The first day is usually fine.
You get there. You unpack a little, or you do not. You sleep badly in the unfamiliar bed, which you put down to the mattress. You feel a bit hollow, a bit far away, and you tell yourself it takes a day to arrive somewhere.
Then day two happens. The headache that will not shift. The throat. The bone-tiredness that has nothing to do with the driving. You spend the afternoon lying in a rented room in the flat light with a mug going cold beside you, wondering how you managed eleven weeks of that quarter without missing a morning and then fell over on a Tuesday with nothing to do.
I want to talk about that Tuesday, because I have had a lot of them, and because the way most people explain it is backwards.
What the popular explanation misses
The usual account is that you ran yourself down, and then the rest let the bug in. Your immune system was depleted, you finally stopped, something caught you.
There is a name for the pattern, at least. A Dutch researcher, Ad Vingerhoets, coined the term leisure sickness in 2001 for people who report feeling ill on weekends and holidays rather than on working days. In his survey of around two thousand people, roughly 3% recognised themselves in the description. The symptoms they reported were headaches, fatigue, muscle pain and nausea, plus the usual colds.
I want to be straight with you about what that is and is not. It is not a diagnosis. The research is contested, and at least one researcher has argued the effect is partly memory, since getting a cold on a beach is far more memorable than getting one on a Wednesday in March. So it is a name for something a lot of people notice. It is not an explanation of what your body is doing.
Which leaves the interesting question open. If you have lived this, you already know the depletion story does not quite fit. You were not obviously ill in week nine. You were fine in week nine. That is the part that needs explaining.
What may be happening underneath
Here is the version that has made the most sense of it for the women I write to, and for me.
If you are running on alarm, the alarm is load-bearing.
Not metaphorically. A body with the sympathetic system partly switched on runs warmer, faster and more alert than it otherwise would. It gets you out of bed on the mornings that should have been impossible. It carries the meeting you had no reserves for. It holds you at a height you could not hold by yourself, and it charges for that, but it does not present the bill while the work is still going.
Then you stop. The demand comes off on a Friday afternoon, all at once, and the alarm comes down first, because that is the part that was responding to the demand. Underneath it is the tiredness that has been accumulating since about February.
So on day two you are not getting worse. You are getting accurate. The tiredness was always the true reading. You are simply feeling it for the first time without anything sitting on top of it.
This is a description of a pattern and how it tends to feel, not settled physiology. The polyvagal model gives it useful vocabulary, and I use that vocabulary, but nobody should tell you they know exactly what your body did that week.
If any of this is landing, the distinction between genuinely driven and driven-looking is the one that matters, and it is the whole foundation of Quiet the Achiever. Two women can produce identical work all quarter. One of them is doing it from an engaged state and paying an ordinary price. The other is doing it from a partly shut-down body with the alarm firing on top to keep the output moving. From the outside they are indistinguishable. Day two of the holiday is one of the few moments the difference becomes visible, which is exactly why it is worth paying attention to rather than apologising for.
Why this keeps happening to the same people
Notice who this happens to. It is almost never the person who coasts.
It happens to the woman who has not taken a sick day in three years. It happens to the one who booked the holiday months ago and then worked later in the fortnight before it than she had all year, clearing the decks so she could go. It happens to the one whose family has learned to expect her to be unwell for the first part of any break and has stopped commenting on it.
The pattern is not a character flaw and it is not poor planning. It is the shape of a nervous system that has only two settings available to it: on, and off. And a Friday afternoon is a very fast way to go from one to the other.
If the whole picture is new to you, the plainest introduction I have written to how these states work is the free book. It covers what the nervous system is doing in ordinary language, without the jargon I have had to translate here.
One thing to try this week
Do not try to fix the holiday. Change the entry.
If you have a break coming, even a long weekend, take the last two working days and step the demand down instead of dropping it. Concretely: on the second-to-last day, stop taking anything new on. Do not clear the decks, which is the trap. Clearing the decks means raising the demand right before you remove it, which makes the cliff higher.
On the last day, finish early enough that there is an ordinary evening between the work and the travel. Not a celebratory one. A dull one. Dinner, a walk if you have it in you, an early night in your own bed.
And if you are already on day two, lying in the flat light: the useful move is not to rescue the holiday. It is to let the day be what it is. Horizontal, low light, nothing scheduled. What is happening is not the holiday being ruined. It is the arrears being paid, and they were always going to be paid somewhere.
One caution, and I mean it. A pattern is not a diagnosis. If you are running a fever, if the symptoms are new for you, or if this is happening more often than it used to, that is a conversation for your doctor and not for a newsletter.
If you want to see the shape of a whole year rather than a single break, the 3am post covers the other hour when the body tells the truth with nothing on top of it.
Maeve