Christmas Breaks Reduce Overwork Health Risks

Long working hours are a recognized occupational health risk. A joint analysis from the World Health Organization and the International Labour Organization reported that in 2016, long working hours of at least 55 hours per week were linked to an estimated 745,000 deaths from stroke and ischemic heart disease worldwide, based on modeling of global data summarized in a news release from the World Health Organization.

The same WHO and ILO estimates conclude that people working 55 or more hours per week face an estimated 35% higher risk of stroke and 17% higher risk of dying from ischemic heart disease compared with peers working 35 to 40 hours. Those risk figures come from pooled cohort data that follow workers over time and compare outcomes between exposure groups.

For people who routinely work at or above this threshold, the question is how to create realistic recovery windows inside busy schedules. Widely observed public holidays such as Christmas Day can function as short, structured tests of genuine time off, especially in workplaces where ordinary weekends are not fully protected from job demands.

Research on vacations and recovery suggests that even limited periods away from work can improve well-being when employees are able to detach mentally from their jobs.

A 2024 meta-analysis in European Psychologist reports that vacations have a small to medium positive effect on employee well-being and that the benefits are clearest for mood, stress, and exhaustion rather than for broader life satisfaction, according to European Psychologist.

Key Findings on Overwork and Holiday Recovery

Working 55 or more hours per week is associated with about a 35% higher risk of stroke and 17% higher risk of dying from ischemic heart disease than working 35 to 40 hours.
WHO and ILO estimate that 745,000 deaths from stroke and ischemic heart disease in 2016 were attributable to long working hours.
A 2024 meta-analysis in European Psychologist finds that vacations improve employee well-being with an overall effect size of d = 0.25.
A 2025 Journal of Applied Psychology meta-analysis reports that psychological detachment and physical activities during vacation are strongly linked with post-vacation well-being.
A one day Christmas break can support recovery for workaholics when it is clearly bounded and structured to support psychological detachment.

Evidence Linking Long Hours and Cardiovascular Mortality

The WHO and ILO joint estimates are based on a systematic analysis published in Environment International that quantifies the global, regional, and national burdens of ischemic heart disease and stroke attributable to exposure to long working hours. In that work, researchers estimate that in 2016, about 398,000 deaths from stroke and 347,000 deaths from ischemic heart disease were attributable to working at least 55 hours per week, as described in Environment International.

To generate these figures, WHO and ILO synthesized evidence from existing cohort studies. For ischemic heart disease, they pooled data from 37 studies covering more than 768,000 participants. For stroke, they drew on 22 studies with over 839,000 participants.

The relative risks were then combined with data on how many people globally work 55 or more hours per week in order to estimate how many deaths and disability-adjusted life years could be attributed to this exposure.

The burden is not distributed evenly. According to the WHO and ILO estimates, roughly 72% of the deaths related to long working hours occurred among men.

Most of the deaths were in people aged 60 to 79 who had previously worked long hours between ages 45 and 74, illustrating that the health impact of overwork often appears decades after the period of highest exposure.

When the findings were released in 2021, WHO Director General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus stated that "no job is worth the risk of stroke or heart disease" and emphasized that governments, employers, and workers should agree on limits to protect health.

The joint estimates also classify long working hours as the occupational risk factor with the largest share of the global work-related disease burden, underscoring that hours are not only a productivity issue but a public health concern.

Why Recovery Windows Matter

Occupational health models treat time away from work demands as an essential part of how the body and mind restore themselves after stress. In this framework, long working hours are a chronic demand, and "recovery" refers to periods when workload and work-related mental activity are low enough for strain to decrease over time.

The WHO and ILO data show that the health risks associated with long working hours accumulate across years rather than days. That pattern implies that occasional short breaks cannot fully offset the effects of chronic overwork, but they still matter because they reduce immediate strain and can form part of a broader move toward safer schedules.

A clearly defined recovery window, whether it lasts one day or two weeks, gives workers a chance to pause work tasks, disengage from job-related communication, and restore sleep and energy. Without such windows, workers who regularly exceed 55 hours per week may face weeks or months without meaningful interruption of job demands, which is exactly the exposure pattern captured in the WHO and ILO long-hours category.

For many employees, Christmas is one of the few days when offices reduce operations by default, clients expect slower responses, and meeting schedules are lighter. That context can make it easier to carve out uninterrupted time away from email and work platforms compared with ordinary weekdays, especially in organizations where standard weekends are porous.

Treating Christmas as a deliberate recovery period aligns the day with what occupational health research recommends: a span of time when work demands step back enough for physiological and psychological stress markers to move closer to baseline, rather than remaining at the elevated levels associated with prolonged overwork.

Vacation Science: What Meta-Analyses Show

A 2024 meta-analysis in European Psychologist examined 13 studies with 1,428 workers, with an average vacation length of 11 days and a range from 4 to 23 days. The authors report that vacations improve overall employee well-being with an average effect size of d = 0.25, which is typically categorized as a small to medium effect, according to European Psychologist.

In that analysis, improvements were most evident in specific facets of well-being such as positive affect, stress, and exhaustion.

Life satisfaction showed little change, with an effect size near d = 0.10. This pattern suggests that vacations tend to influence short-term states like mood and fatigue more than broad judgments about one’s life or career, which are shaped by factors beyond any single time off period.

The same meta-analysis found that the gains in subjective well-being diminished after workers returned to their jobs. By about one week after resuming work, average well-being scores were no longer significantly different from pre-vacation levels. The authors interpret this fade-out as evidence that vacation effects are real but temporary and that regular recovery opportunities are needed to maintain benefits over time.

A newer meta-analysis published in 2025 in Journal of Applied Psychology drew on 32 studies with 256 effect sizes to re-estimate how vacations affect employee well-being. The authors report that vacation has a larger effect on well-being than earlier syntheses suggested and that the benefits do not fade as quickly as previously thought, based on the combined evidence presented in Journal of Applied Psychology.

In addition to overall effects, the Journal of Applied Psychology meta-analysis examined how specific activities and experiences during vacation correlate with well-being outcomes. The authors conclude that "psychological detachment and physical activities during vacation may be the most beneficial for improving employee well-being," highlighting that how people use their time off is as important as the fact of being away from work.

Designing a One Day Christmas Break

For workers who tend to overextend their hours, one practical step is to treat Christmas as a full, bounded break rather than a partially working day. That can start with blocking the calendar for December 25 and confirming in advance that meetings and routine deadlines will not be scheduled during that 24 hour window. An out-of-office reply can reinforce this boundary.

Many occupational psychologists recommend specifying that you will not be checking messages during the break and providing a single, clearly defined path for true emergencies. This structure supports psychological detachment by reducing the sense that every incoming email requires attention and by making exceptions transparent rather than informal.

Limiting digital intrusions is another key element. Silencing nonessential notifications for email, messaging applications, and work platforms during the break reduces the number of cues that pull attention back to job tasks. If job responsibilities make zero contact impossible, some workers choose one brief, pre-scheduled check in rather than intermittent scanning throughout the day, since the meta-analytic evidence links ongoing engagement with weaker vacation-related improvements.

What fills the break also matters. The Journal of Applied Psychology review finds that vacations that include physical activities and clear psychological detachment are associated with larger improvements in well-being. For a one day holiday, that can translate into a walk, exercise, shared meals, reading for pleasure, or extra sleep, provided these activities are not combined with simultaneous checking of work devices.

Social expectations inside an organization can either support or undermine such a break. In workplaces where late night responses are common, some employees may worry that taking a full day off signals disengagement. Framing Christmas as adherence to an organization-wide holiday policy, rather than an individual preference, can reduce that concern and align personal behavior with stated norms.

Organizational Norms and the Limits of a Single Holiday

The WHO and ILO joint release urges governments and employers to establish maximum limits on working hours and to avoid mandatory overtime as part of a strategy to prevent cardiovascular disease.

Similar recommendations appear in a companion news item from the International Labour Organization that summarizes the same estimates and calls long working hours a serious occupational health issue, as outlined by the International Labour Organization.

Within individual organizations, clear norms can make it easier for workers to take recovery time without fearing negative consequences. Examples include expectations that weekend messages be limited to time-sensitive issues, use of clear subject-line tags for true urgencies, and explicit statements from leadership that employees are not expected to reply during holidays such as Christmas unless they are part of a defined emergency-response group.

These structures also help address disparities between different types of workers. Hourly staff and contractors are sometimes excluded from formal limits on working hours, which can leave them feeling compelled to remain available even during holidays. Transparent rules about maximum hours and holiday expectations can narrow this gap and align incentives with the cardiovascular risk data that WHO and ILO report.

At the same time, a single day off is not sufficient to reverse years of long schedules. The European Psychologist meta-analysis shows that well-being gains from vacations tend to fade within about a week after returning to work. The implication is that occasional holidays like Christmas provide short-term relief but do not substitute for structural reductions in chronic overwork.

For people who regularly work 55 or more hours per week, a pattern of frequent, bounded breaks throughout the year is more consistent with the exposure levels used as the lower-risk comparison group in the WHO and ILO modeling, namely 35 to 40 hours per week. Over time, moving closer to that range is what reduces the modeled probability of stroke and ischemic heart disease, even if no single holiday produces a measurable change in population statistics.

Cardiovascular outcomes are shaped by habits and exposures accumulated over decades, not by one day of behavior. Yet each protected break, including a carefully structured Christmas Day off, can interrupt continuous exposure to long hours, provide evidence that work can pause without collapse, and offer a starting point for conversations about healthier schedules.

For workaholics and their employers, the combination of WHO and ILO burden estimates and vacation meta-analyses points toward a practical conclusion: treating at least some public holidays as non-negotiable recovery windows, and aligning organizational norms with that practice, is a concrete way to translate abstract risk statistics into daily routines that better support long-term health.