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.

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