The Hidden Reason Leaders Often Get Sick After Their Busiest Season — and How to Stop It

Résumé détaillé

Many leaders push through their hardest seasons and then get sick the minute things calm down. Here’s why it happens and what to do about it, so your body doesn’t force the break for you.

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.

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.

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.

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