e30: Can Going on Vacation Make You More Creative?
Thursday, July 24th, 2025
18:30-20:00 GMT (London, UK) • 1:30-3:00pm EST (North America, Eastern)
To celebrate summer and this season of travel, we will be discussing Vacation and Creativity as our July topic.
Vacation and Creativity: Unlocking Cognitive Flexibility Through Travel
Travel may boost creativity by relieving work-related stress, offering diverse new experiences, and enhancing positive emotions. We will discuss longitudinal research exploring how vacations impact different facets of creativity. The study found that while originality remained unchanged after a holiday, cognitive flexibility, our ability to adapt and shift thinking, increased significantly!
We will use the following article as a starting point for our discussion:
Join us for an insightful conversation about how breaking from work and immersing in new environments can refresh the mind!
This meeting has passed, but we would love for you to join us next time!
📄 De Bloom, Ritter, Kühnel, Reinders, & Geurts (2014)
Vacation from work: A ‘ticket to creativity’?: The effects of recreational travel on cognitive flexibility and originality. Tourism Management, 44, 164-171.
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Recreational travel may increase creativity by relieving workers from stress, providing diversifying experiences and increasing positive emotions. Consequently, vacations may boost creativity, apparent in a greater variety (flexibility) and originality of ideas after work resumption.
In our longitudinal field study, creativity (measured by Guilford's Alternative Uses Task; independently scored by three raters) was assessed in 46 workers before and after vacation. Potential precursors for creativity changes (i.e. work load, vacation hassles, vacation destination and positive affect) were also explored.
Cognitive flexibility increased whereas originality remained the same after vacation. None of the precursors explained variance in creativity changes.
Although vacations seem to increase chances on creative insights by raising the amount of available cognitive elements (flexibility), they do not necessarily lead to higher levels of originality (uncommon, remote and clever ideas). Research in larger samples is required to further explore mechanisms that may explain why travel seems to enhance creativity.
👋🏼 Please don’t hesitate to reach out if you need a pdf of the article.