How to cope with post-vacation syndrome when you are in high school

You’re not alone. Post-vacation syndrome affects 65% of workers but also the majority of students. Its most common symptoms are psychological discomfort (sadness, anxiety, stress), difficulty concentrating, worry, insecurity, etc. But it can cause palpitations, tachycardia, excessive sweating, trembling, digestive discomfort, muscle pain and headache. According to the Spanish Society of Community Medicine and Family, symptoms can last only a few days, a week, or up to 15 days. When you are already in high school, you add the anxiety of facing the difficulty of the new course or of seeing how the date of the dreaded Selectivity approaches. But can you prevent this syndrome? Here we share 6 tips that will help you avoid it or, at least, overcome it in just a few days.

6 useful tips to avoid post-holiday syndrome:

1. Start as soon as possible and visualize your goal

Attitude is the key to getting back into the routine without involving a traumatic change. We must accept that the holidays are over, face the new course with optimism and think about the positive that this new stage will entail. To give meaning to your daily effort, it is important to visualize each day the final objective that you have set for yourself: pass the Selectividad, improve your average grade, access the studies you want or simply learn and pass the course.

2. Recover your schedule but with flexibility

After months of disconnection and anarchy in schedules, it is necessary to recover the agenda and the weekly calendar. To be effective, the ideal is to fulfill your planning 100%, but after more than two months of vacation you must be realistic: be flexible during the first weeks and do not saturate your own day to day. Your mind and body need time to adjust back to the routine.

3. Start with small goals

Starting with small tasks will allow you to achieve small objectives and, therefore, satisfaction with what has been achieved. Always, now more than ever, it’s important to break down big goals into chunks to motivate you to keep going. For example, if you approach your Baccalaureate research paper as a global task, you will see it as an unattainable mountain. But if you break it down into small daily or weekly goals, it will become much more manageable.

4. Recover your space free from distractions

You’ve spent many weeks distracting yourself and now it’s just the thing to avoid to be effective in your study time. Recover your work area, put it in order, deactivate your mobile notifications and avoid wasting hours on YouTube, Tik Tok or Instagram. Remember that, after a distraction, it took us an average of 25 minutes to refocus on what we were doing.

5. Maintain leisure activities

Experts recommend not to return abruptly to work or studies, but to do it a few days before to adapt schedules, routines and even diet. During the first days, it will also help you to maintain some leisure activities, such as those you did during your vacations, in your free time. Sport, for example, will help reduce your stress, release muscle tension and also mental tension.

6. Rest to be more productive

It is likely that, during your vacations, you have slept in a disorderly way: some days little and other days more than 12 hours. To get back into the routine and be effective, you need to get back to sleep in an orderly and sufficient way. One way to adapt is to go to bed earlier and progressively advance the wake-up time. Sleeping 8 hours a day will help you improve your level of attention and concentration and consolidate the knowledge acquired during the day. It is also advisable to rest 5 minutes every 25 minutes of work to be more productive.

As theory is one thing and practice is quite another, at Academia Guiu we can give you a hand to improve your study habits and confront your goals with guarantees. If you need help with certain subjects, check out our private classes for school and university reinforcement. And if you finished high school and did not do the selectivity, you did not manage to pass or you did not get the grade you needed, in our courses for the selectivity we will prepare you to pass it obtaining the best results.