By Alec Hogg
I got quite a wakeup call this holiday season. We gave it horns last year, so I was more than ready for relax mode after finally switching off the desktop computer. Unfortunately it was just as ready for me. The next day, Christmas Eve, delivered the mother of all flu viruses.
That saw me confined to bed on Christmas Day. Plus a few more moping around with an aching body, splitting headaches, a cotton wool head and rasping cough. Only once the fog cleared did it occur to me this was a bit of a pattern. I’ve been blessed with a body that rarely misfires. Except, it seems, on holiday.
___STEADY_PAYWALL___
That sparked some long-overdue research in the hope of discovering whether others are similarly afflicted. Bottom line: this wasn’t a bad case of “man flu”. Nor a random smack from Mother Nature. What hit me is called “Leisure Sickness”, a genuine malady of those who inherited too many Calvinist genes. Hard work might never have killed anyone, but it sure knows how to flatten modern man (and woman).
Leisure Sickness was identified as a bona fide “condition” a couple decades back by Dutch psychologist Ad Vingerhoets who started researching it after realising his own illnesses only happened at Christmas and the occasional weekend. A number of pals had the same experience.
Vingerhoets and Tilburg University colleague Maaike van Huijgevoort, surveyed almost 2 000 working age men and women in the Netherlands, discovering those who only seemed to get sick during their holidays also suffered the same symptoms – headaches, fatigue, muscular pains and viral infections causing flu-like symptoms and colds.
Also, Leisure Sickness sufferers share an over-developed sense of responsibility to their work, making it very hard to switch off. That switches on the immune system, putting the body into defence mode. A bit like the well documented mind-over-matter approach among the terminally ill who postpone their death to witness events that matter a lot to them (births, marriages, etc).
But once you switch over to holiday, barriers collapse and you tend to pick up pretty much anything that’s going around. The Dutch study identified a pitiful 20 people who had recovered from Leisure Sickness. Pretty much all of them said that occurred after a fundamental change in the way they approached work and life in general.
I’ve got a feeling like with any addiction, those who recovered started by admitting there’s a fine line between honestly earning their daily crust and becoming a full-blown workaholic. So please don’t expect me to answer your next email 10 minutes after it was sent. I’m done with having rotten holidays. If you, too, spent Christmas Day in bed, why not join me?
