Emotional Letdown Condition - Essay Example

In life, there are many goals people set such as attaining a degree, winning a major sports event, wedding, and so on, and they focus their attention and efforts on achieving these goals.

The climax of this achievement is high emotional excitement or celebration, but the aftermath is an emotional letdown. Dunn (n.d) points out that, there is a middle space that acts like an equilibrium in such a way that, when the emotions are high, then there will be a time they will be pulled down to settle into this space. In other words, the feeling of emotional letdown results from the process of trying to settle into the original situation. In some situations, the problem arises from a lack of an alternative goal to pursue or a lack of a proper fallback plan leading to a worrying kind of situation.

For instance, several days after falling back bring the attainment of the degree, the graduate starts to feel the challenge of adjusting to the new environment and may start worrying about how to secure employment. The emotional letdown may sometimes result in serious problems like depression if not checked and corrected within a reasonable time. Some symptoms of an emotional letdown are a feeling of anxiety or frequent feeling of fear or panic, sometimes for no apparent reason. In some cases, a person may feel hopeless, withdrawn, and uninterested in anything, or may even have sleeplessness and lack of appetite; these lead to depression.

Moreover, a person may experience frequent flashbacks of events that happened during high times leading to stress and sometimes, the person may engage in alcohol and drug abuse. When these symptoms persist, then professional attention becomes the only way out. The first step towards moving out of emotional letdown is accepting the situation, and then engaging in a different activity like exercising/fitness even if it seems a tall order, to eliminate the negative emotions from the mind (Dunn n.d). Doing new things like reading motivational books, enrolling in community activities, joining a college, starting an intellectual project at home, and sporting are important in transforming negative emotions.

In some situations, one should establish a new goal and focus his/her efforts on this new goal or may opt to keep company/socialize with people fitting in his/her new environment. In the prevention of emotional letdown, a person needs to preplan for the aftermath. With a clear understanding that some emotional letdown is expected after the achievement, the person should establish a fallback plan that will keep him/her occupied thus eliminating the occurrence of low emotion. In chatting, having a continuity plan for the goal is essential in that after accomplishing the goal, one moves on to pursue an even higher goal or similar goal in a different context.

According to Norcross (2001), people who set up and strive to accomplish a one-lifetime goal are more likely to fall out after completion. The emotional letdown, therefore, is a condition that is inevitable but preventable and correctable.