You have just gone on vacation, but it is finally a sick leave that you would have needed? You left work on Friday for two weeks, determined to take advantage of the summer, but, from Sunday, it is at the bottom of your bed and not on a deckchair that you must lie down? The classic hit! Which even has a name: the paradise syndrome.
A well-known pathology
“It’s a well-known pathology, explains Doctor Wilfrid Guardigli, President of the Toulon – La Seyne Territorial Professional Health Community. At each holiday period, big or small, it’s systematic and it has nothing to do with seasonality.” He describes: “We go on vacation, we relax and we catch a little virus. Nothing bad – often rhinitis – but enough to spoil the rest.”
A phenomenon, specifies the general practitioner, linked to “a little immunosuppression when you release the tension”. To the point that the paradise syndrome never happens just before the holidays, which would make it possible to shift them and claim sick leave. “Stress promotes resistance to certain pathologies, thanks in particular to the secretion of cortisol and adrenaline. Without stress stimuli, these secretions decrease and we catch the microbes that pass through.”
Sign of suffering at work
The most stressed people are therefore the most likely to develop this type of pathology. Dr Guardigli notes, moreover, that falling ill at the start of the holidays is “a sign of suffering at work”. In other words, if it is better to be wary of excessive temperature variations, air conditioning has little to do with the phenomenon.
Thus, the best way to guard once morest the syndrome of paradise, underlines the doctor, is to “don’t be stressed” and preserve their quality of life at work. Or else, adds the generalist, caustic, of “don’t take a vacation!”
