RUCHI PAREKH - COACH/SPEAKER
Welcome to another issue of Rise & Thrive. Each week, I send insights that help high-performers like you break through barriers, beat imposter syndrome, and build unshakeable confidence so you can live your best life while reaching your full potential.
Reentry isn’t a problem to manage. It’s information to read.
If you came back from a holiday recently and you’re already deep into the project of “getting back to normal” - clearing the inbox, catching up on what slipped, restoring your usual pace - I want to offer a different idea.
That instinct, however responsible it feels, might be the exact reason holidays never quite restore you.
The version of you that “normal” is asking you to return to is the one who needed a holiday in the first place. Snapping back to her - quickly, efficiently, before anyone notices you slowed down - undoes the entire point of going away.
Here’s what’s actually worth doing instead.
Most accomplished people don’t consciously decide to race back to their usual pace. They just... arrive there. Within hours of being home, sometimes within minutes of opening the laptop, the old operating system reboots and the holiday-version of them quietly disappears.
This isn’t a discipline problem. It’s how the brain works.
Your nervous system runs on familiarity. Whatever state you’ve been in most often becomes the state your brain treats as baseline - the default it returns to without asking your permission. For most successful people, that default is a low, constant hum of activation. Slightly braced. Slightly ahead of itself. Slightly on.
A holiday interrupts that default. For a week or two, your system gets to operate in a different state - softer, slower, more present. But the moment you re-enter the environment that built the old default, your brain reaches for it almost reflexively. Same posture. Same pace. Same level of vigilance.
This is what “getting back to normal” actually is: not a choice, but an automatic recalibration to a state that was never sustainable in the first place. You’re not returning to health. You’re returning to depletion. Just with a tan.
Here’s the question worth sitting with: what was normal, exactly?
For a lot of the people I work with, when they look honestly, “normal” was:
A nervous system that hadn’t fully exhaled in months. A pace that produced output but left no margin. A relationship with their phone that they’d quietly known wasn’t healthy. A weekend that never felt like a real weekend. A constant sense of being slightly behind, slightly braced, slightly tired in a way no amount of sleep fixed.
That’s what they’re rushing to return to. And they’re rushing because returning to it feels like responsibility - like proving they’re back, like signalling they didn’t lose a step, like demonstrating they can handle their life.
But notice what’s underneath that rush. It’s not actually about responsibility. It’s about avoiding the discomfort of staying in the slower, softer state any longer than absolutely necessary. The holiday version of you feels foreign, even though she felt good. Your nervous system, accustomed to high alert, treats the unfamiliar calm as something to correct.
So you correct it. Quickly. And you call it “getting back to normal.”
There’s actual research on this, and it’s worth knowing.
Studies on vacation recovery have consistently found something counterintuitive: the restorative effects of time off fade remarkably quickly when people return to the same patterns at the same pace. Within a week or two, most physiological markers - cortisol levels, sleep quality, perceived stress - return to pre-holiday baseline.
Not because the holiday didn’t work. Because the reentry pattern undid it.
The body and brain need time to integrate a different state before it becomes available to them. If you arrive home on Sunday and slam straight back into Monday’s pace, your nervous system gets a single message: that calm thing we just experienced? Not real. Not for us. Back to the usual.
So the holiday becomes a thing that happened to you. A nice memory. A photo album. But not an integration. Not a recalibration. Not a lasting shift in how you live.
The fast reentry, the thing you’re calling responsible, is the thing erasing the holiday from your system.
A different way of returning isn’t about taking more time off. It’s about not snapping the elastic band back the moment you walk in the door.
Reentry, done well, is a deliberate continuation of the holiday’s pace for as long as you can stretch it. Not the location. The pace. The pause before reacting. The slower walk through your own house. The phone left in a drawer for the first morning. The decision to handle the inbox in two unhurried sittings rather than one panicked sprint. The Monday meeting you reschedule by a day because it can wait, and you know it can wait, even if no one else does.
These are small. None of them require dramatic life changes. All of them quietly tell your nervous system: we’re not going back to the old default. We’re integrating something new.
This is where the real work of a holiday actually happens. Not at the beach. In the first ten days back, when you let the slower state stay - even partially, even imperfectly - instead of dismissing it like a fever you’ve recovered from.
The people I work with who handle reentry differently describe a similar shift.
They notice they can hold onto a piece of the holiday version of themselves for weeks, sometimes months, instead of hours. The calm doesn’t fully evaporate. The pace doesn’t snap all the way back. They go back to work, of course - the job, the responsibilities, the demands all return - but they don’t return to the exact same nervous system state they left in.
Something stays. A small recalibration. A slightly looser grip. A slightly slower default.
And that small shift, repeated across enough holidays and enough deliberate reentries, becomes the actual change. Not dramatic. Just durable.
The people who snap right back, in contrast, spend the next eleven months counting down to the next holiday - because that’s the only place they’re allowing themselves to feel okay. The relief is location-locked. The recovery never integrates. The cycle keeps repeating.
That’s the cost of “getting back to normal.” It guarantees you’ll need another escape, soon, just to feel human again.
If you’re reading this in the throes of reentry - probably feeling guilty for not having caught up faster, probably annoyed at yourself for the slight sluggishness, probably already half back into the old pace - consider not finishing the job.
Don’t catch all the way up. Don’t return to the full pre-holiday velocity. Don’t prove anything to anyone by Friday.
Let the reentry be slow on purpose. Let one piece of the holiday version of you stay - the slower mornings, the more deliberate response time, the boundary you held in your inbox while you were away. Don’t reinstall every old pattern just because the cues are back.
Your nervous system is watching what you do this week. It’s deciding whether the holiday was an exception or the start of something. You’re casting that vote with every small choice in the next ten days.
You don’t owe anyone “normal.” Normal was the problem. The version of you waiting on the other side of a deliberate, unhurried reentry is the one worth returning to.
That one is new. And she gets to stay - if you’ll let her.
If reentry has felt harder than it should this year - or if you’re noticing the old pace tightening its grip faster than you’d like - that’s exactly the kind of thing my free 15-minute calls are useful for.
And I run a monthly membership called The Journaling Club which is a small, private community of people who get it - accomplished, ambitious, and quietly doing the deeper work alongside you.
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