After weeks—or even months—of anticipation, you have finally made it to your destination and are ready to enjoy a few days of sun, sand, and sangria. But wait, is that a sniffle in your nose, a scratch in your throat?
Though it is unpleasant and can even feel downright unfair, coming down with a bug during your time off isn’t uncommon. And of course, it’s certainly possible to catch a cold in the crammed quarters of a plane or eat something that makes your digestive system say, “No, thanks.” But sometimes your immune system simply decides to take a break right along with the rest of you—and that’s not necessarily a coincidence.
This phenomenon has a name: leisure sickness. Here’s what you need to know about what causes it and how to prevent it before your next vacation.
Why do we get sick on vacation?
Ad Vingerhoets, a psychologist and emeritus professor at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, coined the term leisure sickness in the early 2000s after noticing he often fell ill during his time off and decided to conduct a study on the phenomenon. His research found that high-achieving, high-stress individuals are more likely to get sick when they take a break, reporting ailments like headaches, muscle aches, fatigue, nausea, and flu-like symptoms.
Why might that be the case? Well, what you do before taking time off can influence how you feel during the trip. “Before a vacation people are already stretching themselves—working overtime, not sleeping well, not eating properly—so the body is already in a vulnerable state,” says Meena Malhotra, MD, a board-certified internal medicine physician and the founder of Heal n Cure. “Then when you finally slow down, the body kind of lets go, and that’s when symptoms show up. It’s not that the vacation caused the illness; it’s that the body was already run down and now it has the space to express it.”
The science behind why this may be happening is pretty simple, says Steven Goldberg, MD, MBA, a Kentucky-based urgent and primary care physician. It boils down to how much cortisol is in your body. This major stress hormone helps control inflammation and keep your immune system in check. “Think of it as a lid on a boiling pot,” he says. “While you’re pushing through a deadline or managing a hectic pre-trip week, cortisol is holding things together. The moment you decompress, cortisol levels begin to drop and that lid comes off.” When that happens, your immune system gets back to work. Inflammation increases, and symptoms that cortisol was keeping at bay may start to break through, Dr. Goldberg says. For example, many cold symptoms are caused by inflammation, so when that’s suppressed by high cortisol levels, you might not even realize you’re sick—that is, until you finally unwind and your cortisol drops.
People under chronic stress may be especially vulnerable. When cortisol remains consistently elevated over time, it weakens your immune system by reducing the production of certain infection-fighting cells and dampening important immune responses, both Drs. Goldberg and Guerrero-Wooley say. Pair that with other common vacation experiences, including pathogen exposure during travel, disrupted sleep, and dietary changes that can affect the gut microbiome, and you’re ripe for an illness to pop up on your trip, Dr. Goldberg says.
“The cruel irony is that your body wasn’t protecting you from illness during the stress,” Dr. Goldberg says. “It was just delaying the inevitable.”
Besides opening the door for new illnesses, pre-travel strain can also trigger underlying conditions or viruses that are sensitive to stress and immune changes, Dr. Malhotra says. One example is shingles, which is caused by the varicella-zoster virus, the same virus behind chickenpox. The virus can lie dormant in our nerves for decades after a bout of chickenpox, only to be reawakened by stress. Stress is also a common trigger for flare-ups of other conditions like autoimmune diseases, eczema, and irritable bowel syndrome.
