Leisure Sickness Explains Why You Get Sick On Vacation

I’m looking forward to a few days of vacation before Christmas with one of my missions being to get a flu shot. It may not be the flu but many folks regularly get sick when they take a few days off from work.

It’s a common enough phenomenon that there is a name for it: leisure sickness.
A 2002 poll of nearly 2-thousand people discovered that three percent said they tended to get sick on weekends and vacations. Psychologists think leisure sickness is spurred by all the work stress leading up to a break, which compromises the immune system which could lead you to get sick once that stress catches up with you.

One way sickness gets around is on the means of transportation we use to get around. Vanderbilt University’s preventative medicine says , whether influenza, the common cold, or other viruses, it's clear that mass transportation contributes to transmission. In our daily lives, we build up antibodies to fight the germs around us, but if you travel for the holidays you're exposed to all new germs.

Another psychology professor adds that it is likely that people probably remember illnesses during vacations better than those that occur during more regular work schedules. (Newser)