There is a moment, somewhere between typing in your card details and the confirmation email landing, when a holiday pays out its first and possibly largest instalment of happiness. You have not gone anywhere. You have not packed, queued, or discovered that “sea view” is technically true if you lean far enough out of the bathroom window. You have simply committed, and something in you has already begun to feel better about the coming months. For years, I assumed that was just me being easily pleased. It turns out to be one of the sturdier findings in happiness research. In 2010 a Dutch team led by Jeroen Nawijn tracked 1,530 adults through a holiday season, measuring how they felt before and after. The people with a trip booked were happier than those without one, and that gap showed up long before anyone had packed a bag. When everyone was back home after their holiday, the two groups’ happiness looked the same again. The extra happiness boost is not the fortnight away. It is the weeks of knowing the fortnight is coming. This has a rather happy and clear practical consequence: if you cannot get away this month, book something for later in the year and you’ll start feeling happier and less stressed today! “For the remembering self, a two-week vacation is barely better than the one-week vacation, because there are no new memories added. You have not changed the story.” Daniel Kahneman, TED2010, Long Beach, February 2010 Over the last ten years, I’ve picked up a lot of holiday happiness tips from the world of behavioural science and happiness research, so I thought I’d share a few more of them with you here. One of the best tips that we’ve used for many years now is finding that our memory picks up change and remembers it way better than things that are always the same. Basically, when it comes to looking back at your holiday months or years later, you will find the days that differed from each other get their own memory entries, whilst the days where you did the same thing all blur into one. This is why a fortnight of the same beach, the same restaurant and the same paperback can shrink, four months later, into one warm but oddly brief impression, while a long weekend somewhere unfamiliar keeps its shape for years. The most useful work on this comes from Jordan Etkin and Cassie Mogilner, who ran seven studies published in the Journal of Consumer Research in 2016. Their findings showed that a day, a week or a month filled with more varied activities left people measurably happier looking back on it. They apply the point to a week-long holiday themselves in the paper, so this is not me stretching a lab result over a sunlounger. So if you are heading off, try not to spend the whole time in one place doing one thing. Take one week here and one week there. Or if that is not practical, make the second half of the trip look nothing like the first: move inland, change the pace, swap the pool for a hire car and a map. You come home with two holidays in your head rather than one long pleasant blur. We have been doing this with our family holidays for a few years now, and it really does work. Just be sure you don’t overdo it though. Etkin and Mogilner found that cramming too much into each day can actually decrease your happiness. In other words, and leave the individual days alone. Attempting to re-create The Amazing Race is not a holiday; it is a logistics exercise with sunburn. Which brings us to the last day, and to the bit of behavioural science that costs nothing to apply and is almost universally ignored. It is called the peak-end rule: we judge an experience overwhelmingly by its best moment and its final one, and barely at all by how long it went on. For a behavioural scientist, a holiday therefore needs two things. One moment you will still be describing at Christmas, and an ending you loved. Most of us get the first roughly right and the second badly wrong. We book the 4am transfer because it saves forty pounds, and then wonder why a fortnight in Puglia is filed in memory under “exhausting”. One company that has clearly worked this out is Alaska Airlines. Since 2010 it has guaranteed that your bags will reach the carousel within twenty minutes of landing, and pays out airmiles when they do not. Twenty minutes at a baggage carousel is the least glamorous stretch of any trip. It is also, for a great many people, the final scene, and Alaska decided to buy it outright. The other classic ruined ending is the itemised hotel bill at checkout, it’s emotionally like getting a parking ticket + it reminds you of every gin and tonic you have ever ordered. Dan Ariely pointed out in our Behavioural Science for Life course that the pain of paying can be greatly reduced by taking out an all-inclusive holiday. You paid months ago, in a different mood, when it felt like optimism rather than expenditure. The last morning costs you nothing, so the last memory of the trip stays pleasant. So if you’re reading this and feeling a bit down, find a place you want to visit, and book it now and then you can start reaping the rewards of that holiday feeling right away. How to PRACTICALLY USE THIS IN WORK AND LIFE Put the date in early. Book the gig or the weekend away months out. The extra happiness is free. Split the offsite. If you’re ever running a work offsite remember that two half-days in two different rooms will beat the memory of one long day in one. Change one variable a week. A different route home, a Tuesday unlike the others. Routine shrinks in memory, which is why days can seem monotonous. The added bonus of doing this is that it helps your creative thinking too. Write the last two minutes first. Meetings and projects mostly end by running out of time. Decide the ending in advance, even if it is only naming what went well and who did it. P.S. If you want more practical ways to build a happier life the most helpful course we do on that subject is the marvellous The Even Happier Course with Meik Wiking.