Why Founders Get Sick Right After the Deal Closes, Not Before

About 3% of people in a 2002 Dutch study of nearly 1,900 subjects recognized a pattern researchers now link to founders and executives: getting sick after a stressful stretch ends, not during it. UCLA psychologist Marc Schoen calls it the let-down effect. Dutch psychologist Ad Vingerhoets studied a version he named leisure sickness, where symptoms show up on weekends and vacations.

The pattern matters for business. A funding round closes, or a big launch wraps up, and a week later the person running the company is sick, writes an Entrepreneur contributor who has spent 15 years studying how people change. When you're the one running the company, that is going to affect the business as well, the author notes.

The author's own case follows the script. After the author's oldest brother died suddenly, they kept working — running their own business, with no paid time off and nobody to cover. Clients still needed the work, bills still had to be paid. When things settled down, the author got sick, and then sick again. The same thing happened during the divorce: work straight through, then real illness only after everything was done.

"My body had been running on stress for months, and once I slowed down, it gave out," the author writes.

Who gets the let-down effect?

Vingerhoets's 2002 study found the roughly 3% who recognized the pattern tended to be high achievers with a strong sense of responsibility and real trouble adjusting to not being busy. That profile describes most founders.

The mechanism is physiological. Under pressure, the nervous system stays on and stress hormones keep you pushing through. The body sends signals the whole time — tight shoulders, shallow breathing, a stomach that's off before every big meeting. When you're busy, it's easy to override them. Once things get quiet, they're harder to ignore.

The author's framing: "We don't have problems — we have patterns." For many driven people, staying busy is how they avoid feeling the hard stuff. After the brother's death, it was easier to keep working than to sit still and feel it. Rest didn't feel relaxing. It felt uncomfortable.

Success makes the pattern bigger, not smaller. The more you build, the more people depend on you and the more reasons you have to keep going. Knowing about the pattern doesn't fix it either.

The client who lost every January

The author cites a coaching client of two years, called Michelle, who runs a business that gets demanding toward the end of the year. From fall through December, she's all gas. For years, she spent the first couple of weeks of January sick on the couch. It was so predictable she'd raise it in coaching sessions in November, saying she was already dreading it.

This past January was the first time it didn't happen. The fix wasn't one big change. Michelle started putting time off on her calendar, a few days here and there, instead of waiting for the holidays. She learned to notice when she was pushing too hard and pull back before her body did it for her.

What actually helps

The author offers four concrete practices, and more vacations alone won't do it:

• Check your nervous system a few times a day, not just when you're falling apart. Pause and notice your jaw, shoulders and breathing. Most leaders are surprised how often they're running hot while telling themselves they're fine.
• Use bilateral stimulation. Any steady left-right rhythm — walking, tapping knees one side at a time, crossing arms and tapping shoulders. It's the rhythm used in EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing), and a few minutes between meetings is often enough to take the edge off.
• Spend time with people who make you calmer. Psychologists call it co-regulation: being near someone who's calm helps your body calm down. It might not be family — it could be an old friend, a neighbor or a coworker who doesn't need anything from you.
• Take time off before you need it. Schoen's advice: don't go from 100 to zero overnight. Spread time off through the year and lighten the week after a big push instead of booking the next big thing.

One caveat from the source: not every sniffle means something, and if you're getting sick a lot, your doctor should be your first call. What to watch is the repeated pattern — crashing every time a big deal closes, or losing the same weeks every year.

The author's closing advice is blunt: "If you don't stop, your body will make you. I'd rather you choose when that happens."