It’s September and the lovely summer vacation you had may seem like a thing of the very distant past. Are you feeling a bit down about being back in the office, workplace or on family duty? All of us can suffer from temporary post-vacation blues. Here we talk about the cycle of negative mood and give you some tips to avoid the post-vacation dip.

Stop and listen closely for a second. Notice all of the noises and sights around you. If you are in your office you may hear the air conditioning unit, the sound of your computer fan,  the faint roar of traffic outside… But you only became aware of all of these noises because you stopped and listened. If you were focusing on your work (before you started to read this blog that is) then you were probably deaf to those distracting sounds. This is because in order to survive in a busy world, the brain has to choose what to focus on. If we were to attend to everything all of the time we would never complete tasks because the huge sum of distractions would be too great. Our brains focus on what seems important in the moment making us essentially blind and deaf to other distractions. This is called selective attention.

A lot of different factors drive what we attend to at any one moment. It could be the environment we’re in, the people we’re with and how important it is to focus on the task at hand. But another factor that strongly predicts what we attend to is mood. When you feel sad you unconsciously focus your attention on other things that are sad. When you are happy you unconsciously focus on other things that are happy. One group of researchers showed this by making one half of a group of people happy and the other half sad. They then set them a boring computer task to do in which they had to count balls moving around a screen. Halfway through the task one of the balls suddenly turned into either a happy or a sad face. After the computer task was over the researchers asked them if they had seen anything strange during the trial. People who were sad were more likely to have noticed the strange face if it was a sad face. They were less likely to have even noticed that a face had appeared it if it was a happy face [1].

This is called an attentional bias.

If you’re back from holiday or the vacation period is a thing of the past and you’re feeling a bit down, your attention may be unconsciously drawn to negative things that match your mood. Are you focusing on how much work you missed while you were away and how much you have to catch up on? Did you mistake a colleague’s frown of concentration for a frown of annoyance? Most of the time attentional bias is completely unconscious. For example, when people look at a normal list of words when they’re feeling down they will be more likely to remember words that have negative connotations than positive [2]. Feeling blue like this can result in a vicious cycle of negative thinking that is hard to escape from: The lower you feel the more your attention is drawn towards negative things. The more negative things you notice the worse you feel. So how do we turn this around?

Well just as low mood drives your attention towards negative things so too does positive mood drive your attention towards happier things. If you can give your mood a little positive boost it will help you to break out of the cycle of negative thinking. Here are some ideas to boost your mood on return from vacation:

1) Welcome yourself home.

Make being home pleasant by using little treats. Have your favourite music ready for listening, stop off at the grocery store to pick up ingredients for a meal you really like or go for a walk around a part of your neighbourhood that makes you feel happy. Research shows that simple activities such as these can boost your mood enough to change your unconscious attentional bias to focus on positive things. Even better, positive mood causes your brain to focus on things that are rewarding meaning that once you give yourself one little treat you may be more likely to think of other activities that will also make you feel good [3].

2) Give yourself time to recover.

Take time to relax and enjoy being home. Research has shown that the beneficial effects of vacations fade relatively quickly after returning home but this can be delayed if time is taken to relax between the vacation and going back to work [4]. Sit in your local park, go for a stroll or why not take out the Pip and spend 5 minutes bringing yourself into a relaxed and calm state before you have to jump back into your regular routine.

3) Plan something nice.

We don’t mean plan your next vacation as soon as you are in the door from the last one but plan something nice to do during the week or the weekend. Make plans to meet with a friend for a catch-up, plan a trip to the cinema or find a way to incorporate something new that you learnt on your vacation into your daily life – maybe you did some yoga classes, took up painting or started to learn a new language. Research shows that merely anticipating doing something pleasurable activates the reward systems of the brain giving you a nice little boost of dopamine and a more positive outlook [5].

You may feel disappointed that the vacation period is over but don’t let the post-vacation blues bite too hard. Try our tips or formulate your own plans to make that transition between vacation and home a positive experience.

1. Becker, M.W. and M. Leinenger, Attentional selection is biased toward mood-congruent stimuli. Emotion, 2011. 11(5): p. 1248.
2. Koster, E.H., et al., Mood-congruent attention and memory bias in dysphoria: exploring the coherence among information-processing biases. Behaviour research and therapy, 2010. 48(3): p. 219-225.
3. Tamir, M. and M.D. Robinson, The happy spotlight: Positive mood and selective attention to rewarding information. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2007. 33(8): p. 1124-1136.
4. Kühnel, J. and S. Sonnentag, How long do you benefit from vacation? A closer look at the fade‐out of vacation effects. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 2011. 32(1): p. 125-143.
5. O’Doherty, J.P., et al., Neural responses during anticipation of a primary taste reward. Neuron, 2002. 33(5): p. 815-826.

The long days of summer are drawing to a close and a new chapter is about to begin. September is the start of a new school semester and with that comes excitement, nerves and probably some stress and anxiety. If you are the parent of a child starting a new school semester the to-do lists are endless and back-to-school anxieties can surface. But change can be exciting and a new semester brings with it new possibilities and many things to look forward to. Don’t let stress override excitement. Take a look at our tips to help reduce back-to-school stress:

Organisation is key: Having too many things flying about your head is a recipe for stress and panic. When we have a huge list of things to do our brain constantly frets over the tasks we haven’t done and actually interferes with our abilities to plan tasks [1]. Just like an app running in the background of your smartphone drains the battery this constant mulling over of uncompleted tasks takes over our attentional abilities leaving us unable to focus on the tasks we can do now. One way to trick your brain into switching off this over-activity is to write down what you are going to do and when you are going to do it [2]. Don’t just write a list of tasks to do over the next month, write down what task you will do each week. The simple act of planning exactly when you will do something turns off that background fretting and leaves our facilities free to enjoy other activities and calmly tick-off that to-do list.

Give them some control: Feeling in control of your life is hugely important for your health and happiness. When adults feel that they don’t have control over what is happening to them they have higher levels of stress and a greater risk of getting sick [3]. Children and adolescents don’t have much control over the big things in their lives but you can give your child control over the small things. Let them choose what pencil case they want for the year or what healthy lunch they want on the first day back. This will not only leave them excited about using their new things, and therefore about going to school to try them, but it will also give them some sense of control over a big change in their lives.

Avoid absolutes: Try to avoid telling your children that they are naturally good at one subject or not good at another. An important predictor of how children do at school is whether they have an entity or an incremental view of intelligence. This means whether they believe that intelligence is fixed (entity) or can be changed (incremental). Children who have incremental view of their abilities – those who believe that if they study they will get better at a subject – do better in school than those with an entity view [4]. The reason for this is that children with an entity view of intelligence think that they have no control over how well they do in the school as the result is predestined. For example, if a child thinks that they are bad at maths (even if they are good at other things) they won’t have the confidence or motivation to try harder in maths class and, every time they do badly as a result, their belief that they are bad at maths will be reinforced. On the other hand, if a child thinks that they are good at maths not because they work hard but just because they are then they won’t have the abilities to cope with a situation in which they do poorly in a test because they can’t explain why. Children with incremental views of intelligence don’t balance everything on the results of a test but instead believe that if they work a bit harder on a difficult topic they will do better. This leaves them less stressed and better able to cope with failure. If your child is anxious about their school abilities talk to them about how much they progressed last year in a subject they initially found difficult. Try to avoid phrases such as ‘you’re not good at maths but you are good at English’. Instead use phrases such as ‘look how much better you did in maths at the end of last year compared to at the start, you really worked hard’. Looking back on past difficulties can give a sense of control and help to put new worries into perspective.

Adjust to regular bedtimes: Sleep is important for everyone but it is particularly crucial for children and adolescents. Children up to the age of 12 can need as much as 10-12 hours of sleep per night and teenagers need 8-9 hours. When children don’t get enough good quality sleep they are not able to concentrate and do poorly in school [5]. Children need a lot of sleep for a number of reasons. Firstly, when children are in school they are learning huge amounts of new information every day and the brain needs sleep in order to process and retain those memories [6]. Secondly the brain is still forming and developing right through childhood and adolescence. One part of the brain, the pre-frontal cortex, is not fully developed until as late as the early twenties. Children need a lot of sleep to help their development and to allow them to properly process information in these still-developing parts of the brain. Sleep disruption is more harmful to children’s concentration levels than to adults’ because of their still-changing brains [5]. If you are finding it difficult to get to bed or to help your child sleep check out our blog on sleep. Start earlier bed times a few days before they go back to school to help children adjust to a new schedule after a summer of freedom. This will avoid sleepy tears on the first day back and help them to enjoy their first day back with all of their friends.

Children are very attune to emotions and can pick up on your stresses and anxieties without you realising so don’t forget to look after yourself as well. Take some time out to relax amidst all of the organisation and enjoy the last days of summer as you calmly prepare for a new school term.

1. Masicampo, E. and R.F. Baumeister, Unfulfilled goals interfere with tasks that require executive functions. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 2011. 47(2): p. 300-311.
2. Masicampo, E. and R.F. Baumeister, Consider it done! Plan making can eliminate the cognitive effects of unfulfilled goals. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2011. 101(4): p. 667.
3. Lachman, M.E., S.D. Neupert, and S. Agrigoroaei, The relevance of control beliefs for health and aging. Handbook of the psychology of aging, 2010: p. 175-190.
4. Blackwell, L.S., K.H. Trzesniewski, and C.S. Dweck, Implicit theories of intelligence predict achievement across an adolescent transition: A longitudinal study and an intervention. Child development, 2007. 78(1): p. 246-263.
5. Dewald, J.F., et al., The influence of sleep quality, sleep duration and sleepiness on school performance in children and adolescents: a meta-analytic review. Sleep medicine reviews, 2010. 14(3): p. 179-189.
6. Payne, J.D., et al., Memory for semantically related and unrelated declarative information: the benefit of sleep, the cost of wake. PloS one, 2012. 7(3): p. e33079.

The modern miracle of human flight is a spectacle to behold in itself. Journeys that once would last a lifetime, now can be notched off in a day. Without doubt, we’ve come a long way. While some of us enjoy some of the exciting aspects of flying, there are just some things that can leave us feeling, frazzled, depleted and downright irritated.

So, we’ve listed the top 4 stresses when flying and our top 12 tips on how to handle them, to make sure your next flight experience is as stress free as possible.

Rushing to the Airport

The one guaranteed way to compound the stress of flying is to let yourself run late and have to rush. It’s never fun when you know you’re cutting it close to missing your flight.

Our tips:

• Be organized – pack all your luggage/hand luggage the night before. Weigh out your luggage if you can too, it can help save headaches at the check-in desk. If you have kids, make sure they have their bags and their necessities packed the night before too.
• Arrive with plenty of time to spare – nowadays most airports boast a healthy selection of shops and restaurants to choose from. Who cares if you’re early for your flight, you can rest assured that you can relax that little more and if you’re feeling good you can have a quick look about the shops.
• When booking your flights, try and see if you can fly around midday instead of early mornings – generally speaking afternoons are a less hectic time for flying.

Queues/Security checks

It’s safe to say, when flying you’re most certainly going to have to deal with the dreaded queues. If it’s checking in baggage, preparing to go through security or lining up to get on or off the plane, they can make us all feel a little like herded cattle at times and can all test the best of our patience.

Our tips:

• Arrive with plenty of time to spare – like above, being early will help you avoid fretting in the queue
• Check in online/Carry hand luggage only – thanks to the ability to check in online, dropping off your luggage at the airport is as quick as ever. But for some of us it can be too much of a hassle. Nowadays airlines have much more generous hand luggage policies. So try checking in online and only carrying hand luggage, you’ll be surprised how little you need/much you can fit.
• Know what not to pack to breeze past security – apart from being ready for when it’s your turn to go through the security scanners, ensuring you don’t have any banned items in your hand luggage can also help avoid any hassle and save some time.
• Fast track security queue – Many airports now offer a fast track security queue service for a small price. Can help you save a bunch of time.

Delayed flight

You’ve arrived early, have flown through the queue (pardon the pun) and you’re at the gate,  and over the intercom you hear that your flight has been delayed. Not to worry, here are some simple ideas to help pass the time.

Our tips:

• Come prepared – The smart thing here is to have something to keep you or your children occupied. Time killers like books, music, ipads can go a long way. Want some recommendations on music? Here’s our youtube playlist for July to help kill some time.
• Accept delays and queues to be part of the whole experience – Yes it may be frustrating to hear you’re going to be delayed by a few more hours, but think about how gifted we are to be able to experience this luxury of travel in comparison to how long it used to take to travel these huge distances!  

Actually flying

For many, the act of flying itself can be quite a nerve wracking prospect, not even to mention the feeling of being frazzled after all the hustle and bustle of the airport experience. Here are some ways to help you relax and unwind before or during your flight.

Our tips:

• Exercise the morning of flying – we’ve talked a lot on this blog about the benefits of exercise. Working up a sweat the morning of your flight, or even the night before, can help tucker your busy mind out just enough to help calm some jittery nerves during your flight.
• Try use the Pip – a quick session with the Loom and its’ new levels could help put you in that calm state of mind and help clear your head of the clutter from flying.