Why the Holidays Are Making You Feel Worse, Not Better

I see you.

You are the one who held it together right up until the last day of term, smiling at the school gate, signing the cards, packing the bags, telling yourself that once the holidays came you would finally get to rest.

You counted the days down like a countdown to rescue.

And now you are here, on the other side of it, and instead of the relief you were promised, you have a headache that started the moment you switched off your emails. Or a scratchy throat that appeared out of nowhere the second you finally stopped moving. Or you are lying awake at half past five on the one morning you could have slept in, wired and exhausted in the same breath, wondering what on earth is wrong with you.

Nothing is wrong with you.

You are not unlucky, and you are not broken. There is a name for what just happened to you.

The thing nobody warned you about

Researchers call it leisure sickness. Dutch psychologists first named it back in 2001, describing people, often under pressure at work, who fall ill almost as soon as they stop. A more recent German study found that a striking majority of employees recognise the feeling of getting ill or utterly wiped out on days off, with roughly one in five experiencing it regularly.

The mechanism is not mysterious once you know it. While you are under sustained pressure, your body keeps a steady supply of adrenaline and cortisol running, partly to keep you going and partly because cortisol has a mild pain relieving, immune boosting effect. It is doing its job. Then the pressure lifts, the stress hormones drop away, and the symptoms that were being quietly held back can surface all at once. Headaches. Exhaustion. Aching muscles. The cold that had been circling for weeks finally lands.

In other words, you did not get ill despite finally stopping. You got ill because you finally stopped.

The part that will land hardest

Here is what makes this especially unfair for women like you. Mental Health UK's most recent Burnout Report, based on YouGov polling of thousands of UK adults, found that 96 per cent of women had experienced high or extreme stress in the past year, compared with 86 per cent of men. Women were also more likely to say they felt uncomfortable telling their manager how much pressure they were really under.

Read that again. Almost every woman is running close to the edge, and most of them are doing it quietly, because saying so out loud has never felt safe.

So you do not just carry the stress. You carry it alone, and then your body waits until the safest possible moment, the two weeks you have finally set aside for your children, to send you the bill.

This is not a design flaw. It is your nervous system doing exactly what it was trained to do

Your body has spent months, maybe years, treating vigilance as the safest state to live in. Staying alert, staying useful, staying one step ahead. That is not a fault in the system. That is the system working precisely as it learned to.

The trouble is that nobody teaches a nervous system how to come down gently. It only knows two speeds: fully on, or crash. So when you finally give it permission to stop, it does not ease into rest. It slams into it, and the slam looks like a headache, a virus, or lying awake at 6am on the one morning you could have slept in.

This is not a punishment and it is not bad luck. It is proof of how hard you have been working, and how long you have been doing it without a proper off ramp.

Two things worth trying before you switch off completely

1. Build in a transition day

Rather than working flat out until 6pm on the Friday and expecting Saturday morning to feel like freedom, try to protect one genuinely low key day between "on" and "off." Nothing urgent, nothing that needs your sharpest thinking, just enough space for your system to notice the pressure easing before it drops off a cliff. Even half a day helps.

2. Let rest arrive in small doses rather than all at once

If total stillness after months of sprinting tends to backfire, do not force it. A short walk without your phone, ten minutes sitting in the garden, a proper cup of tea drunk while it is still hot, these small doses teach your nervous system that slowing down is safe in manageable amounts, rather than asking it to go from a sprint to a dead stop in one afternoon.

Before you go

If this is the first summer you have actually noticed the pattern, that noticing matters. You are not weak, and you are not uniquely bad at holidays. You are a woman who has been operating in high alert for so long that your body has forgotten what a gentle landing feels like.

That can change. It changes not through gritting your teeth through one more holiday, but through actually addressing why your system has been stuck in that state in the first place.

You deserve a break that actually feels like one.

Beverley McCluskey is a coach, mentor and trainer who works with exhausted, high-achieving women in pharma, biotech and healthcare. She spent 33 years in the industry before burnout ended her career and now helps other women find a way through before they reach that point. Start Flourishing is her 1:1 programme. If you'd like to talk to her about it, book a call here or drop an email to beverley@florerevita.co.uk