A Vacation Pill to Good Health, and High Efficiency

Somewhere on a faraway beach, a cellphone rings, a BlackBerry
buzzes, a laptop beeps.

"I never go on vacation," said Ellen Kapit, a real
estate agent in Manhattan. "And when I do, I have my computer, my Palm, my
e-mail and my phone with me at all times."

Ms Kapit's habits are typical of today's employees.
According to surveys of workers released in the last year. Employees are
sweating over every aspect of their getaways, from whether taking time off dooms
them to the want ads to whether the workload they will face when they return
will keep them from ever leaving their cubicles again.

But plenty of employees worry about taking vacation for reasons
that have little to do with job security. Some consider themselves to be
indispensable. Many competitive, ambitious workers take all the responsibilities
on themselves, said Jennifer Sullivan, a spokeswoman for CareerBuilder.com.
"Those are the people that are probably working multiple hours on their
vacation or not taking vacation at all."

Ambition, fear of being fired, feeling indispensable and
self-imposed getaway guilt all help to explain why workers do not use all of
their vacation days and why many prefer to take respites that are shorter than
two weeks.

Erin Krause, a spokeswoman for the travel Web site Expedia.com,
which publishes an annual Vacation Deprivation online survey, said,
"Americans are not using all of their vacation days and it seems to be
getting worse... "We are not taking advantage of the time our employers are
giving to us," she said.

A Families and Work Institute study found that overworked
employees are prone to make mistakes, be angry at their employers, and prone to
have higher stress levels, experience symptoms of clinical depression, report
poorer health and neglect themselves.