Canadians aren’t taking their paid vacation days. Can burnout be far behind? | Canada Voices

Deep in the woods in Alberta, Monique has equipped her family cabin with an office desk, dual computer monitors, a professional-grade headset and high-speed internet. Her job as a manager in health care had been creeping into her vacations so regularly, she decided to install this workstation by a window, water and tall pines just out of reach outside. During a week-long “break” this spring, she clocked in 20 hours at her makeshift office in the woods.

“On this vacation and on many vacations, many of us are tapped into work,” said Monique, whom The Globe and Mail is not identifying because of the risk of professional consequences.

Though she finds her work meaningful, the way it bites into her time away with family feels painful. What can’t wait until after a holiday? Time-sensitive deadlines; crises that inevitably arise when she’s away; a tower of work growing taller as the days go on. She gets up early to fit the most pressing tasks into her vacation days, then tries to decompress.

In the end, these punctuated breaks rarely feel restful. Returning to the office is often chaotic, with more catching up to do on the weekend. Some years, Monique will end up forfeiting a few vacation days entirely.

Despite her devotion working decades in a notoriously understaffed field, she sometimes feels tacit blame from above when she works through yet another holiday: Did she really need to log in, or was it a choice? Couldn’t she manage her time and workload better?

“Over the long term, it’s all quite bad for mental health, burnout and longevity. Physically, there’s less time to look after yourself when you’re working at this kind of pace. Mentally, you fatigue. Emotionally, you have less elasticity for those that you love,” Monique said.

“I think the people that get the shaft from my work pace are my friends and family. It detracts from being present with them. They see you working and wonder when you’ll be available, how long will it really take. You’re dealing with that dual edge of guilt. You feel stuck.”

Opinion: Workplace stress has become a public-health concern

Canadian workers are struggling to take their annual paid vacation days – to unplug, rest and connect with loved ones after intense cycles at work. Last year, 40 per cent of employees didn’t use up their paid time off, according to a March survey from recruitment firm Robert Half. While many were squirrelling days off for some later absence, nearly a third worried their workload would pile up so high while they were gone that it would just intensify their burnout – which six in 10 respondents were experiencing, the same data found.

Undeniably, workplace optics feed into the problem: 11 per cent feared that taking downtime would hinder career opportunities; another 9 per cent worried about how colleagues would perceive their absence. Employees who used up their vacation days or set out-of-office replies on weekends were less likely to be promoted – even though their bosses publicly encouraged detaching from work, a separate May 2025 study found.

As companies shed head count and workers feel anxious about losing their jobs, people are doing more with less, quietly racking up unpaid overtime and growing wary about taking days off. The problem goes beyond people’s time management skills, to an intensification of work, an ever-speeding-up sense of what needs to be accomplished on the job. More than 4.1 million Canadians reported high or very high levels of work stress, 2023 Statistics Canada data found.

“People feel they don’t have the time to take the time. They feel extremely pressured,” said Cassie Holmes, a UCLA Anderson School of Management professor who studies the consequences of “time poverty,” this sense of forever running behind.

There are costs to this accelerating hamster wheel. Not taking time off to rest and recover fast-tracks burnout, erodes productivity and diminishes our quality of work, thought and decision-making, according to those studying workplace mental health. Worldwide, 81 per cent of workers now feel they are at risk of burnout, a jump from 63 per cent in 2019, according to Mercer’s 2026 Global Talent Trends report.

Workers who feel they

are at risk of burnout –

Mercer’s Global Talent

Trends 2026 report

Canadians who would change jobs if they were offered more vacation days – Expedia’s 2024 Vacation Deprivation Report

Canadians anxious about the volume of e-mails waiting for them after a holiday – Expedia’s 2024 Vacation Deprivation Report

Employees who feel engaged on the job, a low since 2020 – Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2026 report

Workers who feel they

are at risk of burnout –

Mercer’s Global Talent

Trends 2026 report

Canadians who would change jobs if they were offered more vacation days – Expedia’s 2024 Vacation Deprivation Report

Canadians anxious about the volume of e-mails waiting for them after a holiday – Expedia’s 2024 Vacation Deprivation Report

Employees who feel engaged on the job, a low since 2020 – Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2026 report

Canadians anxious about the volume of e-mails waiting for them after a holiday – Expedia’s 2024 Vacation Deprivation Report

Workers who feel they

are at risk of burnout –

Mercer’s Global Talent

Trends 2026 report

Canadians who would change jobs if they were offered more vacation days – Expedia’s 2024 Vacation Deprivation Report

Employees who feel engaged on the job, a low since 2020 – Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2026 report

“It’s your nervous system that’s frazzled. The only way you can recover is if your nervous system has space to rest,” said Jennifer Moss, a workplace culture strategist based in Kitchener, Ont., who wrote The Burnout Epidemic: The Rise of Chronic Stress and How We Can Fix It.

Chronic stress can have serious effects on every system in the human body, from muscular and cardiovascular, to respiratory, reproductive and gastrointestinal, according to the American Psychological Association. Ms. Moss says it takes people, on average, two to three days to shake off day-to-day stress and sink into rest when they’re off work. Plugging in your laptop poolside derails that process.

“We’re seeing increasingly that people are taking meetings on their vacation; they say it makes them feel better to check in. But that’s making it so your brain is still bifurcated between work and life. You don’t get the rest you need,” said Ms. Moss, who, after a hard-driving speaking season, tunes out on summer afternoons with her kids, leaving her phone in the hotel safe on holiday.

At the same time, scheduling in rest is an ever more demanding process.

Those studying work and leisure describe the “time-off tax” – many unacknowledged hours of overtime that employees put in just so they feel they can get away. Last year, Canadian workers put in nearly 17 extra hours of labour before and after their one-week vacations, according to ADP Canada’s Happiness@Work Index, which also found less than a third of respondents took all their vacation days, with a quarter taking less than half or no days.

“We have to put in so much time to go on vacation that people are opting out. That time-off tax is so expensive,” Ms. Moss said.

Another hurdle: People feel guilty they’re leaving colleagues in the lurch when they set off on holiday.

“We’re realizing that there’s no one there to pick up the slack, and we also care about our coworkers,” Ms. Moss continued. “It isn’t like before, where it was easier to ask someone to take on some of your workload because they weren’t at capacity. But when everyone is overworked, it’s difficult to put that burden on someone else.”

In Alberta, health care manager Monique said that when it’s her staffers’ turn to take time off, she wants it to be without work – without a headset in the woods: “For me, it’s really important that they’re not burning the candle at both ends,” she said.

On the rare opportunities when she travels out of province and can unwind more fully, Monique feels the difference. A data geek, she’s scanned her own biometrics and been startled by how clearly her body responds to rest. “Your stress score, your sleep – they really improve. It’s irrefutable data that tells you your body is taking a break.”

Still, the manager gets few windows to reset this way, with superiors looking the other way when she logs in to work during a holiday.

Those who study burnout say the only way out is executives modelling taking restorative time away themselves. If a boss rarely takes holiday, or e-mails through a break, employees will feel pressured to follow suit.

For employers who don’t see any intrinsic value in “human-centred leadership” that allows people to detach and recover, experts point to the benefits of time off for the bottom line. Healthy workplace culture around vacations has been shown to boost recruitment, retention and engagement.

“Taking vacation makes you happier. When people feel happier, you see effects on creativity, adaptive problem solving, people being more collaborative and kinder to their colleagues,” said Prof. Holmes, who wrote Happier Hour: How to Beat Distraction, Expand Your Time, and Focus on What Matters Most.

“When you allow people to take care of their emotional well-being, they show up better and are nicer to work with. It’s a positive loop.”

Forward-thinking employers are starting to recognize the importance of giving their staff restorative time off. But there are good ways to do vacation, and bad.

In recent years, startups and tech firms have been dangling “unlimited” time off as a perk. While flexible, boundless vacation days off might sound like a dream, staff in these high-octane industries often feel so much pressure to produce, they make little use of the option. These employees ended up taking less time off than staff at companies with fixed-day policies, a 2017 survey found.

Again, it comes down to workplace optics. Employees with unlimited vacation plans have no clear parameters for what’s appropriate, worrying they’ll look like slackers if they request more time than others.

“Any vacation you then take feels like a choice, or a luxury,” Prof. Holmes said. “And what does that reflect around your commitment to the company? How will it be perceived by your boss and by your team, which will presumably need to cover for you?”

Related: Time in the wilderness can break teens’ fixation on phones

There are smarter avenues for restoration. Some firms are co-ordinating periods of time off so everyone gets to step away from work simultaneously. This way, no one’s blasting through the out-of-office reply you’ve carefully composed in your inbox. And no one needs to feel guilty about burdening colleagues with their duties. At Deloitte US, inaugural “chief wellbeing officer” Jen Fisher helped usher in “collective disconnect days,” companywide periods to recharge all at the same time.

Of course, there also exist the smug vacation skippers. Robert Half’s survey included a small camp who said they hadn’t taken all their paid time off in the last year because they just hate missing work.

Here, Ms. Moss offered a reminder: Work is good for people when it fuels the rest of their lives. When it becomes the only thing giving us purpose and starts eroding meaningful off-time and the relationships we forge there, we risk isolating ourselves.

“Work is not always loyal to us; it’s not going to commit to being our best friend forever. We need to have other parts of our lives that are robust and healthy,” she said. “We have to focus on our long-term goals: Are we going to regret that we took that vacation and made memories with our family?”

The Decibel: The case for prioritizing rest in the age of burnout

The Globe and Mail’s time use reporter Zosia Bielski joined The Decibel podcast to challenge the idea that downtime needs to be earned, and to talk about some of the different approaches people are taking to prioritize rest in their lives.