As the winter months set it and the working year seems to extend beyond your capacity to keep up with it, you begin to yearn for a holiday once again. But with travel prices soaring and the budget already tightly stretched, an investment in getting away for the sake of your health and sanity has become a more difficult decision than it used to be.

You’ll find you’ll get much better value for your holiday buck if you think carefully about what you really want out of your time away.  The best kind of holiday is the one that helps you to rebalance deficits in your normal routine.

Travel brochures are not going to be much use. The recommendation of a friend is not necessarily going to be much help either. We each need holiday experiences for different reasons, usually dependent on what stresses are going on in our lives right now.  The closer your holiday answers your need to balance your life as it is now, the more you will benefit from that break.

Begin by asking yourself what exactly you need to get out of your break. Do you most need physical rest and pampering? Is it time for a full-on health and fitness stint?

Do you want to spend open-ended time with those close to you because that is a cherished luxury for you?  Are you so chock-a-block with family things to do that a little solitude will revitalise your soul?

Are you a person who gets few opportunities for the pleasures of cultural novelty, art and learning? Or is your working life in the present so filled with mental demands that an activity like fly-fishing is the thought-free meditation you’d most benefit by?

Remember that because the main goal of any break is to release the stress associated with imbalances in your normal routines, you don’t want your choices to add further stress. If you are choosing between possibilities, ask yourself what arrangements will be the easiest. You don’t want to return in a worse condition than you went away. (I thank my own advice that I recently chose a guided tour of India rather than my usual suck-it-and-see approach to travel. It was a great decision. Beautiful and amazing India is not easy on newcomers.)

Once you have worked out the essence of what you need, you might realise that, although your budget does not allow you time away in the preferred destination of your choice, you can still focus on finding balancing activities closer to home that will make a change as good as a holiday.

Suzie St George is a personal development counsellor, educator and writer specialising in the power of whole-of-life balance.
Email her through www.reachpotential.com.au