Bottoming Out

I came home after a ten hour work day, followed directly by a church engagement that ran late. After coming in the door, I tried to put my stuff away and head for the shower, but my husband stopped me. He wanted to talk. I didn't think I could. He insisted that we sit down and try. I did. I tried to take deep breaths. I work to get my thinking brain to engage. I tried to get calm. I absolutely could not. After a few minutes of sobbing, I just went to the shower as planned. As the warm water of the shower fell over me, I realized that I had bottomed out. I was tired, hungry, and absolutely running on empty. There are times when life just takes everything out of us, and this was one of them. I needed to do a better job of filling myself up so that this would not happen so often.

What do we need to fill ourselves up? I think we need to start with the basics: food, water, and sleep. Our bodies require these to function well, but we often deny ourselves of them. We live in a busy culture and it is easy to mismanage our nutrition, fail to adequately hydrate, and cut short our sleep. These things seem expendable, and they are, to an extent, until they are not, until we reach a crisis level of need and bottom out. Our livers empty of fuel about five hours after we eat (Brady, 2021). Yet how many of us go longer than five hours between meals? Or forget to eat all together? That sets us up for failure, especially people like me who get hanger, or my self-dubbed "Chicken Little syndrome" ("The sky is falling"/anxiety) when blood sugar gets low (Hartley, 2019). Low level dehydration may manifest as headache or other malaise that does not adversely affect overall functioning, but may contribute to agitation and then crisis when compiled with other contributing factors. Sleep. We are supposed to get seven or more hours a night (CDC, 2017). Yet how many of us fall short of this? I am raising my hand here. My sleep cup is constantly low. We cannot perfectly control or food, water, or sleep, but we can rethink them and reconsider how we prioritize them.

What empties us? Many things besides lack of food, water, and sleep: Work stress. Family stress. Cultural stress. Weather stress. Emotional stress. Factors behind our control, or at least factors further beyond our control than our own basic needs.

Have you bottomed out lately? As evidenced by the example above, I obviously have, and this has not been the only instance. My bottoming out points me back to my basic needs, needs I need to tend to in order to be more full, and to have more tolerance for those things that empty my cup, those things that are out of my control. My husband was trying to help me the evening I melted down. He had something in his cup to give, and to allow him to tolerate my big feelings. I want to be able to do the same for him, and for others. That means getting back to the basics, back to the basics so that the bottom of my cup might not appear quite so often.

References:

Brady, K. (2021, September 21). 12 mindless habits that are secretly exhausting you. Huff Post. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/habits-exhausting-you_l_61489344e4b0175a18347a6f.

Center for Disease Control [CDC]. (2017, March 2). How much sleep do I need? https://www.cdc.gov/sleep/about_sleep/how_much_sleep.html

Hartley, R. (2019, August 1). Four types of hunger in intuitive eating: Physical hunger, emotional hunger, taste hunger and practical hunger. The Joy of Eating. https://www.rachaelhartleynutrition.com/blog/four-types-of-hunger-in-intuitive-eating). 

Khatri, M. (2021). What is dehydration? What causes it? WebMD. https://www.webmd.com/a-to-z-guides/dehydration-adults#1-3