Psychologists have a form of treatment for unhappy people called PAT: pleasant activity training.
It's quite simple: you make a list of the things you like doing, then do them more often. It's not as silly as it sounds. We've learnt our brains have one system that controls wanting and one that controls liking. The wanting system tends to dominate the liking system, so we often end up doing less of what we like than we'd like to.
I suspect that's true of taking holidays. A survey conducted by Professor Barbara Pocock of the University of South Australia, as part of the Australian Work and Life Index, found 57 per cent of full-time employees would prefer an extra two weeks' paid annual leave to a pay rise of 4 per cent.
So it seems we like taking holidays (and it sounds like a good idea to me). And yet there's a wealth of evidence that many of us don't take the leave we've already got. A survey conducted regularly by Roy Morgan shows that only about 70 per cent of Australians aged 14 or older intend to take at least one holiday over the next 12 months.
Another survey conducted for Reuters by a global market research company, Ipsos, found that only 47 per cent of Australians expected to use all their annual leave. This was the lowest proportion for any country bar the Japanese, on 33 per cent. By contrast, 89 per cent of the French, 77 per cent of the Brits, 75 per cent of the Germans and even 57 per cent of the Americans expect to take all their annual leave.
Australia's governments have required employers to provide their workers with paid annual leave since 1941. In 1973 it was increased to four weeks. At the time many people thought this extravagant, but it's about average. The French get six weeks, while the Finns, Norwegians and Swedes get five.
Pocock's survey shows 60 per cent of Australian employees stockpile at least some of their annual leave. And according to calculations by Roy Morgan, the stockpile has reached 117 million days.
But if people like annual leave, why don't they take it all? According to Pocock's survey, 31 per cent of full-time employees say they're too busy at work and 13 per cent say they couldn't get time off that suited them. Nine per cent say they prefer to work.
And 41 per cent say they're saving their leave for a future holiday - though I'm not sure I believe it. If it were true - if people were merely delaying their holiday-taking - unused leave wouldn't have piled up the way it has.
It may be that some young people want to combine a few years' leave for an extended overseas trip, but I think "saving for later" is just something you say when you don't get around to taking it all.
I guess it's true that, consciously or unconsciously, some employers don't encourage their workers to take their leave, especially key employees.
But is all this a problem? Why turn unused leave into another crisis? Well, a lot of employers think it is a problem, including one quite close to me. If an employee takes all her leave during the year, the business suffers an expense of 52 weeks' wages on her behalf. But if she works all year without taking leave, the expense rises to 56 weeks' wages, with the extra four weeks of untaken leave owing to her adding to the firm's liabilities. (What's more, the firm doesn't get a tax deduction until the leave's actually taken.)
In theory, insisting that everyone take their leave during the year means the firm has to employ more people. In practice, it means we all have to work a bit harder when we're not on leave to cover for those of us who are. Whistle-blowing economists call this "work intensification" - but it comes from employer penny-pinching, not from the leave itself.
Another group that sees untaken leave as a great problem is Tourism Australia, the federal government's tourism marketing body. Last year the minister, Mar'n Fer'son, launched a campaign called No Leave No Life to encourage us to take our leave and spend it in Australia, complete with commercial TV show.
Tourism Australia can think of many reasons why it's good to take your leave (and for employers to offer a "leave-friendly workplace"). Achieving work-life balance, we're told, comes with improved physical and mental well-being.
Taking your leave helps you avoid the stress of exhaustion and burnout. You get greater job satisfaction when you approach your task in a refreshed state. Taking leave helps you "rediscover your friends, your family and most importantly yourself".
The figures show we're taking more, shorter breaks rather than blowing the lot in one go. Maybe this explains why we have trouble making sure we've taken it all. There's some evidence that taking more short breaks is more re-creational (though I like to make sure of it by taking short breaks through the year and a big break at the end of it). Tourism Australia says there are so many great experiences to be had we should "take the opportunity to visit some more of Australia and gain some lasting memories as well as some great stories to share with others".
It may be advertising copy, but it does have evidence behind it. Psychologists have shown that one reason we get more satisfaction from buying experiences rather than things is the memories and stories we're left with.
Recent research also shows that much of the pleasure we gain from holidays is in thinking about them before we take them. But please don't think that's what I've been doing in this column. And if you're working through, please don't think I'm trying to make you guilty or envious. But I'm off.
