Not sure if it is just me but I was suffering from a feel-good hormones hangover after my solo Melaka drive trip… I believe most CDs might have experienced this before. After a good dress up session, you feel so high and happy. Everything is so blissed, so peaceful and happy. However, after that feel-good feeling died down. You realized that you were on the other extreme end of emotional spectrum. You feel easily irritable and stressed, it was like you were on an emotional roller coaster where you were on the highs a moment ago and then you are in the lows soon after.
I am not a psychology expert, but I was just observing this based on my own experience over the last few days ever since I came back from my solo dress up adventure in Melaka. When things started to fall into place and back to my normal guy alter-self, it just felt like I clash and fall from cloud nine. When some things never go my way, I felt so easily annoyed and overwhelmed. I was quite shocked by my outburst or uncontrollable temper, which is quite uncommon, and I started to reflect why…
I felt that the feel-good hormones, namely dopamine, serotonin, endorphins, and oxytocin, were at play. When CDing, we release a lot of these feel-good hormones and overloading our sensory and emotion. That is why even after removal of make-up and the initial phase of going back to become our male alter-self, that good vibes feelings were able to last maybe a couple of days.
Once the brain was in overdrive with these feel-good hormones, we started to crave for more of these hormones or chemical. However, as things starting to set back to the mandate normal male alter-self persona and we starved the brain from more of these feel-good hormones, we started to experience emotion free-fall or clashing. Much like a hangover where we suffered mood swing or lousy feeling after a night of boozing and drinking. It is like drinking bubble-tea with 100% sweetness and when we started to change to 0% or 25% sweetness, we lost that sweet taste in the taste buds… When the brain does not get its dose of feel-good hormones or same level as before, anxiety or negative feelings started to build up.
To exacerbate the matter, as much as I wanted to share my happy CD experience in Melaka with my friends and those closest to me, I was unable to do that as none of my normal friends know about my CD secret neither does my wife. At times, I wanted to share some of the beautiful photos of Francesca with my wife, but I was unable to do it. Sharing a good feeling with others and eliciting a positive response or acknowledgement from them helped in the generation of feel-good hormones. However, since I was unable to do it, I must hamper down my urge to share that good feelings and experience, that further deprive the production of feel-good hormones, sending my mood in a downward spiral with more negative feelings and energy building up…
Having emotion hangovers can be quite disruptive and disturbing. I see how Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde can manifest in one body. I can be quite fine one moment but when things happened or I feel overwhelmed, instead of the normal thinking of “I-can-handle-it”, I just cannot contain that dissatisfaction or frustration. This came as a shock to me and at times, I let the negative vibes and feeling get the better of me and leading to poor judgement or decision at times. Not sure if other CDs experienced the same emotion swing as me or maybe it is just a “ME” thing…
Anyway, if you are experiencing similar mood swings like me, you are not alone. I might not have all the answers, but I am working hard on it to cope with this emotional hangover… Here are some advice on how to handle those episodes of emotional hangovers:
- Practice mindfulness and acceptance. Do not dismiss those negative feelings but acknowledge them. See and understand where the source is. Dismissing these negative feelings will only make things worse as you are just denying yourself from having feelings, be it good or bad. It is normal to feel sad when good times ended, it is human nature.
- Practice gratitude. Be thankful for the good times and treasure them. Keeping snippets of those good moment in the heart and mind and be glad with what had happened. Keeping that little flame of happiness can help to maintain the sanity in the heart and mind. I do keep some photos of Francesca in the Hidden folder in my phone where I can look once a while to recall the happy moments.
- Practice isolation and peace. Bringing the mind and emotion back to a neutral state. It is much like resetting your mind and emotion, or like detoxing your mind and emotion from feel-good hormones overload. At times, a quiet moment is all you need to find emotional stability before you are ready to face the world. Calm the monkey mind and bring it back to focus. Can try listening to some lofi music on YouTube to help you calm down and find peace in solace.
- Practice distraction. Exercise or do other things to make you feel good. Go on an online shopping spree, go run or have a walk in the park. Watch a good show or read a good book. However, I will advise against using work as a distraction because work can be a source of negative feeling generation or it sap up the good vibes easily.
- Practice letting-go. This is a high level attainment much like Buddhism where you understand that all things in life is impermanence. Do not be too caught up with a certain feeling and understand that all things will past evenly, be it good times or bad times. The more you hold on to a certain good feeling, the more attached you are and you will feel more pain when that good feeling diminishes. Learning to let go is not easy but it does help in managing your mood and emotion.
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