The Two-Month Exhale: When Your Body Stops but Your Brain Doesn’t

I thought I was taking two months off from a podcast.

What I didn’t realize was that I was going to spend a good chunk of those two months teaching my nervous system that every empty space did not have to be filled with only one of two choices: work…..or guilt.

Turns out that was a hell of a lot harder than closing my laptop.

To be clear, I did not disappear to a tropical island for sixty days and drink cocktails out of coconuts while someone fanned me with a palm leaf.

I still worked.

I saw clients. I taught groups. I wrote. I handled business. I prepared for conferences. I dealt with crises. All the normal “Hyper-productive” Cinnamon things.

What I stopped doing was producing After the Tones Drop every single week.

And I deliberately started leaving more space in my life where nothing needed to be accomplished.

Apparently, my nervous system had some opinions about that.

Not Working and Being Off Are Not the Same Thing

This was probably the first thing I learned. My schedule had space in it. My brain did not.

I could be physically nowhere near my office and still be mentally answering an email. I could be driving through some gorgeous part of the country while part of my brain was going: Should I respond to that? Maybe I should write this down. Maybe I should get ahead on that proposal. Maybe I could turn this into content. 

Maybe I should… Maybe I should...Maybe I should. You know the drill.

I had an out-of-office response on my email, but not on my brain.

And when people texted me, I found myself worrying that they would think I was ignoring them. Then I would start strategizing how I could be off while also making sure nobody experienced me as unavailable.

Which, you may notice, is not actually being off. My body had stopped. My brain was still at work. That distinction is pretty significant, especially in first responder culture.

A shift ends. The radio shuts up. The uniform comes off. You get your keys back and somebody essentially says, “Okay, you’re off now. Go relax.”

As though a nervous system that has gone from sleep to adrenaline in seconds for years can look at the clock and say, “Excellent. We are done being activated for the evening.”

That is not how this shit works.

You can take somebody out of the work long before you get the work out of somebody’s head.

Functioning Is Not the Same as Being Okay

There was another reason I needed the break.

I needed to grieve.

I had been through three painful experiences, almost twelve months apart, over the previous three years. Any one of them would have been enough to knock somebody sideways.

And yet I kept going.

I worked. I traveled. I made plans. I spoke at conferences. I showed up for other people. I did the next thing, and then the next thing, and then the next thing. From the outside, my life still worked. Actually, my life was good. Both of those things can be true.

Your life can be good and something can still hurt like hell.

You can be productive and grieving. You can laugh and still be carrying something enormous. You can show up to work every day and still not be okay. We get this confused all the time. Especially with high-functioning, highly stressed people. We see someone producing, accomplishing, answering texts, showing up on time, making everybody laugh, and assume they must be doing fine. Sometimes functioning just means they are exceptionally good at carrying pain while continuing to perform.

Eventually, the body is going to want a vote. Mine did.

There were two days during that break when I stayed in bed and cried.

There was another day when I floated in almost bath-temperature water for about three hours. No podcast. No music. No company. No productivity. Just me, a floaty, and a bunch of things I had apparently been postponing feeling. I joked and said I was having a Daddy Daughter Date with God. There were certainly some things we needed to discuss, and there were things that needed some kind of explanation, a very clear finger pointing at where the lessons were hiding. 

Turns out you cannot productivity-hack your way out of grief.

Annoying, I know.

You also cannot intellectualize your nervous system into believing something did not hurt just because you understand why it happened.

Grief does not negotiate with “should.” Eventually, it wants its own time and space.

Boredom Was Weirdly Fantastic

Somewhere along the road, something changed. I stopped immediately looking for the next thing to do. Not completely. Let’s not get carried away. I am still me. But I started having stretches of time when I wasn’t thinking about work. Then those stretches got longer. And eventually something absolutely bizarre happened. I got bored. And I loved it. Because for once, boredom did not feel like unused capacity. It felt like freedom. There was nothing on fire. Nobody needed an answer. There wasn’t a hole in my schedule that needed to become a project. There was just... space.

I drove thousands of miles. I turned 50. I wandered parts of Route 66. I stopped to look at weird roadside things simply because I wanted to know what they were.

There was no CEU attached. No presentation. No strategic objective. No way to monetize it.I was just curious. At one point I found myself in Oatman, Arizona, surrounded by wild burros, and one of them literally walked into a store behind me like he owned the place.

His name was Ollie.

Apparently Ollie was the unofficial mayor.

I fed donkeys. I collected rocks. I killed some plants.  And none of it advanced my career. It was fucking delightful.

I had forgotten how much joy can live inside doing something for absolutely no productive reason.

Less Than Everything I Have Can Still Be Enough

This may have been one of the harder lessons.

While I was away, life back home did not politely stop.

There were losses. There were people hurting. There were situations I normally would have physically shown up for.

And I felt that familiar pull. I should be there. I should do more. People need me. Except I couldn’t do everything I normally would have done. So I did what I could. And what I did mattered. That was uncomfortable information.

Because apparently I had quietly confused making a difference with being endlessly available.

Those are not the same thing. During one week of the hiatus, the podcast had more than 300 downloads. I wasn’t recording. I wasn’t releasing anything. I wasn’t promoting an episode. The work was still working. Something I had already created was helping somebody while I was off doing something else. That landed differently than any lecture about boundaries ever could. I do not have to operate like a machine 24 hours a day for something I created to make a difference 24 hours a day. And neither do you. Impact does not require perpetual activation.

Who Are You When Nobody Needs Anything From You?

This one might sting a little. A lot of us have built identities around being useful. First responders are especially good at it. You’re the one people call. You know what to do. You can fix things. You can handle things. You show up. Maybe you’re the peer supporter. The supervisor. The medic everybody calls with medical questions. The friend everybody unloads on. The person with the truck everybody wants to borrow.

Eventually, being needed can become so familiar that not being needed feels uncomfortable. 

And underneath that can be an even scarier question: If nobody needs me today, am I still valuable?

I had to wrestle with some version of that too. I spend a lot of time talking about prevention, boundaries, nervous system regulation, recovery, and quality of life. At some point I had to notice the absurdity of building an entire career around wellness while running my own nervous system like a rental car.

I cannot tell first responders they need recovery while bragging about never taking a day off. I cannot preach boundaries while making myself accessible to everybody, everywhere, all the time. And I definitely cannot build a podcast about wellness that requires sacrificing my own wellness to produce it. 

Eventually somebody was going to point out the hypocrisy. Apparently it was me.

You Probably Don’t Need Two Months

I know what somebody reading this is thinking.

That’s great, Cinnamon. I’ll just tell my chief I need sixty days to wander through the Mojave Desert and regulate my nervous system. Good luck with that. Two months was a luxury. I know that.

Most people have mortgages, kids, court, mandatory overtime, understaffed departments, second jobs, family obligations, and about twelve minutes of PTO somebody is already trying to deny.

I am not prescribing sixty days.

What surprised me was how much practice it took before stopping started to feel normal.

So maybe your version is twenty minutes. One protected morning. A walk where your phone stays in the truck. A meal where nobody talks about work. An evening when you are unreachable. One day when you do not pick up the overtime. A hobby you are knowingly terrible at and refuse to turn into a side hustle. Maybe recovery does not always require disappearing from your life. Maybe it means putting little endings into a life where nothing ever feels finished. Tiny places where your nervous system repeatedly gets the message:

The call is over. Nothing is required of you right now. You are allowed to stand down, not just stand by.

And Then There Are Your People

The first part of my road trip was with one of my oldest friends, Tanya. I’ll call her Tanya mostly because that is her name and she requires no anonymity. We have known each other since we were four.

She is Type A enough to want to know what time to set the alarm in the morning. I was at a place where the idea of another schedule made me want to crawl out of my skin. Somehow, the two of us spent almost two weeks together, thousands of miles in the car, and had an absolutely fantastic time.

At some point during all those miles, I realized something.

I have always thought Tanya was remarkable. She is thoughtful where I am spontaneous. She catches details I blow right past. She brings steadiness where I bring momentum. And I had never really told her. I assumed she knew. That sentence stuck with me. I assumed she knew.

How many important things do we leave sitting unsaid, inside an assumption?

They know I love them. They know I appreciate them. They know what they mean to me. They know I’m proud of them. But assumptions are silent. People cannot hear what we never say.

And that belongs in a wellness conversation too. Wellness is not only breathing exercises, therapy, sleep, exercise, and reducing symptoms. Human beings regulate in relationship. Connection matters. Not just having people in your phone. Being known. Having someone you can sit beside for two thousand miles without performing. Someone who remembers who you were before the uniform, the credential, the trauma, or the job became such a huge part of your identity. Sometimes wellness is letting yourself stop being useful long enough to simply be known.

I Came Back Because I Wanted To

Somewhere during those two months, I started asking a different question. Not, “What else can I accomplish?” But: What do I actually want my days to feel like?

I am 50 now. Half a century, which seems wildly inappropriate considering there are still days I do not feel qualified to be unsupervised. But if I get another fifty years, God willing, I do not want the second half of my life measured solely in productivity and output.

I want joy. Curiosity. Rest. Connection. Fun. Work that matters, absolutely. But also a life outside of the work. And that is part of what I want this season of After the Tones Drop to be about too. Not only surviving the worst moments.

What makes a life worth staying for? What makes somebody want to go home after the shift? Who are you outside the uniform? What makes you laugh hard enough that an actual noise comes out? What makes you curious? Who are your people? What happens when nobody needs you? Can a day occasionally just be a day without a deliverable attached to it?

I came back to the podcast because I missed it.

That felt different. I did not come back because I had finally finished everything. I didn’t come back because I had to, or merely because I said I would. 

God, no.

I came back because I wanted to have these conversations again.

There is something fundamentally different about returning to something because you choose it rather than continuing because you have convinced yourself you are not allowed to stop.

So maybe that is the question I want to leave here too:

When was the last time your nervous system actually believed the work was over?

Not when the shift ended. Not when you clocked out. Not when the laptop closed. Not when you technically went on vacation. When did you actually stop carrying it? And if you cannot remember, do not turn that into one more thing to judge yourself for.

Just get curious. Where could you create one small place in your life where nothing is required of you? You may not have two months. You may not have two hours. Start with what you do have. 

Because every nervous system needs somewhere to stand down.

And maybe wellness is not only about surviving whatever happens after the tones drop. Maybe it is also about building a life you actually want to return to when they do.