Taking more than three weeks’ holiday a year could lengthen your life, according to results that give another reason to mourn the end of summer.

Doctors should prescribe time off to people with heart problems to ensure that the stress of trying to live more healthily does not kill them, researchers said.

People who took less than three weeks off work in a year were 37 per cent more likely to die during the course of a 40-year study. “Don’t think having an otherwise healthy lifestyle will compensate for working too hard and not taking holidays,” Timo Strandberg, of the University of Helsinki, who led the research, said.

His findings arose out of research that he began in the 1970s on 1,200 businessmen. It produced