Welcome to the Daily Ascent. I'm Molly Carmel and this is the podcast, and I always wish existed. A bite-sized on-the-ground spiritual note that can shift your thinking and your outlook on life. To help make us all a little bit more, awake, alive, and ascending.
One of the things that I love most about the work that I do is that I get to help people, obsessed. But really, one of the things I love most about the work I get to do is that people turn around and teach me things all the darn day. And so today's episode is about one of those moments that I learned something from one of my SOS members and my stop-starting-over system. She told me about this syndrome that I'd never heard names before, which I was shocked by.
And the moment that I heard it, I thought, oh my God, I've lived this. My and so many of us have lived this our entire lives, and I didn't know it had a name. So the name of this is called Post-Collapse Syndrome. Here's what it is.
You do something big, and I'm not saying something hard. In fact, that's the part that I've got really taken by. You do something wonderful, right? You go to like an amazing concert, you come home buzzing, and then you crash for two days, or you finish a project you love, and suddenly you can't motivate yourself to do anything, right?
You go on the best, most amazing vacation of your life, and you get home and you can't get off the couch, right? You celebrate something huge, like a friend's wedding or a big anniversary, and then you just feel like inexplicably flat. And the body doesn't really distinguish between exciting and exhausting, let's be clear on that. It just knows something big happened, a lot of energy was spent, and the tab is coming due.
And one of my first sponsors in my recovery program, Alex, taught me this in very early sobriety. She didn't give it this name, but it never left my mind when she said it to me. She would always say, Molly, it's not the event where the danger is, it's after the event, it's the exhale. And here's why, during the big thing, like we're mobilized, we're energized, we're getting it done, we're prepared, we're on guard, we're doing what needs to be done, the adrenaline is really carrying us, but the moment that these events end and the pressure releases, the body finally puts down what it's been carrying, positive or not, right?
And that's where we're most vulnerable, to relapse, to the refrigerator, to isolation, you know, whatever your particular poison is, right? And it's not because something went wrong. Often it's because something very wonderful and very human and rather exciting just happened. And the really cool thing about this is when you know that, like when you can know that, when you have that awareness, you can meet that need to exhale with tender care instead of what happens to so many of us, we get completely ambushed by it.
And so that brings me to our pocket stage today. This is, we've had Wayne Mueller on the show often, and this is from his book Sabbath, which is a book about rest and rhythm and what happens to us when we don't honor the body's natural need to recalibrate. And so here's what he has to say. If we do not allow for a rhythm of rest in our over-busy lives, illness becomes our Sabbath, our pneumonia, our cancer, our heart attack, our accidents create Sabbath for us.
Rest is an essential enzyme of life as necessary as air. Without rest, we cannot sustain the energy needed to have life. We refuse to rest at our peril. Let me read that again for those of you on the back.
If we do not allow for a rhythm of rest in our overly busy lives, illness becomes our Sabbath, our pneumonia, our cancer, our heart attack, our accidents create Sabbath for us. Rest is an essential enzyme of life as necessary as air. Without rest, we cannot sustain the energy needed to have life. We refuse to rest at our peril.
I mean, so what he's really saying there is that our body is gonna find its recalibration one way or another. And when the person in my group was explaining this post-collapse syndrome, she was explaining it in somebody else explaining that they had this big, beautiful weekend and then they came home and they binged on food and they didn't understand why because it was such an amazing time. So again, our body is gonna recalibrate, no matter what, that we don't have control over that. The question is whether we choose it or whether it chooses it for us.
And so our word of the day to day is exhale. As I'm defining exhale today, it's not really the opposite of inhale, it's actually the completion of it. You can't take in the next breath until you've fully released the last one. And so the exhale is not a pause.
The exhale is an essential active part of our cycle because without an exhale, there is no next breath. And we treat the exhale after big events the same way, right? It's something to tolerate until we get back to doing, doing, doing, but what this reading is really saying is that the recalibration is not the gap between the important things. It's actually what makes the important things possible.
It's the enzyme. And when we don't honor it consciously, it finds us anyway. And harder and messier and usually at the worst possible moment. And that's what that post-collapse syndrome.
It's what happens when the exhale comes for you instead of you going to it with awareness and care. And so here's what I want to talk about today. Knowing about the exhale changes everything, everything. Because here's the thing, without this awareness, this post-event collapse, I don't know if you've experienced it, but it's confusing, it's sometimes dangerous, like you just had this amazing week and you just finished something you're super proud of or something that was amazingly heartwarming.
You had an amazing trip, whatever it is, and now you feel flat and depleted and unmotivated and maybe a little depressed and low and you don't understand it. And if you're someone who struggles with anything that puts you at risk in these vulnerable moments, be it food, alcohol, isolation, Amazon shopping, right? Like any of the ways that we reach for comfort when we're depleted in an unhealthy way, the exhale is your vulnerable window. And not because something's wrong with you, but because you're human and your body is doing exactly what our bodies do after big expenditure.
And so knowing this, knowing it's coming, changes your relationship to it completely. And that is with post-collapse syndrome and life in general. When we can really accept these vulnerabilities, we can change our relationship to anything completely. And so instead of being ambushed, we can prepare, we can build tenderness into the days after the big thing.
You can lower your expectations of yourself, you can take a PTO day that Monday, you can reach for people and practices that nourish instead of numb. You know, you can say, I just did something big and my body is settling its tab right now, and that's normal. And I'm gonna meet it with care, I'm gonna meet it with what it needs, I'm gonna honor my needs. And you know, so many years ago, that's really what my sponsor sent to me.
She gave me this, you know, awareness, not really a warning, but she gave me this awareness. She's like, you'll be great at the event, right? Like, you know what not to do, you're gonna be on guard, you have the people to call, you got the whole thing down. She's like, you gotta be worried when you come home, you gotta be worried about the exhale.
And it really sat with me forever and ever and ever because that awareness carried forward. And I would argue it's probably saved me more times than I can count because I'm not surprised when I'm exhausted, right? I mean, sometimes I'm a little surprised, but I always go back to what she said. And this reading today is about rhythm.
It's the inhale and the exhale, the effort and the rest, the big event and then the quiet after it. But we can try to only live in the inhale. I just don't think we do it very well. And I think we have to reevaluate our relationship with the exhale being a failure of the breath.
It's not, it's just what makes the next breath possible. And when we can tend to it in this beautiful conscious way with gentleness and awareness, it can be one of the most important things that we can do for ourselves. So listen, my friend, my gorgeous ascender. If you're about to do something big or you just did something big, good, hard, exciting, exhausting, celebratory, all of the above, I want you to know, get prepared for something to happen.
Get prepared for this exhale. That exhale is normal. I wanna offer you. Maybe you could just build something tender into it, right?
Maybe you can take a half day, maybe take a half day, lower the bar, be gentle. Let the exhale happen on your terms. And so your reflective question for today, what big thing have you just been through or about to go through that deserves a conscious tender exhale? And listen, I am right here with you as senders, trying to honor that exhale on my terms, not its terms.
And if these are landing with you, yay. But like, let's spread the word, the more the merrier. Let's grow this as ender crew. Repost on Instagram, send it to a buddy, scream it from the rafters, you know, you know, because we rise together.
Until next time.