You lie by the sea and think about work. You have lunch with friends while already lining up tomorrow in your head. You sleep more hours than usual and get up feeling like you rested nothing. If this sounds familiar, you are not the problem - the problem is that the holiday changed the location, not the rhythm.

That is the point raised by a brain-training expert: we go on holiday, but the mind does not come with us. We change the scenery - a different bed, a different terrace, a different sea - and carry on checking the phone, answering messages, organising plans and trying to make the most of every minute. The change is geographical. Inside, everything stays the same.

Mental rest does not mean an empty head. It means giving the brain moments in which there is nothing to solve. That is entirely different from relaxation and much harder than it sounds, because we are used to filling every gap. We wait - out comes the phone. We walk - on goes a podcast. We are alone - we look for something to do.

The first piece of advice is exactly there: a few minutes a day with no screens, no information and no obligation. Just to be. At first it will feel strange, even uncomfortable. Then the brain starts recognising those minutes as space for rest rather than as wasted time.

The second is harder for those of us trained to make everything pay off. Even our free time has become a list: travel, see places, meet everyone, exercise, read, and come back feeling the holiday was used well. But a holiday should not be another task. Allow yourself to do something purely because you like it - without it having to be useful. The brain rests when it does not have to achieve anything.

The third is the simplest and the rarest: be where you are. We work and think about the holiday. We are on holiday and think about coming back. We eat while already planning what comes next. When you eat - eat. When you walk - walk. When you are with someone - be there. That requires no plane ticket.

And now the real part. If we spend a whole year waiting for one week to let the brain slow down, we arrive at it so saturated that we cannot even use it. That is the trap - the holiday gets treated as the only permitted break in twelve months. Here the August holiday is almost a ritual, and September regularly opens with the same sentence: "it's like I never went anywhere".

It is no mystery. The brain is not asking for a holiday - it is asking to learn how to rest. And that does not depend on where you travel, but on how you learn to be with yourself. It can start today, on a terrace or in an office, completely free of charge.