To feel anxious on annual leave?

[ilovesleep6]

I always feel a bit anxious on annual leave, and worried about what will happen when I go back. Worried I’ve made a mistake and it will come to light when I’m not there. I know it’s silly as annual leave is intended to relax and get a break for work but I can’t help it. How do you switch off?

Urgh, I feel the same. I’m generally less stressed when I’m at work.

I find I need two weeks off to really relax and get my brain off work.

I had a terrible time over Xmas fixating on what I thought was a career ending mistake, it turned out to be not my fault at all and noone at any point thought it WAS my fault except me. For me it's been a sign I've underlying anxieties around work, I forced myself to picture life if I lost my career a d I decided I'd cope, I'd do something else, life would go on.

It turns out if been doing a lot of checking and rechecking myself due to anxiety and when I was off I couldn't do that to check what I thought was my error but was infact NOT. Checking obsessively happens to me when anxious. I've had other anxiety issues.

I had counselling about 3 years ago for other anxiety issues and I put those in place, the first thing is, stop checking! Obsessively checking feeds the nxiety by reinforcing the need to check, it tells your brain the checking is rational. Do a decent tie up of loose ends and handover before annual leave then step back and know you can deal with work when in work. It's not easy but it has helped immensely, even in enjoying my days off more and planned family days. Life's too short so I'd say find some counselling for what is driving it

If you are practical get a container of some kind and write any thoughts or worries about work on scraps of paper and put them in the container. Don’t read them as you’re adding new ones.
You can also download or create your own version of a worry tree where you escalate what is the worst case scenario and agree a time with yourself when you will think about it, ignore it at all other times, don’t write it down and then when you get to the agreed time e.g 2pm on Thursday for 15 minutes you might find you have forgotten most of your worries or they are less important
If saying a phrase is enough then just notice the thought or worry and say something like “not now” and let it drift by like it’s passing on a current or the wind.
Finally if you are visual you can imagine work is contained in a building like a museum and every different part of work is a different gallery or exhibition e.g the big project, a past trauma- and if you find yourself in “the museum” you can either choose to visit a different gallery or say to yourself “nah, I’m on annual leave. I don’t want to visit this museum today.”