THAT'S MEN:Workaholics run the risk of 'leisure sickness', writes PADRAIG O'MORAIN
REMEMBER when BlackBerry Man and Woman waved about their status symbols in holiday resorts just to make sure everybody knew they had them?
These objects of desire (I’m talking about the phones) were paid for by their employers, so that they could remain in constant touch with their terribly important jobs. Otherwise, there was the danger that the entire financial and commercial system of the West would grind to a halt.
That didn’t work out and to make matters worse, no sooner had the world collapsed around the ears of Mr and Ms Indispensable than teens and college students lowered the tone by buying BlackBerrys for messaging their pals.
What the Indispensables must not do, though, is to say, “Sod it!”, fling the phone in the pool and order another chardonnay. Otherwise, they could end up with a nasty dose of “leisure sickness”.
Leisure sickness refers to the phenomenon of getting sick on holidays. I don’t mean the sort of sickness that confines you to a darkened room, but rather headaches, sore throats and other nasty, niggly things.
According to Christian Jarrett, writing in The Psychologist, highly committed workers and very extroverted people may be at most risk of leisure sickness.
Nobody really knows why. It may be that their immune systems have adapted to stressful lifestyles and are thrown out of balance if they go on holiday and relax. Extroverts may become unstimulated and bored – and this, it has been speculated, leaves them open to boredom-related illnesses.
I suppose making extroverts go on lots of slides, bungee jump and enter silly competitions may help. As for the driven worker, maybe all that faffing about with laptops and iPads and BlackBerries is just what the doctor ordered.
Ideally, they would both scale down their activities in the week before going on holiday so as to acclimatise to a less-stressed regime. Nobody really ever succeeds in doing that though, and usually the couple of days before going on holiday send stress levels up into the stratosphere.
On the plus side, holidays are good for most of us and we even get to maintain that holiday glow for a couple of weeks after coming home.
Some newspaper headlines based on the Psychologist article have been lamenting the short-lived effect of holidays. Well, when I go out to dinner I don’t expect to be wallowing in the afterglow for months afterwards, so I really don’t see what’s so remarkable about the fact that the holiday effect fades over time.
And you have those great memories that might not be entirely real, but that you can enjoy nonetheless.
When holidays are over, we often edit out irritating bits and remember the good parts – so the sweaty experience of trudging up 500 steps every day with five litres of water in 40 degrees is left on the cutting room floor while we remember basking by the pool with a pina colada and feeling superior to BlackBerry Man.
Our holidays, like so much of our past, are edited heavily, but so long as the memories are good, we can go on getting a sense of satisfaction from them. And some of my holidays, by forcing me to be calm and quiet, have allowed ideas to surface that helped me to make beneficial changes in work and in my life.
Talking of BlackBerry Man, I was probably helped in this by the absence of nearby internet connections and by the ruinous cost of using a mobile phone abroad. As broadband becomes ubiquitous and mobile roaming no longer costs an arm and a leg, maybe I, too, will become as distracted as Mr and Ms Indispensable.
Last week, I wrote about keeping your woman happy with cuddles. A male reader with a male partner asks: “What about changing: marry a woman/cuddle her/just marry her/when she needs support to: marry a man/cuddle him/just marry him/when he needs support?” Any thoughts?
Padraig O'Morain (pomorain@ireland.com) is accredited as a counsellor by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. His book Light Mind – Mindfulness for Daily Livingis published by Veritas. His mindfulness newsletter is free by e-mail.