The long holiday is over.
You try to return to work, but your body won’t move. It isn’t sadness, exactly. Everything just looks gray. The lunch you usually enjoy doesn’t register. The work you usually shrug off feels impossible.
In Japan there’s a name for this: gogatsubyō (五月病) — May disease. It hits after Golden Week, the long string of national holidays at the end of April and early May. But the phenomenon isn’t Japanese. Anyone who has come back from a long vacation feeling worse than before knows it.
I’ve never liked the word “disease,” though. It isn’t quite right.
This is a dopamine story.
What the Holiday Spent
Dopamine has two distinct modes.
The first is phasic dopamine — sharp, fast bursts that fire in response to novelty, surprise, or unexpected reward. New scenery on a trip. A great meal. The next post in your feed. All of these spend phasic dopamine.
The second is tonic dopamine — a steady background current. It is sustained by routine: the same morning, the same walk, the same rhythm of an ordinary day.
What happened during the holiday is now obvious.
You spent a lot of phasic dopamine.
The Hedonic Setpoint Drifts Up
The harder problem is what happens after.
A brain accustomed to high stimulation experiences a temporary rise in its hedonic setpoint — the baseline level at which ordinary life feels “good enough.” When the setpoint moves up, ordinary stimulation no longer clears it.
This is not a new finding. Psychology has studied it since the 1970s under the name hedonic treadmill. People who win the lottery return to baseline within a year. People who lose the use of their legs return on a comparable timescale. Humans adapt to almost everything, faster than they expect.
But the days during the readjustment — when the setpoint is high but life is now ordinary — feel like grayness.
That gray period is gogatsubyō.
It isn’t that the brain is broken. The threshold is just briefly mismatched with reality.
Shu — Returning to Form
So how does the threshold come down?
Here a Japanese framework is worth borrowing: shu-ha-ri (守破離) — a three-stage model of mastery from Zen and the martial arts.
- Shu (守) — keep the form
- Ha (破) — break the form
- Ri (離) — leave the form
For recovery from gogatsubyō, the most powerful stage is the first one: shu.
Deliberately stop seeking novelty.
Same breakfast. Same walk at the same hour. Same song to start the workday. The same clothes, even.
This sounds boring, and it is supposed to.
Dopamine research shows that habituated behavior reinforces tonic dopamine — the background current — rather than phasic spikes. The holiday burned through phasic. Stop feeding the phasic side. Let the tonic side accumulate again.
Within one or two weeks, ordinary life starts to register as “good enough” again. The baseline returns.
Returning to form is not a step backward. It is the grammar of neural recovery.
Ha — One Small Novelty
Once the tonic baseline feels stable, the second stage becomes available.
Ha is the practice of introducing one small novelty. A different bookstore. A new walking route. Nothing big.
The constraint matters. One.
A holiday delivers unlimited phasic stimulation. Repeating that pattern just pushes the setpoint back up. So instead, build novelty on top of a tonic foundation, one piece at a time.
Reward prediction-error research shows that dopamine fires most strongly on the gap between expectation and reality. The gap doesn’t have to be large. A small surprise, on top of a steady day, restores light to ordinary life more reliably than a large surprise on top of an empty foundation.
Ri — Cut the Comparison
The final stage is cognitive.
Stop the comparison itself. The thought “the holiday was good, so this feels bad” is doing the damage.
This isn’t a willpower exercise — it is environmental design. Don’t open the holiday photos this week. Put the trip itinerary out of sight. That’s enough.
When the comparison disappears from view, the brain quietly recalibrates the setpoint downward, on its own.
The hedonic setpoint comes down automatically. You only need to set the conditions.
Wanting vs. Liking
One more piece of neuroscience belongs here.
Kent Berridge and colleagues distinguished two systems: wanting (dopamine-mediated craving) and liking (opioid-mediated satisfaction). Modern feeds, and modern holidays, amplify wanting while starving liking. That is why the holiday felt insatiable, and why returning home feels empty.
The “liking” circuit isn’t moved by the quantity of stimulation. It is moved by the quality of attention.
Tasting the morning coffee — actually tasting it — quietly fires the liking circuit. The same thing, the same time, the same order: this is also a discipline that suppresses wanting and trains liking.
Shu, neurologically, is the practice of attention.
How to Begin
Pick one thing tomorrow.
One thing you will do at the same time, in the same way, every morning this week. That’s it.
Don’t try to recover with intensity. Recover with form.
Same breakfast. Same window of light. Same first song.
The brain, inside that repetition, quietly returns the threshold to where ordinary life can register again.
It isn’t willpower. It’s design.
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What state is your brain in right now?