watching the sun go down.

Later, at home in bed, I felt like I’d done something illicit — like I’d stollen a bit of life that I wasn’t entitled to on a weekday evening. Everything seemed different, including me. I was happy for the change in company.