Returning from a trip? How to avoid the Monday morning dread.

Let’s set the scene.

You’ve just spent the last 3 months planning for a trip.

You’ve spent the last 9 days having the absolute time of your life at a beautiful location.

You’ve been watching incredible sunsets, you’ve eaten food that you’ve been dreaming about, and you even forgot what day it was last Thursday.

But now, you’ve arrived back home.

You start to feel that familiar heaviness in your chest.

It’s not quite sadness, and it’s not quite anxiety.

It’s that deflating feeling of returning to real life, and with a thud!

If you travel with a full-time job, you will absolutely know that the post-holiday, Monday morning return-to-work dread is a real thing!

After years of cramming as much travel as I can into my annual leave, I’ve learned a few things that have genuinely helped me, and hopefully the strategies can help you too!

Why post-holiday dread happens (it’s not what you think)

Most people assume post-holiday dread is about missing the destination: the sunshine, the freedom, the novelty. And while that’s part of it, the real cause is usually something more specific: the contrast.

When you’re travelling, almost every moment is new. Your brain is engaged, curious, stimulated. You’re making decisions constantly: where to eat, which street to turn down, what to try next. That level of aliveness is addictive, especially for those chasing a dopamine high (me!)

Back at work, the opposite is true. The same commute, the same desk, the same emails that accumulated while you were gone (do I really get over 500 emails every week?!)

The contrast between those two states isn’t just uncomfortable, it can feel genuinely disorienting.

Understanding this helps, because it means the solution isn’t to stop travelling (or to stop working). It’s to manage the contrast more intentionally.

1. Don’t fly back the day before you return to work

Ok, ok. I know you might only get 4 weeks of leave a year and you want to make the most of every single day.

I get it, it’s what I’ve done for almost all of my trips as well.

But then on one trip, the Saturday flight was so much cheaper, so I actually couldn’t justify spending so much more money just to fly back on Sunday.

So, I booked the Saturday flight.

I realised that flying back in on Sunday and then heading straight to work the next day was absolutely brutal. It didn’t give me any time to transition back into home life.

So, if you can, arrive back home on Saturday. Give yourself Sunday at home. This gives you time to unpack, do laundry, restock your fridge, take a walk, and let yourself remember what normal feels like.

Use Sunday to decompress.

While I understand it is one less day at your destination, it’s worth it.

2. Build a ‘re-entry ritual’ for the night before work

Don’t let your holiday memories slip past by throwing yourself back into your home life too quickly. A re-entry ritual to transition from holidays to back-to-work may help reduce that Sunday night dread.

Instead, be deliberate with your transitioning actions.

Choose a dinner that reminds you of your trip.
Either make a home cooked meal or order in, but choose a dish that transports you back to your trip.

Look at your photos.
Spend some time going through your photos from your trip properly. Don’t just quickly scroll through them. Take the time to reminisce about your experience. This will turn your experience into memories you’ve acknowledged, rather than just let it all slip away.

Now is also a good time to back up your photos!

Write three things down.
Write down three treasured moments from your trip that you want to remember (even if you keep a detailed travelogue). This will only take a few minutes.

Writing just a few sentences will give the holiday a sense of completeness rather than just an abrupt ending.

Lay out your clothes and pack your bag.
I know, it sounds counter-intuitive for beating the existential dread! But by organising yourself for Monday morning, you will remove a layer of friction that your brain will no longer have to deal with.

Now you can relax for the evening, maybe even catching up on your favourite tv shows you might have missed.

3. Don’t check work emails until you’re actually at work

While it sounds simple, some people feel like they just need to check in. Honestly, don’t do it!

Checking emails before you head back in will not make Monday any easier – it just extends the dread backwards! You get all the stress without being able to do anything about it until the morning, anyway!

Besides, your inbox isn’t going anywhere! Surely, whatever is waiting for you can wait another 12 hours!

Your holiday isn’t over until you really cross that threshold, so protect your precious time.

4. Plan something small for the first week back

One of the reasons why the thought of Monday feels so heavy is because it feels like a long, grey expanse with nothing to look forward to. Your trip was this tantalising glimmer on the horizon – and now it’s over and behind you.

So, before you go away, put something small on your horizon for when you get back.

It doesn’t need to be anything significant like another trip, it can be something as simple as a dinner with friends on Wednesday, buying tickets to a movie you want to watch, or a day trip planned for the next weekend.

5. Let yourself be sad that your trip is over (briefly)

Yes, you’ve just been on an amazing trip, and you’re now feeling that back to work dread. So now, you’re feeling guilty because you should be on top of the world. You admonish yourself thinking that you shouldn’t be feeling so flat about being home.

But this is a completely reasonable response! You were somewhere amazing… and now you’re not. That’s a loss, even if you think it’s a small one.

Give yourself permission to feel it, as it’s more effective than ignoring how you feel. Acknowledge how you feel, sit with it for a moment, appreciate how you were able to travel, and let it move through you.

Don’t resist the feelings, allow those post-holiday blues to flow through you, but then let it go.

6. Use the trip as fuel, not an escape

Let’s play the long game. Let’s actually shift our mindset about why we travel.

For the longest time, I travelled to escape. Yep, I counted down those days until I was free from my inbox and responsibilities.

But then I realised that I always hit reality with a thud because my life didn’t suddenly change because I went away for two weeks.

In fact, this way of thinking made that Monday morning dread even worse! The holiday had ended, and real life resumed.

I realised I needed to view travel as a way to enrich my regular life. I needed to view it through a completely different lens.

Now, I see travel as a way to change my perspective, broaden my thinking, increase my skills in project planning and descision making. I think about all the places I could go, the books on the countries I could read, the food I could eat, and the culture I can experience.

When I return home from travelling, it actually feels like I am bringing something back.

I know it sounds cliche, but if you still feel the dread of returning to normality, is this your mind’s way of telling you something in your regular life needs to change?

7. Start planning the next trip

Not obsessively, and not as an avoidance mechanism, but having something loosely on the
horizon changes the emotional weight of coming home.

I’m not saying you should have your entire year’s worth of leave all booked up before you go! You don’t even need firm dates or booked flights.

I like to spend twenty minutes the week after I return thinking about where I’d like to go next, looking at destinations, or even roughly mapping out when my next leave window might be.

These 20 minutes can just be enough to shift the feeling from “the good bit is over” to “the good bit is ongoing”.

As a full-time slave to my 9 to 5, this is what helps me. It’s not a series of escapes separated by long grey stretches. It’s a continuous thread running through the year. The thread might sometimes be dormant, sometimes active, but it’s always there.

Final thoughts

Post-holiday dread is real! But it’s completely manageable.

By implementing some practical solutions, you can try to beat the Monday morning dread.

Things you can try are to fly home a day early, build a deliberate Sunday routine, don’t
check emails until you’re at your desk, and put something small on the calendar for the first
week back.

The bigger shift is treating travel not as an escape from your life. The best shift is to realise that travel is something that feeds you, rather than something you feed into a countdown timer until the
next time you can do it again.

Monday will still come. But it doesn’t have to feel like the end of something.

Where to next?

Rome, perhaps?
Or my favourite so far, Uzbekistan!
Or see how I spent a weekend in Oman.