24/09/2024
I feel like I should scream from the rooftops, but I felt awful, and I'm really excited about it. I had the most amazing weekend in Canberra with one of my adult sons and a friend. Lots of flowers, lots of friendship and not a small amount of food and alcohol. Just bliss. We went down to see Floriade, great food, just a whale of a time, but Sunday night, by about 10 o'clock, I was feeling just hideous. I didn't realise that it's the hangover effect of any huge level of excitement, whether it be alcohol or drugs, or flowers and friendship, that there's got to be the rundown.
We came back from Canberra after lunch. We did have a flat tyre, but we managed that, I thought, extraordinarily well, not a biggie. I had to do some work when we got home, which I also thought went relatively well,
and then grocery shopping,
and then making dinner,
and then organizing the house,
and then packing away all our stuff,
and then preparing for tomorrow
and slowly coming off that magical, magical high, and by 10 o'clock Sunday night, I felt wretched, absolutely revolting. I felt incredibly ungrateful, like, how after such a magical weekend, could I possibly be feeling so revolting?
This morning I remembered the conversation Luke instigated, about being prepared for the hangover. When you drink excessive amounts of alcohol, the hangover the next day is to be expected. It's really, really obvious and it's directly proportional to the amount of alcohol you consumed the day before,
But I'd not thought about getting exactly the same effect from every other high, whether from substances or activities that give you some a real emotional boost.
Luke was talking about being prepared after the high, for the low, and for the hangover that naturally follows the fabulousness, because it's our body's natural desire to manage its dopamine after such a Magical weekend and so many feel-good chemicals racing around my body that I had simply run out of feel good, and was in this state of absolute dread and revoltingness and must have been right through the night as well.
Monday morning I woke up and I was in neutral, the horribleness was a distant memory, and the fabulous friendship and flowers left me with a lovely memory and a pleasant smile on my face.
The excitement and euphoria had run its course. I'd recovered through the hangover stage. This morning I'm out the other side to being tranquil and neutral.
Thank you, Anna Lembke.
Luke learned all of this from the fabulous book called Dopamine Nation; Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence by Anna Lembke. How amazing is the modern world, I bought him an audio book so he didn't read it, and then he taught me all about it, so I didn't even listen to it. But I feel really grateful for the knowledge, because now I'm not perplexed and frustrated, at feeling so bad last night after such a fabulous weekend.
