You're listening to Roundtable.
I'm Steve, today with Yushan and Feifei.
Coming up, once the fireworks fade away and the tables clear, something shifts.
It changes.
Your thoughts crawl.
Your energy tanks, and that familiar heaviness settles in.
But it's not just about exhaustion.
It's your body coming down from weeks of being dialed up to 11 and it's your brain returning to the office.
We'll see if we can figure out How to get over that feeling.
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And now.
The vibrant red of Spring Festival has faded away, but for many of us it's been replaced by a lingering sense of the blues.
It's that heavy post-celebration fog that rolls in once those red envelopes are tucked away and that festive feast is all but done for some.
Maybe for you too, it's even worse than just feeling unmotivated.
You might find yourself actually feeling ill the moment you sit down to rest when you go on vacation.
Scientists call it leisure sickness, and it turns out that when we finally stop our high speed hustle, our stress hormones dip and our immune systems rebound, and all that suppressed exhaustion catches up to us at once.
Then, when we come back to the office, somehow we can feel broken in a way, or at least our brains do a little bit.
But today we'll dive into the science behind why our bodies betray us in this way during the holidays and see how we can get ourselves back on track.
It's true, isn't it?
Yeah.
It is.
Dreading.
Just dreading this morning.
You both saw me.
Dreading.
The first thing I came in and sat down on my desk.
I took a big sign like Here we go again.
Ladies and gentlemen,
Here we go again.
Goodness me.
Well, I'm happy to be here, everyone.
All right, but let's talk about it.
Post-holiday syndrome, it is a real thing.
It's a psychological and physical state that people can, and often do, experience after a holiday, because your body and your brain needs to readjust to your work environment.
And those symptoms might include things like fatigue.
Okay, let's check here.
Are we feeling fatigued?
Yeah.
Okay, check.
Lack of motivation?
Oh, yeah, of course.
Okay, check.
Difficulty concentrating?
Yep.
All right.
Well, Dr. Steve has diagnosed you with post-holiday syndrome.
And I think it's easy to understand because this year it was long, right?
It was nine days long.
Yeah, and the spring festival holiday is one of them.
If not the most important holidays for the Chinese people.
And it's celebrated almost the same way in every family that we eat in a lot of nice food.
It leads to kind of like an indulgence on many things.
We sleep over time.
We stay up as late as we want.
And that's all we ended up as families.
It's that time of the year.
What's 过年?
过年 means celebrating the spring festival period.
So 大过年 is just expanding on the exaggeration of, yeah, it's the time of the spring festival.
Almost like the justification yes yes, precisely of not doing.
Doing anything.
Do not doing, you know.
Want to planning, especially when it come to work wise, get rid of the old schedules yeah yeah, just just don't do any of the um arrangements and scheduling no no no, just relax, enjoy anything you want, snacking as much as you want uh, you know, especially on the first well, the New Year's Eve day, which we were supposed to stay pretty late into the night.
And then, starting from there, The whole holiday is basically sleeping at around 2 or 3 in the morning and wake up right around the moon.
Interesting.
I didn't know about this part.
So not just on the New Year's Eve.
That part I knew everybody stays up late that night.
But it's just kind of the holiday thing that people do.
You'll sleep super late at night and then wake up super late in the day.
Yeah, I guess for a lot of family, for my family, it was not the case.
We remain the usual schedule, unfortunately.
But yeah, I heard that a lot of people just sleep by 3am and wake up perhaps at lunchtime.
Yeah, you know, this is not just the first on the New Year's Eve night that people would feast and play Namajan.
Play poker cards.
But on the following two or three days they're just finding different places and different reasons to get together and playing different games late into the night and feasting on different foods.
Late into the night.
Yeah, yeah.
What was the latest, Yushan, what was the latest you woke up during the holiday?
9 a.m.
Oh, you're really healthy.
Oh, we woke up.
The latest in my lifetime is pretty much around lunchtime.
Really?
Yeah, yeah.
That's the latest in your lifetime?
Yeah, yeah.
It's like, I think that year we had a really, really big family reunion.
And I remember we had pretty much like three or four tables of mahjong playing at the same time.
Oh fun, yeah.
So you can see that then after the mahjong games, we went out and you know, fire up the firecrackers, and then we came back for more mahjong And then the next thing, you know, it's already three in the morning.
And then people were like, oh, we need to go to bed now.
And then you woke up and finding it's pretty much lunchtime.
I made it.
Well, it was because of the Olympic schedule.
Well, let me tell you the time that I woke up first.
Yeah.
And you'll feel disappointed and shocked.
1 p.m.
But now, see, look at Yushan's face.
This is like I'm flashing back to high school, like when my mom saw my physics grade.
Like, how is it possibly that low?
Because the Olympic hockey games were on very late at night.
So that was the first game was at 1140 p.m.
And then the second game was at 4 a.m.
So I was up until 6 a.m. watching hockey.
So I slept only a limited number of hours.
But yes, my wake-up time was much later on that particular day.
That's so impressive.
But yeah sure, having fun and staying up late and eating whatever you want is very good at the moment.
But this is part of the problem why we suffer from post-holiday blues.
Yeah, that's because all of this contributes to The biological clock disturbance, the psychological gaps and the irregular eating habits caused from all that indulgence.
Right after we come back to a sort of quote-unquote normal schedule back-to-work schedule.
So that all contributes to this feeling of loss, a big sign of oh, we're going back to that normal schedule again kind of mood that we call post-holiday syndrome.
And that's caused by a lot of different things, like we mentioned earlier, and that emptiness.
I'm feeling that right now after the holiday.
Emptiness.
It's like, oh, I used to do things according to my own schedule.
That seems to be a little bit of a reversal that people have to go through around this time of the year.
Do you?
I mean, if you look at lists on the Internet, why people feel bad about coming back to the office after a long holiday.
And by the way, this is not.
Chinese culture or Western culture.
This is just human nature.
But if you look at the lists, this one's always near the top.
Workplace anxiety and overload, meaning people are afraid of the amount of work or missed information or pending tasks.
That can feel overwhelming coming back to the office, but I don't think that necessarily applies to us, does it?
I don't necessarily feel the same way I checked our schedule yesterday and I realized that I should be preparing for today's show and I just feel like yeah I'm sort of knowing that I'm going to be part of this schedule and it doesn't struck me as hard but that's perhaps just me you know Thinking about all the scheduling coming back to the, I guess it's because of the, you know, the way your routine during the holidays.
Like during the holiday, I personally basically lost track of the dates.
Like what day is it today?
What time is it?
20th?
23rd?
No.
So then, coming back, you need to sort of you know that you need to stick to some kind of a schedule.
You need to get back on track. you need to start to thinking seriously about things.
Planning ahead.
Yeah, planning ahead and what's happening next month or the month after that.
I think you've just got the post-John Legend blues.
Oh, maybe.
Disappointed that we're sitting in this room with you instead of him.
I mean, for students is another thing as well.
My daughter was complaining to me yesterday, I don't want to go back to school.
I mean, why?
What do you say?
What do you say in that moment?
Do you just say like tough luck?
Too bad?
I'm complaining back.
I don't want to go back to work.
I'm with you.
I'm with you.
Vibing, young one.
Vibing.
Creating that mother-daughter bond that will last a lifetime.
But did you know that it's not only after the holiday that we feel a little bit low.
It's during the holiday we're as.
As soon as we try to relax our mind, we already have what's called the leisure sickness.
That's something that I was experiencing, especially during the first few days of the Spring Festival holiday last week, that I feel my immune system just shut off on me.
Like whatever I eat, usually very oily and a lot of meat in the same time.
In the beginning of the holiday.
In the beginning of the holiday it kicked back with inflammatory reactions in my throat and my guts.
And yeah, that happened to my parents too.
I guess that's like an immune system off-shooting that you don't need to fight up that hard after you relax.
This is the one that I think people may not know about.
Because everybody knows post-holiday blues. right?
Everybody knows, coming back to school or coming back to the office is not an easy thing to adjust to.
But yeah, when you go on vacation, they say that you can experience flu-like symptoms, like a fever or like a sore throat, like you said, muscle aches, migraines, really bad headaches can be involved.
And that can start that the, the minute that a person starts their vacation or starts to relax, and people are calling it that, or psychologists are calling it a physiological, biological rebound.
So you're so used to your grind of your work week and your regular schedule, but then it just crumbles when it stops.
So I find that to be a really interesting thing that we get sick and When we start it has to do with the chemicals that we release in our body.
Yeah because, according to some of the biological and environmental factors, under high stress, our body pumps out cortisol and adrenaline that they can suppress inflammation and pain, that sort of essentially masking a lot of these symptoms while you were busy.
But when you relax and these levels plummet, and then this is the time when your immune system starts to react.
I think it's more like putting back, postponing a lot of your symptoms.
So your immune system knows somehow that you're in your busy daily work grind, so it works harder.
It puts on like a superhero cape for you, but then it just crashes when you don't do that scheduling.
Yeah, I remember one of the podcasters, well, host called Chen Luyu, she said, she shared that she somehow have this biological switch in her, is that when she works, she's fine.
But the moment she starts to relax and taking a holidays she will have this kind of leisure sickness you know, having fever headaches, sore throat.
And she was like does that mean that I'm a workaholic to the level that I'm able to control my bylaw?
Like going through work withdrawal?
Yeah, yeah.
But I guess there is some kind of a science behind that.
Is that It's true on some level that there is a kind of a switch that you turn on when you're busy?
You know that this is not the time for me to feeling falling sick, having a fever.
But when you finish that work tasks and you start to relax, all the symptoms flooding back in.
One of the tips they give to avoid that going into holiday sickness is to create kind of a buffer zone.
But I don't know if this is possible or not.
What they say is you know, don't work at 100 effort right up until the holiday starts.
Taper off your work so that you can kind of slowly enter into the holiday.
And I thought, that's not how things work.
Ideally, if we can, of course, we want to, you know, just slow things down before the holiday.
But, you know, before the holiday, there is a lot of deadlines we need to do.
We kind of need to wrap up on things.
So that you can enjoy a good holiday.
So it's almost impossible.
I mean the pre-holiday period is one of the most stressful times for a lot of people out there, because you have to get a lot of things done.
How about coming back then, coming back into the office?
What can we do to make ourselves feel better?
One way to do that is to adjust your rhythm, get healthy sleep, try to, you know, tell yourself that it's okay.
We're just trying to vibe yourself back to the usual schedule and stop, of course, overindulgence on whatever it is, whether you want to stay up late or want to eat more than usual.
Just try to wind that slowly so that after the holiday is just important to adjust your routine back to the so-called normal.
Yeah, no more 4 a.m. hockey games.
You know, when the Olympics finished, I said out loud, oh, thank God.
I can't keep that.
I loved it.
I loved it while it was happening, but I just couldn't keep that schedule.
Yeah, I guess for you know us combating a lot of this post-holiday syndrome.
The things you need to do is basically, during the holiday, you still need to keep moving.
For example, you need to maintain some of your old habits during the holiday so that when you come back you don't have to face that crash or that sudden changes in your life routine that you feel start to have like a lot of problems.
But the sudden changes are the great things about being on holiday though.
Being able to eat what you want, sleep what you want, uh, wake up when you want.
So I don't know for me, I just feel like um, This is just something that we have to go through every year.
And it's a little bit inevitable because inevitably you are going to eat some more foods perhaps than you're typically used to eating, or sleep a little later or stay up later.
So I think we just kind of have to deal with it.
Yeah.
And my motivation for this whole morning came from the one single cup of Americano I had as breakfast.
You only had one?
I feel like I drank half of the world's coffee this morning and none of it worked.
As long as it worked, it's fine, I guess.
It gets you there.
But according to some of the tips there, one of the reasons that we are feeling that of the syndrome is because the changes of caffeine right.
So it's recommended that during the holiday you just don't cut back completely on your coffee some level of coffee to maintain that level of caffeine in your body, to make it stable, so that you don't feel that abruption.
People stop drinking coffee all of a sudden because they don't need it in the mornings, because they don't wake up until 1 pm in the afternoon.
Well, however you're doing it, whatever strategies you're employing to get yourself back into your own personal rhythm, we hope that you're successful with that.
That'll do it for today's roundtable.
Thank you very much for being with us today.
I'm Steve for Yushan and Feifei.
Have a great one, and please do join us again next time.
