Hard working professionals go on vacation and immediately get sick. This doesn’t happen just once, it is regular and reliable. What is going on?
If this has happened to you, you are getting a crash course on the physiology of the body’s stress response system, and some of its flaws. It was developed to deal with very different problems than the problems that modern bodies face coping wilth the stress of demanding work and personal lives.
The body has two systems that respond to stress – the adrenaline system and the cortisol system. The adrenaline system was designed to deal with the sudden threat of an attack by a predator. It raises your heart rate, shunts blood to your muscles and away from your digestive system. In fact it shuts down all motion through your digestive system. It makes you breath faster and deeper, it dilates your eyes (so you can see in low light better, which also means that you can’t see details as well (but then a saber tooth tiger doesn’t need to be seen in detail). It works quickly and, usually, shuts down pretty quickly – timeframe is minutes to hours.
The cortisol system was designed to help you cope with more long term life and death threats – a famine, a battle with another tribe, etcetera. The release of cortisol changes your metabolism so that you can do urgent and important tasks for a while. It suppresses some aspects of your immune system, it reduces pain, it uses up your body’s energy stores (all so that you can handle the critical tasks that are life and death). It raises blood glucose and boosts your mood (giving you energy and optimism). However it does all of these things at the cost of your long term health. Timeframe is hours to days.
It is the cortisol system that is in play in the case of our vacation sickness story. Essentially the person has been overworking, but hasn’t been noticing the damage to body, the low grade infection, etcetera, etcetera, because cortisol is keeping them going. But when they go on vacation they suddenly face all of the pain, exhaustion and delayed sickness. The body says, NOW YOU ARE GOING TO REST. And you head off to bed instead of the beach.
If possible, you can reduce the impact of this by arranging for more of a gradual transition – try (if you can) to wind down in the last day before a vacation (maybe taking off the day before you actually plan to start the vacation so that you can get prepared at a somewhat slower pace). And then, consider being a bit more active in the first day or two of vacation to continue the transition.
We really like this site for more information about how the stress system works.