First of all, the figures: in the holiday months of July and August, the number of people taking sick leave decreases, according to figures from ArboNed and Human Capital Care. People report less sick when they are on holiday, and the leave figures are depressed because, for example, education is suspended during this period anyway.
After the holiday, the number of people taking leave increases again, but it is difficult to say whether this is because people return from their holiday sick: the after-holiday dip.
Headache, bad sleep
“This is not a medical phenomenon, but a psychological reaction,” explains Redmer van Wijngaarden, company doctor and director of medical affairs at ArboNed. “It can certainly feel annoying, but it is a normal process. Something that is pleasant and you want to hold on to ends. And that can make someone feel a bit down or dread things. But also reactions such as headaches, irritability or poor sleep.”
Ad Fingerhoets, emeritus professor of emotions and well-being, has done research in the past into what he calls ‘leisure sickness’: the phenomenon that people get sick precisely when they are on holiday.
“On the one hand, you have people who say: I’m just tired and I have pain all over. Another cluster were other people who had a real illness, with flu-like phenomena such as fever,” says Fingerhoets.
Leisure sickness
“Those vague pains and vague fatigue, that may be the result of the fact that you only pay attention to signals from your body when you are not too busy,” says Fingerhoets.
“Our brains have limited capacity, which has to process what we see, hear, taste and think. When people are very busy at work, they do not perceive those signals from their body. Then they are on vacation, then they have No more busy distractions, and then they notice: gosh, I feel tired, or I’m in pain.”
But this does not provide an explanation for people who become ill when they return from holiday. Fingerhoets therefore wonders whether this is an existing phenomenon. “People sometimes get sick, even when they just got back from vacation,” he notes. “But that doesn’t mean there’s a connection.”
Stress
Incidentally, he states that change, such as a change in your work rhythm or your environment, causes stress, which makes you more susceptible to illness.
“Whether that change is positive or negative, it doesn’t matter,” says Fingerhoets. “That is of course one thing. Our body needs a stable environment. You also see it with weather changes, that people are susceptible. If the switch from vacation to work is accompanied by an adjustment of your sleeping rhythm, an adjustment of your coffee consumption, or your alcohol consumption, that could be a factor.”
ENT doctor Dennis Kox also mentions stress as a possible reason for a post-holiday dip. “Stress also lowers resistance,” he says.
In addition, there are also medical explanations for feeling sick after your holiday. For example, traveling itself can violate the resistance, for example if you take a flight. “When you talk about upper respiratory complaints: they arise more easily when you are around others. The chance that you will contract something in an airplane is a lot higher.
Air conditioning
A distant car holiday, where you spend whole days in the air conditioning, are also not conducive to your health. “You don’t get sick from air conditioning, but air conditioning does make you more susceptible,” says Kox. “Your nose is busy heating and moistening air all day long. Air conditioning makes air cold and dry. So your nose has to work harder, and that causes swollen mucous membranes. That can give you a cold feeling.”
Finally, according to Kox, it is possible that your body reacts differently to local virus variants. According to him, you don’t even have to travel far for this: “In principle, you can even experience problems in a different region in the Netherlands than where you live, because the viruses there are slightly different.”
2023-09-03 13:13:01
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