Question:
Three hours after my red-eye landed, I arrived at the office Monday morning and booted up my computer. Unfortunately, my brain didn’t boot up with it. I’m just not ready for my inbox to glare at me with 247 unread messages and a calendar packed tighter than a TSA line.
Ten days ago, I left my spreadsheets and Slack threads behind to hike glaciers in Iceland. It’s not that I don’t like my job, I do. But my brain refuses to shift into gear. This feels like more than lack of sleep or jet lag.
Answer:
When you’ve spent a week waking up on your own schedule, breathing actual air instead of recycled HVAC, and remembering who you are beyond your job title—you don’t just return, you re-enter. Your body remembers what rest feels like. Your mind remembers what presence feels like. And now it struggles to accept you’re supposed to respond to a five-paragraph email marked “urgent” about something that… really isn’t. Your post-vacation glow takes a swan dive when it slams into a wall of expectations, meetings, deadlines, status updates and administrivia—and disintegrates on contact.
So, what helps when your brain’s still somewhere over Greenland and your inbox has gone feral.
- Get real.
I get it—you’re wired to take charge, dive in and crush that to-do list. Maybe you even told yourself, “I’ll get in early, knock out the inbox, and clear the decks,” fantasizing you’d claw your way back to peak productivity. But your cognitive bandwidth still sprawls somewhere on a beach or trail, sun-stunned and slow.
Fight the urge to sprint. Don’t overschedule your first day back. Block an hour or two for triage. Sort the real fires from the inbox theatrics. Give your nervous system a chance to realize it’s not still in vacation mode and let your mind catch up before you plunge into major tasks, commit to irrevocable decisions, or worse, accidentally reply-all with something snarky.
Don’t expect to go from “whale-watching under the midnight sun” to “budget forecasting before coffee” without emotional whiplash.
- Resist the inbox guilt spiral.
Don’t let a wall of unread messages wipe out your post-vacation glow. You don’t owe anyone—except your boss—an instant reply. You ow a thoughtful re-entry. Even if your out-of-office is out, set a simple autoresponder for your first day back. “Catching up after time away, I’ll respond by X date.”
This gives others a reasonable expectation for when to expect a reply—and helps quiet your own pressure to respond immediately. Email guilt is real—studies show that perceived pressure to reply quickly increase stress and cognitive fatigue even when no one explicitly demands it, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/267928240_Checking_Email_Less_Frequently_Reduces_Stress.
- Ease in
Ease yourself in like a stick shift on a cold morning. Small moves. Low gear. Let the engine catch. Grab a cup of coffee. Reconnect with a few colleagues and get caught up, giving your brain a chance to recalibrate. Set micro-goals. Knock out a few winnable tasks. . You’re guiding your brain from off-leash to on-task. Think of it like coaxing a dog into the car, not tossing it in and slamming the door.
In short, cut yourself some slack. You’re not a productivity algorithm. You’re a human reorienting after time away. Let yourself operate in slow motion today—hit it tomorrow.
- Factor in jet lag and the red-eye tax.
Flying from Iceland to your U.S. home throws your internal clock sideways. You crossed multiple time zones and traveled west, which left your circadian rhythm lagging behind by up to half a day. Expect foggy thinking and restless nights. That red-eye connection you made once you hit the states—even if you napped the resulting fatigue dampens alertness, memory and concentration.
And best of all, plan your next trip. Studies show that anticipating a vacation boosts your mood almost as much as the vacation, https://www.travelbugtonic.com/blog/anticipation-travel. So, block a long weekend. Bookmark a trail. Having something to look forward to makes the return-to-work climb a little less steep.
© 2025 Lynne Curry, PhD, SPHR, SHRM-SCP
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The best suggestion (IMHO) was the one to set an autoresponder on email telling email senders that you’re getting back into think but it may take while to get a response and they’ll hear from you by X date. The advice to work back in gradually and not set unrealistically high goals and submit to email guilt are the ideas that will help turn things around after just getting back from vacation after not enough sleep and maybe passing through too many time zones.
For years, I had my auto-reply set to say I’d return a day later than I did:)