If your dream life only seems to exist during your few weeks of annual leave, things might need a rethink. If you’re someone for whom holidays are not simply a break but the only time your nervous system finally feels safe enough to relax that means that the rest of the year you are just surviving.
Pushing through stress, managing pressure, holding everything together, staying productive and available and “fine” – for 47 out of 52 weeks of every year. That’s not a great ratio.
The problem with that is when most of your energy is being used just to cope, there is very little left for anything else.
Very little left for joy.
For creativity.
For spontaneity.
For desire.
For feeling genuinely alive.
That is why you can feel like a completely different person on holiday. Because you’ve finally got space for those things. Or, at least, it feels like you’ve finally got space for them – but what is more likely is that your nervous system is so overloaded the rest of the year that it couldn’t allow them to exist.
But on holiday? You laugh more. Sleep better. Feel lighter. Think more clearly. Start wanting things again. You reconnect with parts of yourself that seemed to disappear somewhere between stress, burnout, people-pleasing and adult responsibility. Your nervous system relaxes and who you really want to be all the time re-emerges.
Resilience isn’t about tolerating what you don’t want
This is one of the biggest misconceptions around resilience – that it means becoming better at tolerating stress and enduring exhaustion. Better at surviving a life that is quietly draining you. But true resilience is not endless endurance.
It is creating enough internal steadiness and emotional safety that your energy is no longer entirely consumed by survival mode.
Instead of saying this: “What do I want?” When you’re in survival mode it’s only this: “How do I keep going?”
And if you can’t keep going then maybe you call yourself lazy, unmotivated or flat when actually you are chronically overwhelmed and disconnected from yourself.
Then you go on holiday and suddenly feel more like yourself again.
The holiday bounce back is useful data
Your nervous system is showing you the conditions under which you feel safest, calmest and most connected to yourself. And yet I know that if I said this to someone the response I would get is “well we can’t all just be on holiday all the time can we.” No. But neither do we need to live the kinds of lives that we need a holiday to recover from just because our parents did, or other people do, or it seems to be “normal.”
If you want a dream life that goes beyond 5 weeks a year..
The real question is not: “How do I get through the year until my next holiday?”
It is: “Why does my real life feel so emotionally unsustainable in the first place?”
Because your life should not only feel good when you escape it. You should not have to wait until two weeks in the summer to feel present in your own existence.
Resilience coaching is about more than stress management
It’s about finding that presence in your own existence – and the permission to LIVE. Yes, emotional regulation and nervous system safety matter. But what comes next is taking steps to build a life where your energy is not permanently trapped in coping mode.
A life where there is enough space for joy on ordinary Tuesdays. Enough emotional capacity for creativity, connection and pleasure. Enough internal safety that you are no longer constantly bracing against your own life.
That is the version of resilience I care about – not simply surviving your life more efficiently but creating a life you no longer need to recover from.
Don’t you think it’s time?
