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“When we are on vacation, spontaneously, we will change our rhythm of life. Our food intake will shift, we will skip meals, we will not eat the same quantities.” Why are we tired when we come back from vacation? For Brut, Dr. Vanessa Slimani, a sleep psychiatrist, explains why it’s normal and natural to feel tired after your vacation.
“On vacation, we live on our biological rhythms, so it’s perfect, we’ll fall asleep at one o’clock in the morning, we’ll wake up at 9, 10 a.m., so there’s no sleep debt, but when the start of the new school year comes and you have to rephase yourself, well, that’s when there are rhythm disturbances because falling asleep at 2 a.m. when the alarm clock rings at 7 a.m., very quickly you get tired, you is sleepy, depressed, can’t concentrate.”
“Every year, at the start of the school year, we have an increase in requests for consultations for fatigue and the complaints that we will find associated with fatigue, sleep difficulties, concentration disorders“. Being tired when returning from vacation is a common phenomenon according to Vanessa Slimani, a sleep psychiatrist. For her, the “wake-sleep” cycle tends to shift when we are on vacation, which would cause us to lose our usual rhythm. “We will tend to go to bed later or earlier, to modify our alarm clock, to more or less introduce naps, which were not there, and all these changes, in our holiday activity, are messages which are sent to the biological clock and which will change the usual rhythm.”
To resume a normal rhythm, the expert advises above all to resume gradually “the rhythm of our professional lifee”. “You have to mourn, already, the holidays, you have to accept to get back into a rhythm where the alarm clock rings at a fixed time. It is also necessary to restore regularity in food intake, because our food intake is directly involved in the regulation of the sleep-wake cycle.”