Christine Hassler describes an "expectation hangover": the crash when life doesn't match what you planned. It hits three ways: plans fail, you hit goals but feel empty, or bad things happen suddenly. The fix is accepting reality, letting yourself feel it, and reframing the story you tell yourself about what went wrong.
Chapters
When you fight with reality, you only lose 100% of the time. That's a quote from Byron. Katie. It's basically disappointment. It's when one of three things happen. Either things don't go according to plan, the entrepreneur venture that you start flops, or you don't get the promotion that you want, or you're not married by a certain age, the checklist that you had, you're not checking things off and you feel pretty bad about it or something does go according to plan, but it doesn't make you feel like you thought you would. You finally do that, get that promotion, but wait a second, you still don't like your job, you finally quit your job, but wait, you're still not happy. You finally get into that relationship, but you still don't feel fulfilled. Or the third kind of expectation hangover is when life just throws you an unexpected, unwanted curveball. The ones that really are like, ouch. You get broken up with, you get laid off, you get diagnosed with an illness. Someone you care about gets diagnosed with an illness. Those kind of curve balls that really, really throw us off and make us feel a variety of things. This expectation hangover, this grief, this perceived failure, this ending is going to bring up all kinds of stuff for you. It's not just about breakup of this marriage. It's not just about this divorce. It's going to trigger all kinds of things. And if you really milk it, if you really ask, what am I learning from this? You'll never have to go through something like this again because you'll learn the lessons you needed to learn. Learn the first thing in treating your expectation hangover, and I talked about this in my interview with Jason, is to move into acceptance, to stop fighting it, to stop wishing it was different. So acceptance does not mean you have to like. It doesn't mean you have to agree with it. It doesn't mean you have to be in resignation about what's happening. It just means you get out of, I wish this was different. And I want to change the past and I want to just get out of this suffering. You just accept. Accept where you are. How do we actually release and express our emotion is we do that by having compassion for ourself. So there's one part of us that's having the feeling, and then there's this other part of us that's just saying, it's okay, it's okay, let it out, cry as long as you need to cry. If you need to scream and hit a pillow, go for it. And we give ourselves Permission to release our feelings with no voice of judgment. So the next level of the treatment plan is the mental level. And I'm sure you've noticed when you're in the midst of an expectation hangover, your mind is probably going all over the place. And a lot of times our inner judger, our inner critic is fierce. During those expectation hangovers, we can have a lot of self blame. We can have a lot of taking things personally. We can think we're a failure. We can think we're being rejected. We can think we're being punished by the universe. We can go into hopeless helpless and think that we, oh my gosh, the rest of our life is going to be terrible. Our mind can go to a really bad place when we're in an expectation hangover. If we're laid off and we're having those inner critic thoughts of I'm worthless, I suck, I failed, we can go to at least I'm doing the best I can, doing the best I can. In that moment, you want to reframe it to a better feeling thought. I know it's uncomfortable right now, but it's in those uncomfortable moments that we grow the most. So don't skip over it, really dive into it. Know that you're supported, know that there are so many tools out there to help you leverage it and that you will get not just through your expectation hangover, but you will have a breakthrough because of your expectation hangover.
