Travels in the Riel World

Americans work more hours and take fewer vacation days than pretty much anyone else in the industrialized world. Now, though, comes evidence that vacations are more than a fun perk - they may actually help you stay healthy and live longer.

Here are the vacation stats:

A global study by Expedia.com found that about a third of employed Americans usually do not take all the vacation days that they are entitled to, leaving an average of three days on the table. This is not so unusual. About a quarter of the workers in Britain do not take all their vacation time, and in France a little less. The only difference is that the British get an average of 26 days of vacation and the French about 37 — compared with our 14 days, Expedia.com said.

According to John de Graaf, executive director of Take Back Your Time, a nonprofit organization that studies issues related to overwork, 137 countries mandate paid vacation time. The United States is the only industrialized country that doesn’t…

And the Conference Board, a private research group, said the number of Americans who said in April that they were going to take a vacation in the next six months is at a 30-year low.

That’s all well and good, you might be saying, but I can’t leave work for very long or I’ll be swamped when I return. Besides, how can I use all my vacation time if my boss or co-workers don’t use all of theirs? Well, now there are studies supporting the short and long-term health benefits of regular vacations.

(In one study) women who took a vacation once every six years or less were almost eight times more likely to develop coronary heart disease or have a heart attack than those who took at least two vacations a year…

The study, published in 1992, was controlled for other factors like obesity, diabetes, smoking and income, Ms. Eaker said, and the findings have been substantiated in follow-up research.

“It shows how the body reacts to a lifestyle of stress,” she said. “This is real evidence that vacations are important to your physical health.”

Another study, published in 2000, looked at 12,000 men over nine years who were at high risk for coronary heart disease. Those who failed to take annual vacations had a 21 percent higher risk of death from all causes and were 32 percent more likely to die of a heart attack.

Want more evidence? Here it is - but remember, the real health benefits go to those who take a real vacation, and not those who stay hooked up to work from the beach.

After a few days on vacation — and it usually took two to three — people were averaging an hour more of good quality sleep. And there was an 80 percent improvement in their reaction times.

“When they got home, they were still sleeping close to an hour more, and their reaction time was 30 to 40 percent higher than it had been before the trip,” Mr. Rosekind said.

The trick, these days when going on vacation, is not only to physically remove yourself from your normal routine, but mentally as well. Checking your BlackBerry every few hours or rushing to the nearest Internet cafe doesn’t cut it.

For 10 years, the Faculty of Management at Tel Aviv University has conducted a study looking at what is called “respite effects,” which measure relief from job stress before, during and after vacations.

Professor Dov Eden, an organizational psychologist who has conducted the study, found that those who are electronically hooked up to their office, even if they are lying on the Riviera, are less likely to receive the real benefits of a vacation and more likely to burn out.

Do you enjoy living someplace that is walkable? It’s important if you like to walk to restaurants and shops, if you harbor a desire to walk to work, or even if you just enjoy walking for fitness.

The act of walking may also be helpful in much bigger ways. Paul Krugman has a column in today’s New York Times about the environmental and economic benefits of walking and of taking public transit, given fast-rising gas prices. He reported on the topic from Berlin, and had this to say:

Any serious reduction in American driving will require … changing how and where many of us live.  To see what I’m talking about, consider where I am at the moment: in a pleasant, middle-class neighborhood consisting mainly of four- or five-story apartment buildings, with easy access to public transit and plenty of local shopping.

It’s the kind of neighborhood in which people don’t have to drive a lot, but it’s also a kind of neighborhood that barely exists in America, even in big metropolitan areas. Greater Atlanta has roughly the same population as Greater Berlin — but Berlin is a city of trains, buses and bikes, while Atlanta is a city of cars, cars and cars.

And in the face of rising oil prices, which have left many Americans stranded in suburbia — utterly dependent on their cars, yet having a hard time affording gas — it’s starting to look as if Berlin had the better idea.

Now, of course, some U.S. cities are actually friendly to pedestrians. But which ones? Lucky for us, Prevention magazine has already done a study on this and ranked the best cities in the country (and in each state) based on which were the most walkable. 

In all, Prevention ranked 500 cities. Of these, the top five were Cambridge, Massachusetts; New York City, Ann Arbor, Chicago, and Washington, D.C. These just edged out San Francisco, Boston, Honolulu and a few other urban areas for the top spots. Other major cities that scored well include Philadelphia (15), Seattle (23), Denver (24), Portland, Oregon (27) and Austin, Texas (29).

As more young women in India join the workforce and move out of their family’s homes, they are gaining an independence and confronting issues that their mothers could never have imagined. There was an interesting article about this topic recently in the International Herald Tribune.

Not long ago, an Indian woman, even a working Indian woman, would almost always have moved from her parents’ house to her husband’s. Perhaps her only freedom would be during college, when she might live on campus or take a room for a year or two at what is known here as the working women’s hostel.

That trajectory has begun to loosen as a surging economy creates new jobs, prompts young professionals to leave home and live on their own, and slowly, perhaps unwittingly, nudges a traditional society to accept new freedoms for women…

The changes are sharpest in the lives of women who have found a footing in the new economy and who are for the most part middle-class, college-educated professionals exploring jobs that did not exist a generation ago.

High-technology workers and fashion designers, aerobics instructors and radio DJs, these women in their 20s are living independently, far from their families. Many are deferring marriage for a year or two, maybe more, while they make money and live lives that most of their mothers could not have dreamed of…

“I think it’s a very significant shift,” said Urvashi Butalia, publisher of Zubaan Books, based in New Delhi, which promotes women’s writing. “It signals a kind of change and acceptability. It testifies to women’s desire and wish to be economically independent, to be able to interact in public space and be in the same world as men.” Equally important, she said, is the attitude adjustment among elders. “For families to accept that women will remain single, that they will live on their own, that they will work and defer marriage, is a very, very significant shift,” she said. “Even if it’s very small, it’s beginning to happen in a society where before, if you wanted to do that, you’d be out on a limb.”

It is one of our great challenges, particularly for Americans with little vacation time — creating time in our lives to travel.  Rolf Potts, author of Vagabonding, has a variety of ideas for individuals who are determined to hit the road.

Short of simply asking for more vacation time, many people negotiate long-term leaves of absence or sabbaticals (paid or unpaid, depending upon the situation) to enable travel.  Others fine-tune their careers so that they are doing seasonal or contract work, which frees them up to travel between work engagements.  Still others will quit a job and then work a long-term travel stint into their life before accepting a new job.

With the advent of new communication technologies it has also become possible to adopt what has been called a “global mobility lifestyle” - which allows you to redesign your work life in such a way that it can mix in with extended travel.

He focused on the latter possibility in a recent interview he conducted with Tim Ferriss, author of the upcoming book, The 4-Hour Workweek.  Some highlights:

What are the biggest misconceptions people have about work, and making time for travel?

The biggest misconception about work is that you have to spend most of your life doing it. 

I’ve spent the last four years traveling through more than 25 countries interviewing people who have automated income or escaped the office, often without quitting their jobs.  Some of them negotiate “working from the home office” while actually trekking in Africa or touring in Europe, satellite phones and Quad-band Treos in hand. Others create simple virtual businesses that enable them to quit the grind and take one-to-three-month “mini-retirements” a few times per year…

Once you control the most valuable currencies in the digital age - mobility and time - $40,000 can get you more luxury lifestyle than a $500,000 per year investment banker who can’t escape the office.

Many people often can’t stop thinking about work minutiae, even when they’re far away from the traditional office setting.  How do you get your mind, and not just your body, out of the office?

In the experience of those I’ve interviewed, it takes two to three months just to unplug from work routines and become aware of how much we distract ourselves with constant motion.  Can you have a two-hour dinner with Spanish friends without getting anxious?  Can you get accustomed to a small town where all businesses take a siesta for two hours in the afternoon? If not, you need to ask: why?

Learn to slow down.  If you create a mobile lifestyle, whether through a remote work arrangement or entrepreneurship, escaping the “too-weak vacation” world is as simple as using a few common technologies and believing it can be done.

Time Magazine recently had an interesting article on the changing nature of the family in Europe.  The nuclear family is less central to life than it used to be, according to the story.  Although the traditional structure is still common, many other types of family have arisen, as Europeans choose to have children outside of marriage, to delay childbirth, to take on a gay or lesbian partner, or not to have children at all, among other examples.

There’s a revolution sweeping through Europe, one more radical than any baby boomer on hallucinogenics could have dreamt up. The ideal of family life … of the nuclear family, that is, a man and woman, plus the offspring that they alone produced — is being toppled. In its place, Europeans are developing their own, innovative models of family. For millions, that means delaying the decision to have children until later in life — or not having them at all.

For others, it means accepting a union between a gay or lesbian couple as a family, whether or not the Catholic Church agrees. Still other couples split up and re-form, in ever more complex constellations involving stepchildren and adopted children, as well as co-parents and friends who are co-opted as carers. For better or worse — and these changes all carry economic and emotional consequences — most European adults no longer live their lives in the bosom of a nuclear family. …

The nuclear family is not dead — some 29% of E.U. households still include dependent children — but the age gap between parents and children is widening. … But even as the age horizon of traditional parenthood expands, many other options are now available.

Some 13% of Europeans live alone, and every year the proportion of solo dwellers rises. So too do the ranks of heterosexual and single-sex couples living without children who now — at 49% of households — represent the most common form of family unit across Europe. Some have watched their kids leave the nest, others will never have children, but all are likely to spend the biggest chunk of their life in the company of their partner only.

Simply put, the definition of family is increasingly flexible, its constituent parts ever more diverse. While the family was once seen as a form of fate — it chose you — it’s now increasingly something that Europeans choose and define by and for themselves.

American workers and employers are beginning to recognize the benefits of having and using vacation time.  Part of this trend is driven by younger workers who value quality of life issues and a balance between work and personal time, according to an article in the Christian Science Monitor. Even so, the U.S. work culture is quite a bit different than that of European countries when it comes to taking time off.

Even if American workers took all of their allotted time off, they would still lag far behind their European counterparts. The average number of paid vacation days for someone in the US who had worked for a year in 2005 was 8.9, says Carroll Lachnit, executive editor of Workforce Management magazine. The statutory minimum vacation in the European Union is 21.3 days a year. The US has no statutory minimum.

Professor Ciulla observed firsthand the differences in attitudes between Europeans and Americans when she attended a recent conference in France hosted by an American company with overseas operations.

“The French refused to come that Friday because it was their bank holiday,” she says. “When the French have a day off, they have a day off, no matter what.”