Vacation therapy - health benefits of vacations - Brief Article

Vegetarian Times, August, 2000

It's what we working stiffs have been waiting for: scientific proof that vacations are good for what ails us. That is, if we are middle-aged men and what's ailing us is a high risk for heart disease.

Researchers from the State University of New York at Oswego conducted a survey of more than 12,000 men ages 35 to 57 who had participated in a large heart disease prevention trial. The results, presented last March at a meeting of the American Psychosomatic Society in Savannah, suggest that men who take vacations every year reduce their overall risk of death by about 20 percent, and their risk of death from heart disease by as much as 30 percent.

To their surprise, the researchers discovered that some of the men surveyed didn't take any vacation time over the five years surveyed. But instead of being rewarded for their dedication to the job, they suffered the highest overall death rate and highest incidence of heart disease of any of the participants.

"We concluded that skipping vacations could actually be dangerous to your health," said Brooks Gump, Ph.D., an assistant professor of psychology at Oswego and one of the study's co-authors. "Vacations have a protective effect because they help you reduce your load of stress, or at least allow you to take a break from the everyday stressors of the workplace."

Stress is thought to influence heart disease in several different ways. For starters, stressed-out men and women are more prone to engage in risky behaviors, such as smoking and drinking alcohol. At the same time, people under pressure are less likely to participate in leisure activities or get adequate amounts of sleep and exercise. Vacations, the researchers note, can counteract these risk factors, even if just temporarily. On vacation people tend to pack in more hours of sleep and exercise, as well as spend more time with family and friends--all of which are good for the ticker.

During the conference, Gump was approached by several researchers from Europe, where four to six weeks paid vacation is the norm. "They were really struck by how little vacation Americans get," says Gump. But those old world ways might be rubbing off on the next generation of Americans. In the study, the participants most likely to take regular time off also turned out to be the youngest.