Why Leaders Often Get Sick After Their Busiest Season

When my oldest brother died suddenly, I kept working. I run my own business, so there’s no paid time off and nobody to cover for me. My clients still needed me, and there, of course, were bills to pay, so I kept showing up. When things started to settle down, I got sick, and then sick again. I don’t think it came out of nowhere. My body had been running on stress for months, and once I slowed down, it gave out. The same thing happened during my divorce. I worked straight through it, and it was only after everything was done that I got really sick.

I’ve spent 15 years studying how people change, and it still took me a while to see the pattern in myself. The same thing happens to leaders all the time, just on a smaller scale. A funding round closes, or a big launch wraps up, and a week later they’re sick. When you’re the one running the company, that is going to affect the business as well.

Researchers have a name for this

UCLA psychologist Marc Schoen calls it the let-down effect: getting sick after a stressful stretch ends, not during it. Dutch psychologist Ad Vingerhoets studied a version he called leisure sickness, symptoms that show up on weekends and vacations. In his 2002 study of nearly 1,900 people, about 3% recognized the pattern. They tended to be high achievers with a strong sense of responsibility and real trouble adjusting to not being busy.

Not every sniffle means something, and if you’re getting sick a lot, your doctor should be your first call. What I’d pay attention to is the repeated pattern. You crash every time a big deal closes, or you lose the same weeks every year.

The client who lost every January

A client I’ve coached for two years, I’ll call her Michelle, runs a business that gets really demanding toward the end of the year. From fall through December, she’s all gas. And for years, she spent the first couple of weeks of January sick on the couch.

It was so predictable that she’d bring it up in our sessions in November. She’d tell me she was already dreading it — that it was just her pattern.

This past January was the first time it didn’t happen.

Why the people who build companies are bad at resting

When you’re under pressure, your nervous system stays on, and stress hormones help you push through. Your body is still sending signals the whole time, like tight shoulders, shallow breathing or a stomach that’s off before every big meeting. When you’re busy, it’s easy to override them. Once things get quiet, they’re a lot harder to ignore.

I always say we don’t have problems — we have patterns. For a lot of driven people, staying busy is how they avoid feeling the hard stuff. After my brother died, it was easier to keep working than to sit still and feel it. So rest didn’t always feel relaxing. It felt uncomfortable.

And success doesn’t make that pattern better. It makes it bigger. The more you build, the more people depend on you and the more reasons you have to keep going. Just knowing about it doesn’t fix it, either. Michelle knew January was coming every year, and it came anyway.

How to slow down before your body does it for you

More vacations won’t fix this on their own. What helps is learning to listen to your body sooner.

Check in with your nervous system a few times a day, not just when you’re falling apart. Pause and notice your jaw, your shoulders, your breathing. Most leaders are surprised how often they’re running hot while telling themselves they’re fine.

One of the quickest ways I know to calm your body down is bilateral stimulation. That’s any steady left-right rhythm, like walking, tapping your knees one side at a time or crossing your arms and tapping your shoulders. It’s the same rhythm used in EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing), and it helps the nervous system settle quickly. A few minutes between meetings is often enough to take the edge off.

Spend more time with people who make you feel calmer. Pay attention to who you feel most like yourself around, the people you don’t feel like you have to be on for. It might not be who you’d expect. For a lot of people, it isn’t family, and that’s okay. It could be an old friend, a neighbor or a coworker who doesn’t need anything from you. Our nervous systems take cues from the people around us. Psychologists call it co-regulation. Being near someone who’s calm helps your body calm down too, without you having to do anything.

Take time off before you need it, and plan around your hardest season. Schoen’s advice is not to go from 100 to zero overnight, and the easiest way to avoid that is to never hit 100 for months at a time. Spread your time off through the year, and lighten the week after a big push instead of booking the next big thing.

You can pick when you stop, or your body will pick for you

What helped Michelle wasn’t one big change. She started putting time off on her calendar, a few days here and there, instead of waiting for the holidays. She got better at noticing when she was pushing too hard and pulling back before her body did it for her.

Looking back, I wish I’d listened to myself after my brother died. I knew I needed to slow down, but I was so worried about money that I didn’t let myself. If I had, I might have avoided a lot of what came after.

Your body gives you signals all the time. Most of us ignore them until we can’t. If you don’t stop, your body will make you. I’d rather you choose when that happens.

When my oldest brother died suddenly, I kept working. I run my own business, so there’s no paid time off and nobody to cover for me. My clients still needed me, and there, of course, were bills to pay, so I kept showing up. When things started to settle down, I got sick, and then sick again. I don’t think it came out of nowhere. My body had been running on stress for months, and once I slowed down, it gave out. The same thing happened during my divorce. I worked straight through it, and it was only after everything was done that I got really sick.

I’ve spent 15 years studying how people change, and it still took me a while to see the pattern in myself. The same thing happens to leaders all the time, just on a smaller scale. A funding round closes, or a big launch wraps up, and a week later they’re sick. When you’re the one running the company, that is going to affect the business as well.

Researchers have a name for this

UCLA psychologist Marc Schoen calls it the let-down effect: getting sick after a stressful stretch ends, not during it. Dutch psychologist Ad Vingerhoets studied a version he called leisure sickness, symptoms that show up on weekends and vacations. In his 2002 study of nearly 1,900 people, about 3% recognized the pattern. They tended to be high achievers with a strong sense of responsibility and real trouble adjusting to not being busy.