In our work with mental health, we see the same pattern every autumn: people return to work rested, but the daily grind hits fast, and it can feel like nothing is left of that holiday ease. That's not a sign the holiday was "the wrong kind" or too short. It's a sign that recovery is a skill that needs active upkeep — practiced all year round, not just in July.
Here are three things worth paying attention to now, as the autumn work season gets underway.
1. Ease doesn't just live in your holiday. Build it into everyday life.
The first work weeks after a holiday are naturally demanding, because everyday life changes so much at once. On holiday, you likely had fewer schedules, fewer people to interact with, fewer demands, and far less cognitive noise for your brain to process. When all of this returns at once — the calendar fills up, messages start pouring in again, decisions need to be made several times an hour — it's completely expected to feel overwhelmed or tired for a while. This isn't because the holiday "wasn't enough." It's because your brain and body are adjusting to a new rhythm. That adjustment deserves some time.
How long the effects of a holiday last, though, isn't purely down to chance. The more you remember to build in small acts that sustain that sense of ease — a walk without your phone, a consciously drawn boundary at the end of the workday, lunch without scrolling through email at the same time — the longer the holiday's good effects tend to stick around.
In practice, this means you shouldn't expect your holiday to be an endless reserve you draw from all autumn. Instead, it's worth learning to bring small restorative moments into everyday life.
Ask yourself: Where in my day is there a moment when my brain actually gets to rest?
2. Your brain isn't an unlimited notepad
Early autumn fills up the calendar fast: meetings, projects, unfinished business. But the brain isn't only taxed by the doing — it's also taxed by everything we try to hold in mind. Constant interruptions and open, unrecorded loose ends drain our ability to concentrate far more than the workload itself does.
Much of this activity is reactive — replying, commenting, solving small things quickly, one after another, often overlapping. But the brain also needs a counterbalance to this: space to think things through calmly, and time to reach a state of deep focus where things start to flow on their own.
If a day consists purely of reacting, the brain never gets the chance to reach the state where more demanding thinking or creative problem-solving becomes possible. That missing variation often shows up as fatigue and a nagging sense of not having accomplished anything meaningful — even without having worked excessive hours.
Two concrete tips: Block out thinking and planning time in your calendar every week. Plan your work week and workday around your own goals, rather than letting the calendar fill up with other people's schedules.
Agree on shared, brain-healthy ground rules as a team: how many meetings you hold and why, how communication channels are used, and what other practices protect everyone's chance to actually think.
3. One new routine at a time — not a full life overhaul
Autumn tempts us toward a fresh start: a new exercise routine, sleep habits, diet, ways of working — all launched at once. This is exactly why good intentions tend to collapse during September. Change requires new neural pathways to take hold, and that only happens through repetition — not through sheer force of decision.
A question worth pausing on: the same routine can spring from two very different needs. Sometimes it's a genuine desire to grow. Your resources are in good shape. The new routine is an addition that brings a sense of wellbeing or direction. In that case, it usually sticks, because there's no pressure on it to fix anything — it's simply building something.
Other times, it's an attempt to patch an existing deficit. If spring or summer has been heavy, the mind easily reaches for a sense of control by adding more structure: if I can just get my morning routine sorted, I'll cope better. The problem is that this adds more to do at exactly the moment you have the least capacity for it. The new routine becomes one more load, even though it was meant to be the solution.
In practice: choose one routine, not five. And give it time to take hold before adding the next.
The start of autumn doesn't call for a perfect plan. It calls for one question: what's the smallest thing I could do that would help me sustain this autumn's sense of wellbeing — not just get through it.
I wish you a good and sustaining work autumn!
A column is a piece of writing in which the author expresses their own opinion or viewpoint on the topic. The columns in TEK Magazine are also written by a number of people who are not members of the staff of the Academic Engineers and Architects in Finland TEK.