What Your Summer Vacation Is Actually For

I was in LA a few weeks ago visiting my daughter, and I reached for my phone out of habit. I was having my morning coffee while Sienna and Kade were still asleep, and there was my thumb, already hovering over the mail icon. I've been trying to break this habit for years. I don't check email on vacation, that's been the rule for a long time, and mostly I keep it. But the pull is still there. The reach itself, the feeling of doing it, the little hit of being on top of things. The habit runs deeper than the rule.

If you're a leader with a vacation coming up, you probably know the feeling. You may have already started deciding how much you'll check in while you're away. I used to think a little checking in was the responsible version of rest. Then I learned what the brain is actually doing during those unplugged days, and it changed my mind about what all that checking in actually costs.

I put the phone down that morning in LA. But I noticed how much I wanted to pick it back up, and how quickly the reasons showed up to justify it. Just staying ahead of the pile. Just making sure the team isn't stuck waiting on me. Just being reachable in case a client needs something or a deal starts to wobble. It all sounds prudent. That's how I explained it to myself for twenty years, and it's how the executives I coach explain it to me now. Checking in feels like part of the job. Fully unplugging feels like something you can only afford when nothing depends on you.

Here's what I've come to believe instead: the full unplug is the prudent move. Not the indulgent one. And the reason comes straight from the neuroscience.

What your brain does when you stop

Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, a neuroscientist at USC, studies what happens in the brain when it stops working on a task. When you release your attention, when you're not aimed at a problem or a screen or an inbox, a different system comes online. Researchers call it the default mode network, and its job is what she calls autobiographical meaning-making. It's the part of you that works out who you are, what matters to you, and what connects to what.

The part that changed how I think about rest is this: that network does not run while you're directing attention at a problem. It's not that it runs weaker. It doesn't run. The brain is either in task mode or in meaning-making mode, never both. Every time my thumb finds the mail icon, I'm keeping the meaning-making system offline, and I'm doing it in the name of staying on top of things.

The executives I coach are almost never stuck on a spreadsheet problem. What they're actually wrestling with sounds more like this: should I take the bigger role, or is it time to leave? What should this business become over the next five years, and do I have the right team to get it there? Why doesn't hitting the number feel like anything anymore? Those aren't problems that more analysis will solve.

They're questions about who you are, what matters to you, and what connects to what. And that's exactly the thinking that only happens when you stop working.

This is the irony I keep seeing, in my clients and in myself. The harder the question feels, the harder we work at it. We add another strategy session with ourselves, another late night, another vacation morning with the phone. And the effort itself is what keeps the answer from surfacing. The thing you are trying to figure out can only show up when you quit trying to figure it out.

The business case for the beach

I want to be direct about this part, because I know how it sounds. Executives hear "rest" and they hear weakness, a wellness perk, something for later. But this isn't about feeling refreshed. Your clarity about strategy, about people, about your own next chapter is a leadership asset. And the part of the brain that produces it only works when you stop.

Most of the leaders I work with can tell me exactly where their best thinking happens. It's never at the desk. It's in the shower, on the long drive, on day five of the vacation when the work brain finally goes quiet. They say it like it's a quirk. It's not a quirk. It's the default mode network doing what it does the moment you finally give it room. The insight that arrives on day five isn't a bonus of the vacation. It's the vacation working.

This is why, when a client is circling one of these bigger questions, the homework I give them often looks like nothing at all. Five minutes a day of sitting still, no phone, no agenda, no problem to solve. Almost everyone pushes back at first, because it feels like a waste of perfectly good attention. Then a few weeks in, something they'd been chasing for months surfaces on its own, on a walk or in the car, and they tell me about it like it was luck. It wasn't luck. It's what that system does when you finally stop crowding it out. If five minutes a day can do that, think about what a week can do.

And here's the catch with checking email "just for twenty minutes" each morning: it resets the clock. Every check pulls the brain back into task mode and pushes the other one back down. You never get to day five. You get seven first days in a row, and you come back rested in your body and exactly as stuck in your head as when you left.

Email isn't the only thing that does this. An hour of scrolling LinkedIn from the beach chair holds your attention just as tightly as the inbox does, and the meaning-making system stays offline either way. Trading the mail app for the feed isn't unplugging. It's changing the channel.

The commitment I'm making this year

Years ago I wrote a list of lessons from my career, and one of them was "Take a vacation. Take two. Turn off your email." I wrote it before I understood why it was true. I thought it was about recovery. It turns out it's about access to a kind of thinking you cannot do any other way.

I'm writing this the day before we leave for our summer vacation, and this year I'm committing to the full unplug. Not mostly unplugged, with a few quick checks when nobody's looking. All the way. Out-of-office on, with a real person to contact instead of "I'll be checking periodically." Mail app off my phone entirely, and the social apps with it, because I know that thumb of mine, and willpower on a quiet morning is not my strong suit. And when the pull comes, and it will come, I'm going to try to let it be there without feeding it.

I won't pretend the habit is gone. My thumb was hovering over that mail icon just a few weeks ago. But there's a difference between following a rule and understanding what the rule protects, and I finally understand it. Those unplugged days aren't time away from the important thinking. They are the important thinking.

There's a bigger version of this, too. If the part of the brain that works out who we are only runs when we stop, and we never stop, then we can go years without hearing from ourselves. I meet the result in my practice all the time: accomplished people who, on paper, have nothing to complain about, and who can't tell me what they actually want. That's not a vacation problem, and I'm not going to pretend a week off solves it. But a real week off is often where people first notice it.

If you've got time off coming and there's a question you've been grinding on all year, here's the thing I'd offer, the same thing I offer my clients: you don't need to work on it harder. You need to give the other system a turn. Leave the phone in the drawer. Let yourself be bored on the dock. What you're looking for tends to show up when you finally stop looking.

That's what summer vacation is actually for. We leave tomorrow. I'll let you know how it goes.