In Friday's weekly roundup, we linked to a study that reported that the world is experiencing a shift away from nature based recreation. Pundits have been proposing causal factors that range from video game abuse to fear of the outdoors to the creation of Google. Here's another one: the decline of the American vacation.
Decline of the American Vacation
I stumbled across a statistic this weekend that should give all working parents pause, only 14 percent of Americans are going to take a two or more week vacation this year. If that seems shocking, here's another one: in 2007, Americans failed to take 483 million vacation days.
Getting a decent dose of adventure these days requires a commodity as rare as a spam-less day: time off. It's vanishing before our eyes in an avalanche of shrinking company vacation policies, longer and more e-tool-besieged workweeks, and the frantic belief we've got too much to do to break away for something as unproductive as the experience of living.
Only 14 percent of Americans will take a vacation of two weeks or more this year. The standard holiday in the U.S. is now down to a long weekend. Read More At National Geographic Adventure.
Chronic Stress
Instances of work related chronic stress are climbing. This is bad news for vacation skippers because chronic stress doubles your risk of condition known as metabolic syndrome (expanding waistline, high blood pressure, and difficulty metabolizing glucose). Another study suggests that chronic stress pushes the risk of heart disease up by 68%
OK, there is no shortage of studies that tell us that chronic stress is bad, what do you do?
Our Solution: Take a vacation to visit a National Park
Over the next few months, this blog is going to start exploring the multitude of free educational opportunities offered by the National Park System, but before we go there it seems prudent to state the obvious: taking vacation time to load up the kids to visit a national park is a healthy thing for parents too because vacation is the cure for burnout (a nagging symptom of chronic stress).
By using the Trailmix.Net solution you can avoid contributing to the vacation wasting statistic, avoid contributing to the chronic stress statistic, and develop healthy recreational habits with your kids that will prepare them to manage stress in a healthy way.