Arthur C. Brooks explains why vacation happiness fades: your limbic system evolved to keep you alert to threats, not to sustain good moods. A permanent vacation high would distract you from necessary vigilance. Instead, focus on meaningful moments with people you love and savor the trip while it happens.
I'd like to tell you that the perfect vacation will make you permanently happy, or at least happy for the rest of the year, but it doesn't because that's not the way that your limbic system works. Your limbic system, this console of tissue inside your brain between 2 and 40 million years old, which is basically the factory of your emotions. It's there to give you signals about things around you, whether they're threats or opportunities. It's not there to give you a permanently nice day. If you did something like had a good vacation or, and it gave you permanently better mood, that would distract you from things you need to be paying attention to, potential threats. That would be dangerous. The result is that, yeah, you can get a higher affective state. You can improve your mood. You can get more positive emotionality by having a really great vacation, but it's not going to be a permanent state of affairs. And it's important that you manage your expectations about that, not thinking, oh, it's going to be great forever because it isn't. It tends to wear off and in some cases kind of quickly. What you're trying to do is to make some really nice memories with people that you love doing something you really enjoy. You're going to be really significantly happier and healthier while you're doing it., and you get a lot of savoring beforehand, but don't think that 6 months from now that this is the game changer because it probably isn't.
