There’s obviously no great time to get sick, but certain moments can feel like the absolute worst—namely, when you’re about to enjoy some time off work. It especially sucks to spend the first few hours or days of a vacation swallowing through the pain of swollen lymph nodes, conked out on the couch with a head cold, or even just feeling rundown and bleh overall. Yet, paradoxically, it can often feel like that’s exactly when illness strikes, as if your body is playing some sort of twisted trick on you and sabotaging the precious period you’ve set aside for yourself.
It turns out, that’s more than a hunch. Researchers have long spotted what Dutch psychologist Ad Vingerhoets, PhD, dubbed “leisure sickness” in 2002, or the peculiar phenomenon of feeling crappy during weekends or longer stretches of downtime. It hasn’t been proven as a bona fide medical condition, in and of itself—but it’s “definitely something that we observe in patients,” Jay Lee, MD, MPH, FAAFP, medical director at Integrated Health Partners of Southern California and a member of the board of directors of the American Academy of Family Physicians, tells SELF.
Leisure sickness itself is used as an umbrella term to explain feeling unwell during time off. It can include everything from having a legit illness, like a cold or the flu, to just feeling symptoms like muscle pains, fatigue, and headache, with no underlying infection to blame. The potential causes are just as varied, but the common denominator is that it shows up when you’re at, well, leisure.
The bright side is, your body’s not actually out to get you, and you’re not doomed to sniffle or trudge your way through the start of every vacation, either. Read on to learn why the experts think leisure sickness can take hold and what you can do to stave off a case.
Leisure sickness may happen because of pre-vacation stress and changes to your routine.
The whole idea can be a bit of a head-scratcher (rest and relaxation making you…ill?) until you consider what might happen before you take that time off. For instance, you may have been grinding it out at work for weeks if not months on end ahead of a long vacation. Not to mention, the doozy of a to-do list and the associated spike in anxiety that often crops up when you’re preparing for time off, even if it’s just the upcoming weekend. In any case, it’s common to run yourself ragged in the leadup to a break, which may ultimately make you sick for a few reasons.
