Why You Always Get Sick After Stressful Events or Big Deadlines
Picture this: You’ve been running on adrenaline for weeks. The project deadline loomed like a storm cloud, and you powered through—skipping meals, sleeping four hours a night, surviving on coffee and sheer willpower. Your ego convinced you this deadline was life or death. Your family saw glimpses of you between frantic phone calls. Friends heard the same complaints on repeat, like a broken record stuck on stress mode.
Then it’s over. The presentation is delivered. The launch goes live. You finally exhale.
And within 24 hours? You’re flat on your back with what feels like the flu.
Sound familiar? You’re not broken. You’re experiencing what happens when your body stops being your loyal soldier and starts being your exhausted medic.
What Is Post-Stress Sickness? Why Your Immune System Crashes After the Deadline
Sick after a period of stress isn’t a character flaw–it’s physiology. This phenomenon has a name: the “let-down effect.” Stress-induced sickness after relaxation isn’t your body failing you. It’s your body finally having permission to feel what you’ve been forcing it to ignore.
Dr Andrew Huberman teaches us about stress and immunity: stress actually increases immune activity initially. Your body floods with cortisol, keeping you alert and functional. But here’s the cruel twist—this same cortisol suppresses your immune system’s ability to fight off actual threats.
While you’re grinding through work chaos or family crises, your body becomes a biochemical war room. Stress hormones flood your system, supercharging your immune defences to keep threats at bay. Your body treats every stressor like an invasion, marshalling its resources to keep you upright and functional. At this stage, your body is more likely to be hyper-vigilant to threats and overreact than underreact and let an infection take you down. After all, it’s life or death as far as your nervous system is concerned.
But here’s where things get interesting: when that intense period finally ends, your immune system doesn’t just relax—it practically goes on vacation. Think of it as your cellular security team clocking out all at once, leaving the gates wide open just when you thought you were safe.
Meanwhile, the biochemical aftermath of your stress response lingers like debris after a storm. Inflammatory compounds that were useful during the crisis now have nowhere to go, so they turn inward, creating havoc in your own system. These leftover stress chemicals become troublemakers, sparking inflammation that shows up as joint pain, crushing headaches, and that general feeling that your body is staging a revolt against you.
This creates the perfect storm: flu-like symptoms (body aches, fatigue, brain fog), migraines, sinus infections, or that mysterious “I feel like I’m getting sick” sensation. Can stress cause flu-like symptoms? Absolutely. Your body is processing weeks of deferred maintenance in real-time.
The symptoms aren’t random—they’re your nervous system trying to recalibrate after being stuck in survival mode. What are the symptoms of coming down from stress? Think exhaustion that sleep doesn’t fix, emotional rawness, physical aches, and often, actual illness.
How to Tell if Stress Is Making You Sick
The pattern tells the story. Do you consistently get sick right after busy periods? Does your body seem to wait for permission to fall apart?
How to tell if stress is making you sick: Look for the timing. If you’re fine during chaos but crash during calm, stress is likely the culprit. Other signs your body is shutting down from stress include:
- Brain fog that makes simple decisions feel impossible
- Irritability that surprises even you
- Gut issues that appear out of nowhere
- Sleep that doesn’t restore you
- Getting sick within days of “finally relaxing”
These are symptoms of your body shutting down from stress, not because it’s weak, but because it’s been strong for too long without support.
Think of it this way: during stress, your body is like a phone running every app at once, brightness at maximum, constantly searching for a signal. It works, until the battery hits red. Then everything crashes at once, and the phone needs to shut down completely to recover.
Imagine Recovery That Doesn’t Require You to Crash First
Picture this instead: You complete that same intense project, but this time your body doesn’t betray you. You finish strong and transition into rest without the punishment phase. Your family gets the best of you during downtime, not the aftermath of your survival mode. You become someone who works hard and recovers well.
This isn’t about becoming less driven—it’s about becoming more sustainable. It’s about having a body that supports your ambitions instead of sabotaging them with perfectly timed illnesses.
Your nervous system can learn to handle intensity without requiring a crash landing. The question isn’t whether you can avoid stress—it’s whether you can move through it without paying the price with your health.
What happens after a period of stress doesn’t have to be sickness. It can be genuine restoration. But first, you need to learn how to work with your nervous system, not against it.
Ready to break the cycle? Your body is waiting for you to become the ally it’s always been to you. You can fill out the form below, or learn more about my approach here.