Why You Still Feel Stressed on Holiday (and How to Stop)

YYou’ve booked the holiday. The suitcase is packed. Your out-of-office is on.

Your body is lying beside the pool or sitting on a beach somewhere beautiful.

But your mind?

It’s still in your inbox.

You’re thinking about the email you forgot to send, the project waiting for you when you get back, what needs to happen next week, or whether you should just quickly check what’s happening at work.

You’ve physically stopped.

But mentally, you’re still going.

And this is something I’ve come to understand deeply through both elite sport and my work in wellbeing:

Stopping and recovering are not always the same thing.

High performance isn’t just about knowing when to push

As an Olympian, I spent years learning how to perform under pressure.

Training when I was tired. Standing behind the blocks knowing years of work would come down to seconds. Managing expectations, nerves and the pressure I placed on myself to perform.

But one of the lessons that took me much longer to understand was that high performance isn’t only about knowing how to push.

It’s also about knowing how to recover.

In elite sport, recovery is part of the performance plan.

We understand that you can’t continually train at maximum intensity and expect performance to improve. Training creates the stimulus, but recovery gives the body an opportunity to adapt.

Yet in our professional and personal lives, we often treat recovery very differently.

We tell ourselves:

I’ll rest when this project is finished.

I’ll slow down after this week.

I just need to get through this busy period.

I’ll switch off when I go on holiday.

But then the holiday arrives and we discover that changing our location hasn’t necessarily changed the pace of our thoughts.

You can leave the pressure without immediately leaving the feeling of pressure

If you’ve spent weeks moving between meetings, deadlines, school drop-offs, decisions, emails, responsibilities and everything else life demands of you, you may not instantly feel relaxed simply because you’ve stopped working.

Sometimes we expect ourselves to go from 100 kilometres an hour to completely switched off the moment our out-of-office goes on.

And then we get frustrated when we can’t.

Instead, I like to think of recovery as a transition.

We need to learn how to shift gears.

This is one of the reasons I believe the breath is such a powerful performance tool.

Your breath is always with you.

You don’t need special equipment.

You don’t need 30 minutes.

And you don’t need to wait until you’re on the edge of burnout before using it.

You can use your breath as a simple cue to slow down, become present and create a moment between what just happened and what comes next.

Three ways to shift gears

Here are three simple breathing practices I use and teach.

1. Box breathing for focus and clarity

Box breathing follows an even rhythm:

Inhale for 4
 Hold for 4 
Exhale for 4
 Hold for 4

Repeat for several rounds.

I love this technique when my mind feels busy and I want to bring my attention back to the present moment.

Rather than trying to force yourself to “stop thinking”, give your mind something simple to focus on: counting your breath.

2. Extended exhale for slowing down

Try:

Inhale for 4
 Exhale for 6

Repeat for a few minutes at a comfortable pace.

The emphasis here isn’t on taking the biggest breath possible. Keep it gentle and comfortable.

I often use a longer exhale when I want to deliberately slow the pace of what I’m doing and create a sense of transition.

It could be after a busy workday.

Before walking through the front door.

Before an important conversation.

Or yes, when you’re lying beside the pool on holiday and realise you’re still mentally sitting at your desk.

3. Three conscious breaths when you only have a moment

Breathwork doesn’t always need to be a formal practice.

Sometimes it can simply be:

Stop.

Notice where you are.

Take three slow, intentional breaths.

And ask yourself:

What do I need right now?

It sounds simple.

That’s because it is.

The power comes from actually remembering to do it.

Recovery is a performance skill

One of the biggest things elite sport taught me is that sustainable performance requires both effort and recovery.

You cannot stay in performance mode all the time.

And recovery doesn’t have to mean a week-long holiday, a retreat or completely disappearing from your responsibilities.

Sometimes recovery happens in small moments throughout the day.

A breath before a meeting.

Five minutes outside.

Putting your phone down.

Creating a transition between work and home.

Recognising when continuing to push is no longer helping you perform better.

The goal isn’t to remove every source of pressure from your life.

Pressure is part of life and sometimes it’s part of doing work that matters to us.

The skill is learning how to respond to it.

Because rest isn’t the opposite of high performance. It’s part of it.

Learning how to shift out of pressure, recover and become present again is a skill.

And like any skill, it can be practised.

Sometimes it starts with something as simple as one intentional breath.

Breathe Like an Olympian

What if the way you breathe could change the way you perform under pressure?

In my keynote Breathe Like an Olympian, I draw on my experience representing Papua New Guinea at the Olympic Games and more than two decades in high-performance environments to explore what pressure does to us and what we can do in the moments that matter.

Audiences learn simple, practical breathing tools they can use in real time to manage stress, reset their focus and perform with greater clarity under pressure.

Explore Anna-Liza’s Keynote Breathe Like an Olympian and invite Anna-Liza to speak at your next conference, leadership event or staff development day.