Emotional Hangovers :-S

In our household we regularly suffer from what I call an ‘emotional hangover’.  What is this predicament, you may well ask…and does it involve alcohol?

An emotional hangover is the consequence of over stimulation.  The sensitive souls that we are means that following an excess of excitement, interaction…noise particularly… we feel emotionally bruised the next day. 

So, following a delightful birthday, where I made sure to answer every single birthday greeting in a personal manner….ending with one of those jolly, Chinese food eating, wine drinking, family get togethers where everyone talks at once at the top of their voice ….we all got struck the following day..

How is this manifest?  The answer is different for each individual.

The youngest member of the clan did not wish to wake up and go to his home education centre.  He displayed this by shouting, “no” numerous times, with no further explanation of what he was rejecting, and the tremulous emotion rich quality of his voice sent signals to some primordial part of my brain creating a feeling in me of fear and trepidation.  He then went back to bed for five hours before resurfacing ready to at least deal with the less challenging cyber worlds of Minecraft and Toontowne Revisted.  By the evening his spirits seemed to have made a full recovery.

The next character went into school, but spent the day running from noise and wiping away tears.  By pick up time she was a total mess, distraught about every aspect of day as well as the many challenges of being in the Form 5 exam year she is in.  Every nerve appeared to be jangling within her, and I feared a massive meltdown.  However, on reaching home she crashed out on the sofa, music blaring, then woke up and created an oil pastel drawing of a face and background which clearly demonstrated the overstimulation she’d suffered, with bold black marks showing where on her face she’d physically felt the effects of excess.

As for me, I just got into a grumpy mood and ended up quarrelling with people on whatsapp, and getting highly frustrating with my Standard 4 students who feel Art class is synonymous with circus time.  I did feel a heaviness somewhere around the back of my neck, a kind of pre-flu feeling, and a constant background noise seemed to be circling within my head.   Some of the many beneficent birthday greetings had dredged up less pleasant details from my past so these were hovering around my subconscious colliding with present happenings, not too favourably at times.  It was a basic ‘bleuh’ feeling, which I knew would pass, but wasn’t too enjoyable to live through.

This all links to the fact we have sensory processing disorders, to a greater or lesser extent.  My son is probably the most extreme, most clearly exemplified by his projectile vomiting every time I took him to a mall as a toddler…but my daughter and I can suffer equally.  I had to beg my students just today to accommodate my disability by not drumming on the table while I spoke as it was distracting me to the point of total confusion.  As for the girl, for her it’s largely manifest by her being in the presence of too many people…often at school, but now it surfaces at parties where she loses her balance and has to be literally caught by her friends.

I’m sure everyone suffers from this to a greater or lesser extent and it’s probably often masked by drink or drug related hangovers.  But it’s useful to identify the need sometimes to process…the necessity of taking a little time to settle after a highly stimulating experience.  And to understand that as fulfilling and enjoyable social occasions can be, especially for extroverts such as myself, there can be a temporary knock on effect which is probably not worth acting on except to rest, reflect and take some time out.