Advertisement
Why public holidays are essential for your mental health
27th May, 2026 02:57 PM
Kenya has a dozen public holidays per year by official count. Each one is a small interruption in the grind, a pause written into the calendar.
And yet for most people, the holiday lands and vanishes without much changing: you scroll the same feeds, run the same errands, maybe binge watch a series until midnight. Then the day passes and it feels like the break never happened.
That is a pattern occupational health researchers have spent years trying to explain.
Your brain does not recover the way you think it does
The most useful thing science has established about rest is the concept of psychological detachment; your mind’s ability to genuinely disengage from work rather than simply being physically absent from it.
When you are off the clock but still mentally rehearsing tomorrow’s deadline or WhatsApping a colleague about a pending task, you are not recovering, regardless of where you are sitting.
This matters because weekends, for most working Kenyans, are already compromised. Errands, family obligations, and the low-grade background hum of the impending working week mean that two days rarely deliver the depth of recovery the nervous system actually needs.
Public holidays offer something different: a longer window, freed from the usual rhythm, in which full detachment becomes genuinely possible.
Analysis published in the Journal of Applied Psychology concluded that “psychological detachment and physical activities during vacation may be the most beneficial for improving employee well-being,” with the benefits lasting longer than earlier research had suggested.
What genuine rest actually looks like
Lying in bed scrolling a phone keeps the brain in a low-grade alert state that does little for recovery.
What researchers consistently identify as restorative is activity that absorbs your attention without creating new stress: a walk, cooking a meal you enjoy, catching up with a friend face-to-face, or physical movement that gets you fully out of your head.
Control also matters.
Holidays where you decide how the hours go, rather than drifting through someone else’s agenda or a streaming platform’s suggestions, consistently produce better mental health outcomes than passive ones.
Even a modest amount of autonomy over your leisure, the research shows, can meaningfully shift how restored you feel when work resumes.
The holiday is not guaranteed to help you. But approached with even a little intention, it can do something the rest of your calendar cannot.
