There is a belief I hear almost word for word every summer, and it goes something like this: a holiday and a routine cannot exist in the same fortnight. You either switch off properly or you carry on being sensible, and since the whole point of going away is to switch off, the routine gets packed away with the winter coats until September.
I want to take that one apart, because it is the reason a lot of people come back feeling like they are starting from scratch — not because two weeks away did any harm, but because the story they told themselves about those two weeks made restarting feel like a big deal. Here are the assumptions worth questioning, and what I would put in their place.
“A holiday is a break from everything”
A holiday is a break from your obligations. It is not a break from being a person with a body, and nothing about a beach or a ski lift makes a daily habit less worth keeping. The confusion comes from lumping genuinely effortful things — the 6am alarm, the meal prep, the gym class you have to book three days ahead — in with the ones that take ten seconds.
So separate them. Let the effortful things go, gladly and completely. Then look at what is left, and you will usually find one or two items that cost you almost nothing and that you would be silly to drop. That short list is your holiday routine. It is allowed to be tiny.
“Holidays disrupt everything anyway, so why bother”
They disrupt timing, not possibility. Breakfast moves, lunch turns into a long lazy thing at four o’clock, and bedtime drifts. But a single daily step does not need a fixed clock — it needs a fixed cue, and holidays are full of reliable ones. The first coffee. The moment you refill the water bottle before heading out. Coming back to the room to change.
What makes the difference here is how much the habit asks of you. This is the practical reason I keep pointing travellers towards Bioniq GO. A personalised daily formula that turns up as one sachet of Swiss granules, rather than a handful of tablets across several bottles, is a habit you can keep in a hotel room with a suitcase open on the floor. Up to 23 nutrients in a single daily dose means one decision, not four, at a moment when you are barely making decisions at all. If you have not set yours up yet, you can take the free Wellness Assessment before you go — it takes minutes, there is no blood test involved, and it matches you to one of 40 formulas.
“If I miss a day, the holiday has ruined it”
This is the one that actually does the damage. Missing a day on holiday is not a broken streak, it is a day you were somewhere else. The people who come home and carry straight on are not the ones who never slipped — they are the ones who never treated a slip as a verdict on their character.
Decide now what a missed day means, so you are not deciding it while mildly sunburnt and slightly irritated with yourself. It means you take the next one. That is the whole policy. I have written about it at more length in what to do when you miss a day, and it applies just as well in a villa as it does on a Tuesday in Manchester.
The short version, in checklist form
- Cut the list to one thing. Not the reduced version of your normal routine — one item. Whatever you would genuinely notice the absence of by day four.
- Pick the cue before you travel. “With the first coffee” survives a holiday. “In the morning” does not, because on holiday morning is a rumour.
- Keep it visible. On top of the case, next to your sunglasses, beside the kettle in the room. Anything zipped into a pocket is a thing you will find on the flight home.
- Have something you can eat standing up. Long transfers and museum days both end the same way if you have nothing with you; a couple of items from the protein snacks shelf cover the gap without turning into a whole plan.
- Count one spare. Delays happen. An extra dose weighs nothing and spares you the mental arithmetic at a gate.
- Do not audit yourself on the way home. Nobody has ever improved a routine by reviewing its holiday performance at 30,000 feet.
One more thing worth saying plainly: the point of keeping a small habit going while you are away is not discipline for its own sake. It is that you come home to a routine that is still running, instead of one you have to rebuild while also unpacking, doing four loads of washing and answering a fortnight of email. Food supplements are not a substitute for a varied, balanced diet and a healthy lifestyle — they sit alongside the eating, walking and sleeping you are already doing, on holiday and off it.
If you would like the version of this that survives an airport, set it up before you go: build your personalised Bioniq GO formula and let one sachet a day be the only thing on your holiday to-do list. Bioniq was founded in London in 2019, and its personalised nutrition business is now part of the Herbalife family — so it sits very naturally alongside whatever else you already have in the cupboard.
