Surviving Con Drop (post-Conference Drop) with style can make life so much easier, and let you keep that post-conference glow.
Reid Mihalko from ReidAboutSex.com and Cathy Vartuli from TheIntimacyDojo.com share.
Con Drop article can be found here:
The Morning After: The Art of Surviving Workshops, Retreats and Conferences
Cathy: Hi, I’m Cathy Vartuli from TheIntimacyDojo.com.
Reid: I’m Reid Mihalko from ReidAboutSex.com, from somewhere.
Cathy: Do you want to start again?
Reid: Something that has to do with sex. NO! They’re already watching. What are we talking about?
Cathy: Con-drop.
Reid: Con-drop. Okay.
Cathy: You have a great article on it.
Reid: On my website ReidAboutSex.com.
Cathy: When you remember what it is.
Reid: What’s Con-drop?
Cathy: Con-drop is when you go to an amazing conference or workshop or you hang out with some people for a really intense weekend.
Reid: People you like. Not your family.
Cathy: Yeah, that can …
Reid: Thanksgiving, that’s a different thing. That’s called depression.
Cathy: Oh. You get home and you drop.
Reid: You drop. You just feel exhausted. You feel sad.
Cathy: You miss your friends.
Reid: You miss your friends. You had this really powerful experience, lots of oxytocin and other feel-good hormones and basically you get back and you’re a little exhausted because you stayed up late having all these great conversations, and all this fabulous brain sex, and then you just feel kind of depleted.
Cathy: Yes. There’s things you can do to make con-drop a lot easier. I love your article. It’s helped me a lot. What’s the first thing you can do to prevent con-drop?
Reid: Don’t go to conferences or have powerful experiences with your friends. Next question.
Cathy: Look away for just a minute.
Reid: Ah!
Cathy: No violence.
Reid: No violence. Basically the main things I would say to do are – one of the things — the main thing you can do for con-drop is one, recognize, “Oh my goodness, I might have con-drop,” or for those of you who go to art festivals or big music festivals, some of those festivals talk about reentry or decompression, and those are similar situations where they kind of built into the culture of the event that you have to kind of reenter the default world afterwards. In knowing that you might have that kind of experience coming back into the real world after an event, just knowing that that could be happening helps. Then you can start to prep for it.
Cathy: You can tell your friends too, that helps, and if you can take a day off afterwards.
Reid: If you can. Not everybody can do that.
Cathy: I often can’t, but I also try not to plan anything major the first morning back at work because my brain is still processing everything that just happened.
Reid: Yeah. The main thing I’m going to tell you to do is start paying attention to the things that make you feel nourished and nurtured in your life and then leveraging, plan those things, to do some of those things after an event. For me, I like taking baths. Smoking a cigar seems to work really well for me. I’ll go do the things that make me feel relaxed and help me reboot.
For some people its exercise because maybe during a conference or the festival, you didn’t really get a chance to exercise, so going to the gym, doing yoga, those kinds of things. For those of you in relationships and you went to the conference or the weekend retreat solo, reconnecting with your partners can be really useful too, especially if that nourishes you. Then you come home, you get all up in your partner, “I’m so happy that I’m home. I missed you so much. Oh my God.”
Cathy: It makes them happy too.
Reid: For some of you for whom sex nourishes and helps you reboot, need I say more?
Cathy: Whether your single or not, reconnecting, I often make Skype dates or phone-call dates with some of the people that I connected with at the con because my brain – I go home and my brain is like, “I’m never going to have that good of a time again ever,” because I’m back in the normal world having to wash dishes and take the trash out and stuff, and just reconnecting with those people can really ease the transition.
Reid: Yeah, and help solidify the networking and the bonding community-wise that you did.
Cathy: Yeah.
Reid: Those are a few things. You can go to my website and read the whole article on con-drop and it’s got some other tips, but we’ll keep this as short as we can today.
Cathy: Leave any tips you have after you read the article. If you have something else that you think will help, let us know.
Reid: Yeah. What are your tips for con-drop? The link is right there.
Cathy: Yep right there.
Reid: The article is there. Leave comments and hit “like” buttons, and do those kinds of things.
Cathy: Thanks everyone.
Reid: Bye.