In children, a lot of people mistake them for temper tantrums, but meltdowns are a different animal. Meltdowns are often as much physiological as they are emotional in nature.
After going through my last one, I thought I’d write about it. Both in an effort to bring myself back online, and to help others understand what goes on from the point of view of someone “on the inside.”
While there may be a “final straw” that triggers a meltdown event, that final trigger is usually the tip of a much larger stressor or series of stressors. I once saw it discribed as a reaction to “too much” — too much noise, too much light, too many people. It’s a fitting description, I think.
For me, most recently, it was too much pain, and no end in sight. You see, I have dessicated discs in my back. If the discs between our vertebrae are sponges, then my L4-L5 and L5-S1 discs (the ones where the spine meets the waist/hips) are those hard, dry ones. Conventional medicine shrugs its shoulders at my condition and say that there’s nothing to be done except “pain management,” but even “pain management” has felt recently like 2 steps forward, 1 back, 1 forward, 2 back. My trigger this time was a statement made by my husband that was supposed to be in jest, but made my entire being sink as the ramifications of my current situation and how it’s affecting every aspect of my life came flooding back to me.
Then, then response comes in. For me, it’s crying. It can be anywhere from silent tears, to full-on sobbing, depending on the nature of the trigger and stressor. This is where the physiological part comes in, as well.
This is the big difference between a tantrum and a meltdown. Tantrums are attention-seeking, while meltdowns are not. Yes, I’m stressed, but I sure as hell don’t want the waterworks when I’m in an office with my manager (or in an office at all, which makes me supremely glad that I work from home).
However, despite whatever my desires are, and despite me trying to keep it from happening, it still happens. The best way I can describe this is like this: if you have asthma, do you ever really want to have an attack? Of course not. In fact, if you’re in the middle of one, there’s actually a part of you panicking (or damn near so), because you’re trying to breathe, but failing. You may even feel the attack as it’s coming on and try to stop it before it starts. If you’re lucky, you’ll succeed on your own, but more often than not, the only way to succeed is to reach for your inhaler. No matter how much you want to be able to breathe, it’s just not happening until you can get something that opens your airway.
The physical response phase of a meltdown is the same way. I would love to be able to confront someone in a position of authority and defend myself or handle the matter gracefully when the criticism starts. I would love to be able to power through each day and the spiraling, meandering beeline that is the state of my back with dogged determination and not let it ever stop or get to me.
Unfortunately, even when I see the meltdown coming on, and even when I manage to keep some semblance of calm, I still can’t stop the tears from flowing. Those tears are to my meltdown what the constricted airway is to an asthmatic in the middle of an attack.
The entire process is sort of a bell curve:
In a lot of cases, I feel it coming on. Meltdowns are generally stress-based, and as I mentioned, there’s usually a longer-term stressor that eventually contributes to the head. Even the immediate trigger may make the increase in stress subtle enough to see coming, though.
In some situations, there is even an “aura” effect as the stress builds. These might be smaller breakdowns over the situation that don’t provide the full effect of the major episode, but can foreshadow the approach of that “breaking point.” This kind of “aura” effect is similar to what some people experience with migraines — they get some sort of warning minutes or hours in advance, which gives them the ability to respond before it becomes crippling — if they know what to look for.
I had that. Earlier this week, in fact. I responded by doing the only thing I could do — pull the trigger on a supplement I’d been considering, but that hadn’t really been verified and I wanted to research more. Unfortunately, that’s a long-term solution that, if it works, will save me suffering in the long run, but doesn’t help me in the short term, before it has a chance to do (or not) what the claims make about it. So, I stood in my garage, with a death grip on the walking stick I was using after my chiropractor appointment, crying for reasons any passerby couldn’t even guess.
During the beginning of this phase, you can try to stop it, though as previously stated, it’s not likely to work. However, it does provide the opportunity to employ coping mechanisms, if available, and if caught early enough.
Toward the tail end of this phase, rational, coherent thought starts deteriorating. One of the first things to go for me is the ability to translate a thought into speech. This is extraordinarily frustrating, too, because part of my brain starts stressing because of it, which just adds fuel to the fire as feelings of helplessness start taking over.
The peak is exactly what it sounds like — the time when the meltdown is at its worse. At this point — especially in bad meltdowns — rational, coherent thought is suspended entirely. During bad episodes, even moving takes a great deal of willpower and conscious action.
How to cope during this time and start coming down from the peak depends entirely on the person and the situation. Many people have go-to calming tools or techniques, but each situation has its differences and each person their preferences, and what works one time, in one situation, may backfire in another.
A few tools include, but are not limited to:
- Rocking back and forth
- Wrapping up in a blanket
- Getting under a weight, either on the head or the entire body
- Listening to a particular sound or music
These things provide controlled stimuli, which can help focus the mind and ground the person.
It’s very hard to describe what it’s like during this period. The best I can describe my most recent meltdown is a sense of disconnection, as though I no longer felt like my being was physically contained. Almost like feeling lost, despite being a familiar setting. What finally started calming me was wrapping as tightly as I could in a blanket.
Sometimes, it’s the other way around, though — a feeling of suffocation and claustrophobia. In those situations, a blanket is counterproductive, but cool water or air may work to come back down.
When the meltdown has run its course, there is generally a “hangover” period. It’s a lowish, apathetic feeling, but it’s also a state in which I’m more easily triggered again. Even thinking about the original trigger may very well hit me with “aftershocks,” or smaller echoes of the recent meltdown. I literally feel hung over. Depending on the severity of the meltdown, I may even have a headache, and even when I don’t, I tend to be in that state where I feel like I need to sleep in order to avoid getting one.
Meltdowns are extremely exhausting and both physically and emotionally draining. This is another big difference from a temper tantrum. A child having a tantrum may do a 180 within a couple of minutes, as though nothing ever happened. Even an adult, doing largely the same behavior, can recover rather quickly, since the driving force behind a temper tantrum is usually attention of some sort. Conversely, the driving force behind a meltdown is not attention (in fact, attention is generally the last thing a person dealing with a meltdown wants, particularly if they’re an adult), but rather stress relief or escape from the trigger.
In a lot of cases, coming back down from the peak and into the hangover is less about being over the stress from the source of the trigger, and more about physically exhausting oneself. A meltdown, once fully rolling, doesn’t stop because I get what I want. It stops because I have no energy left.
Finally, there is a reboot. For me, it usually requires sleep. At least a nap, if not a full night’s sleep. Sometimes, I’m able to do a sort of “partial reboot,” where I can function for basic stuff, or can do certain tasks (I’m actually in a hangover right now, as I write this), but real higher-order things are still out of reach until I can do a full reboot. Unfortunately, that usually means that my productivity—both for work and for tech-related hobbies—is shot for the rest of the day.
I wish I could say that I’ve learned ways to handle meltdowns and no longer have them as much. They’re more complicated than that, though. I do have them less than when I was a child, by virtue of being more self-sufficient as an adult and having the ability to control my environment and avoid triggers to begin with. From there, it’s a long, slow process trying to find a way to mitigate their effects once one is underway.