2023-09-08 08:16:55
By Javier Sampedro, geneticist and biologist.
Going on vacation is easier than turning off that internal television that is our mind.
For most, the arrival of September is synonymous with having finished the holidays. We spend the year dreaming of a few weeks of summer rest. While you break your nails on the keyboard of a suboptimal computer, stuck in an office designed by a psychopath who seems to ignore the concept of a window and bowing to the witticisms of a guy with stripes to whom no one has taught manners, your mind flies into the free time towards those paradises where you bathe holding a cocktail in your hand with little pastel-colored umbrellas, kicking mountains in mystical contact with fertile nature and putting your mind blank to purge it of the toxic thoughts that have flooded it during the previous 11 months . Unfortunately, things are rarely like that.
There are people who suffer even more stress and hardship on vacation than working. Surely you know some, if you yourself are not one of them. I have a very close friend who, not that she already gets overwhelmed on vacation, but rather that she has been sleeping badly for several days at the mere prospect of taking them. I do not know relevant quantitative data, but psychologists, neurologists and neuroscientists who know about the subject explain to us here the reasons for this absurd suffering that turns what should be the best time of the year into a source of additional anguish. This may suggest a better future, a change in our philosophy of life that will not be easy or quick, but that is worth exploring.
“For some people, vacations are not a source of psychological well-being, but quite the opposite: a cause of suffering,” says clinical psychologist Miguel Ángel López Bermúdez, from the Jaén Hospital Complex. The first problem has to do with a kind of multiple personality disorder that, in a metaphorical sense, underlies our social behavior, the image we present to others, the self we pretend to be depending on the situation and circumstance.
Don’t be offended by the multiple personality thing, that’s my thing. López Bermúdez prefers a cinematographic simile: “During the months of work, our behavior is subject to a script and we limit ourselves to continuing to play a role, as if we were a character in a scene.” In this work context, we focus on what we have to do to earn our salary, on those tasks, however tedious they may be, that the bosses expect of us in exchange for being paid a salary.
On vacation, however, “the script and the character disappear, and, therefore, uncertainty increases regarding what to do and what decisions to make; people need certainty”, explains the psychologist. No matter how much mountain air you breathe and daiquiris with umbrellas you drink at the hotel pool, no matter how much carcinogenic roast you absorb on the beach and decibels that splinter your skull at the disco, your brain doesn’t go on vacation. The brain does not inactivate even while you sleep, how is it going to go blank just because you have rented an apartment on the third line of the beach? Is that really what you’ve been dreaming about all year?
The idea of vacation evokes different memories and different fantasies for different people. I was a child in the sixties, and I remember with chills the early mornings of August 1 to embark for eight hours in the strict plastic of the Renault Dauphine to try to reach Calpe before the family burned. Most of the journey was spent breathing the smoke of a truck that my father couldn’t pass, I would almost say fortunately.
I also remember the immense satisfaction it gave me to return from the beach to civilization, if the Calpe of the time deserved that title, because in the apartment I had notebooks, pencils, pencil sharpeners and other things that reminded me of my normal life. I grew up in a traffic jam and I am a hopeless urbanite. Leaving the city gives me something similar to claustrophobia and I still don’t like it at my very old age. But I am perfectly aware that those are my hobbies, and I also know that others have others. So let’s listen to the science again.
David Ezpeleta, secretary of the board of directors of the Spanish Society of Neurology, adds other angles that can make our holidays bitter. The first is that we are animals of habit, and in summer we change our habits. “It is curious that at the beginning of the holidays some pathologies such as migraines increase,” says Ezpeleta. “On vacation we change places and diets, we consume more alcohol, if we are overweight we make it even worse, we get apneas and start snoring like ceporros, we sleep badly, we wake up in a bad mood and we can’t even stand our grandmother”, expresses the neurologist with naturalness from Pamplona.
Sleep disturbances are not specific to vacations, of course, but they are often related to summer itself, because the increased daylight hours disturb the melatonin system, which directly detects the darkness of the night. and it normally increases what Ezpeleta calls “sleep pressure”, what usually sends us to bed. The delay of sunset in summer, together with the fact that we spend more time outdoors and that on vacation many people binge on video games and other bright screens, leads to a delay in the plasma melatonin peak and makes sleep difficult.
If it is also hot, circadian rhythms, or waves of daily activity, are disturbed and sleep becomes even worse. These tropical nights, which according to the meteorology are increasingly common, in which the minimum temperatures do not drop below 22 degrees even at seven in the morning, can be very good to contemplate the sunrise looking at the eastern sea with a hangover of 13 /14, but they extraordinarily complicate the life of the would-be sleeper. None of this is free, of course, because afterwards there will be no one to put up with you in the morning.
López Bermúdez adds another angle: “Being freed from work obligations makes it easier for our attention to be directed more to our mind, to our thoughts, and that can lead us to a certain self-absorption, to a certain hyperreflexivity that if we do not handle it properly can entangle us with that always-on television that is the human mind.” We are not used to spending so much time with ourselves, and often we don’t like the result. But we can’t turn off the television either.
And there are more problems. Ezpeleta calls them non-disconnection syndromes. Perhaps what we crave most about vacations during the year is just the opportunity to disconnect, a word that we now associate with turning off the cell phone, but which is much broader and older than that. Work leaves us permanently exposed to a stream of calls, emails, WhatsApp messages, requests from management, complaints from respectable people and other daily agonies that, we believe, make our lives bitter. We dream of being able to get rid of all that for even a couple of weeks. But that is much easier to dream than to put into practice when the time comes.
“There are people who reluctantly go on vacation,” says Ezpeleta. “Their comfort zone is work, and they can’t disconnect if they try. I myself feel bad if I stop attending to my email, because I know that when I return I am going to find a thousand messages that I will not be able to answer, and they are not spam, but issues that I should manage ”. The neurologist recalls that there are also extreme cases of this phenomenon, which are what we usually call workaholics or workaholics, people literally hooked on work. But to a lesser extent, this difficulty in disconnecting affects broader sections of the population. As many readers will know from experience, switching off is very difficult in three or four days. It takes more time and, surely, a calmer attitude than usual on vacation.
What does brain research tell us? Óscar Herreras, an experimental and computational neurophysiologist at the CSIC’s Cajal Institute, warns us that some relevant aspects of this issue are better studied experimentally than others. “The experimental models are deficient in some cases and do not exist in others,” he says. “There is a lot of work in cognitive psychology and psychiatry with which physiologists take precautions, because very often their subjects of study are not scientifically objective.”
For example, people often talk about the relationship between boredom and creativity, but this must be considered an urban myth for now. “As a quantifiable object, boredom is slippery,” says Herreras. “It would be more appropriate to talk about lack of activity, rate of activity or interest in activity, but even this is totally personal, since everyone gets bored with different things. We all know someone who gets stressed at home and frees up at work, there is everything”.
The neuroscientist continues: “When you are attending to specific tasks, such as those at work, you use the brain pathways and structures involved in attention, with strong activation of the sensory organs and nuclei and the thalamo-cortical axis. When external activity ceases, the sensory cortex greatly decreases its electrical activity, but the cortex has many areas and the activity continues in them, even more than before.”
Herreras refers to the areas of the cortex or cerebral cortex, where the circuits that encode concepts and abstractions reside, whose joint reactivation gives rise to creativity, or the generation of new ideas. “That’s why you feel like you think more and better when you’re not doing tasks that require your attention, those that put the sensory cortex to work. But from there to considering boredom as something good, or positive, or therapeutic, is taking a leap to voluntarism.”
The Cajal scientist cites one of his favorite sayings: The devil, when he doesn’t know what to do, kills flies with his tail. “There are people who have creative ideas and others who will have ideas, or nonsense, or simply fall asleep. It depends on what is in those circuits of your frontal cortex and other associative areas, that is, on your previous life experiences. This human variability explains why experimental psychology studies are often weighed down by all kinds of divergences. The diversity not only of character, but also of vital and economic conditions, is recorded, or encoded, in the geometry of the circuits of the cortex, what neuroscientists call the connectome.
We have already seen that there are people with a dynamic lifestyle who become stressed when they stop working, and Herreras emphasizes this: “Boredom, leisure, forced or prolonged rest, can be very stressful and, of course, nothing positive”.
Will doctors end up prescribing rest instead of painkillers? Herreras does not see this as unreasonable, and explains that a current current of thought holds that slow neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, can be caused by chronic inflammation of the brain. And that neuroinflammation is due at least in part to the electrical activity of neurons. Therefore, excessive activity in certain areas, precisely those that process specific tasks, requires a high supply of oxygen and, therefore, blood.
“In the metabolic transfer between blood vessels, glial cells and neurons, many neuroactive agents appear, such as cytokines, and some of them are toxic that must be eliminated continuously, and that contribute to brain inflammation. The cessation of activity will be beneficial in this sense.”
By the way, the recovery of the metabolism and the active circuits that are formed during daily activity requires sleep, which returns us to one of the basic topics that we saw at the beginning of the article. A viable hypothesis is that demanding day-to-day tasks break the bank by reaching levels of cytokines and inflammation that sleep does not have time to correct, especially if you sleep little, badly or both. It is possible, only possible, that the work excesses end up paying then as a slow and cumulative neuronal degeneration. But in science, hypotheses only serve to prove or disprove them, and while that arrives, reliable advice cannot be given to the population. Distrust shamans and happy holidays.
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