Take stock of holiday grumps

Most people take time to ease into holiday mode, but if your bad moods persist, it may be time to analyse what's happening.

The great New Zealand Christmas and New Year holiday break is traditionally a time to slow down and reflect.

But for many of us, it's often a time to feel disaffected about work without really understanding why.

Is it just fleeting irritation because holidays remind us that Lotto hasn't yet provided more of them? Or is something else going on? And should we worry about it?

That depends, says psychologist Iain McCormick, of Auckland's Executive Coaching Centre.

At the beginning of a holiday, he says, everybody feels a little disgruntled. Breaking an entrenched routine takes a little time: "That's totally natural."

And that is exacerbated for New Zealanders.

Unlike our Northern Hemisphere counterparts, our Christmas/summer holiday is the main break for most, preceded by a very long haul through winter with few public holidays to break the routine.

And at this time of year, when the December finish-it frenzy is at its height, most of us are in the clutches of what psychologists term "state-dependent memory".

"It means that as the pressure builds up and people are more and more stressed, it becomes harder to think about things that are relaxing, pleasant and nice," says McCormick.

"Memory in humans is not like a tape recorder - it tends to work on the basis of the association between things, like where you were when John F. Kennedy was killed.

"The things we can remember depend on the state of emotion we're in."

And if you're having a rotten, high-pressure time at work as Christmas gallops closer, you're going to have difficulty thinking anything upbeat.

"But knowing this," says McCormick, "can help you to begin to influence or manage your own emotions, or your tendency to feel discouraged."

Breaking the cycle of gloom, he says, means doing things you dimly remember as nice, even if you don't feel like it - going out for dinner, perhaps.

But don't be surprised if getting over this cosmic funk takes a few days once you hit the beach/couch/backyard/favourite fishing spot.

"Most people spend a bit of time processing, with things going around and around in their heads," says McCormick.

"That's a healthy way in which we deal with things, although it might not feel very good at the time."

But if negative feelings persist for more than a few days into your holiday, you may well have a rather more underlying problem.

McCormick picks that for many people, grumpiness about work while on holiday points to a values conflict, a mismatch between what motivates and drives us and what we are doing, or putting up with, at work.

Says Wellington industrial psychologist Keith McGregor: "Grumpiness is a version of anger."

And often part of any angst we may be feeling about work is the difficulty pinpointing what the problem is.

Most of us think of our careers, says McCormick, as a series of one-off events - like promotions - and view problems in the same distinct way. It's hard to get a handle on something that may be pervasive.

Frustration, fatigue, below-par performance and stress are often the result for people whose values clash with their job. Maybe you put great store on honesty, but the sales techniques encouraged at your company require some economy with the truth.

Or maybe you value a good home/life balance but the workload thrown at you makes that impossible.

Analysing your values may seem like a vaguely soft or fluffy idea, but whether you're overtly conscious of it or not, it's values that anchor you and influence much of your career decision-making.

For help working out your values, go to www.nzherald.co.nz and find October 13's Career story headed "Job satisfaction: It's about values."

Or you can take the shorter McCormick version while lying on the beach. Rate the following things in order from one (most important) to 20 (least important):

1: Your acquaintances.

2: Your career.

3: Your children.

4: Your close friends.

5: Your current job.

6: Your extended family.

7: Your future earning capacity.

8: Your health.

9: Your knowledge and wisdom.

10: Your leisure time.

11: Your neighbours.

12: Your partner.

13: Your personal freedom.

14: Your personal wealth.

15: Your religion.

16: Your self-confidence.

17: Your self-esteem.

18: Your sense of accomplishment.

19: Your sense of inner calm.

20: Your work colleagues.

How much time are you devoting to the things you say you value most? If there is a huge gulf between what you want and what your work environment is able to provide, it might be time to spend some of that beach time working out what other jobs might meet those goals.

Another useful way of working out whether you have got easing-into-the-holiday-grumps or something worse is to make a list of all the jobs you have ever had, right back to the Herald paper run you did as a teenager.

"Go through marking ... the things you disliked and enjoyed for each job," says McGregor. "Then match that up with the job you're doing now."

What you're looking for are patterns - and as for the values exercise, doing the job on paper will make the patterns obvious to you.

"It's all about understanding the negative stuff, so you get a better insight," says McGregor.

Although Career doesn't advocate taking a chunk of the office on holiday with you, the summer break is a useful time to reflect on who you are and where you're going, and formulate some plans for climbing straight up the career ladder next year.

* Career takes a break until January 12.