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I am blown away by the growth of our little community here in the past couple of weeks. A lot of you found me this month through my collapse videos on Instagram or TikTok. So let’s talk about it, because there’s more than one kind. From the outside, they look virtually the same. But from the inside, they’re completely different, and what helps depends on which one you’re in.

This is based on my Spiral framework, which has 4 stages: the Ashes, Ember, Flame, and Rise. If you want to go deeper, you can read The Primer first.

The Ashes collapse

My ashes collapsed into utter flatness, with nothing underneath. Every night I’d find myself out on the porch, staring into the dark. I didn’t remember walking out there. And it didn’t hurt. I knew something was wrong, and I’d get those little embers now and then, but mostly it was nothingness and emptiness. No emotions and no feelings.

Then other days it flipped. I was overfull and overflowing. There was too much, and I couldn’t hold it together. That was the Ashes too. Flat one day, flooded the next, and never anywhere in between.

I like to equate this to a pressure cooker. When it’s pressurized and cooking, everything looks calm and almost a little boring, but twist that tiny vent knob on the top and stand back. In the Ashes, you don’t control that knob; it flips between calm and erupting whenever it feels like it.

The Ashes usually descend slowly over time. You eventually just resign yourself to “this is life,” or “this is just who I am.” Your life doesn’t really feel like it’s going anywhere, because you aren’t really in it.

The Flame collapse

The Flame collapse is different because you can see what is actively burning away. It just doesn’t feel like there is anything to do about it.

I go much deeper into this in Spiraling Into Control, but for me, it was serving at my church. My divorce had been finalized, and I had begun dating again. I was excited to share my new relationship with someone I had thought was a close friend. Instead of sharing my joy, she was appalled at my “behavior” and threatened my position in the church. I watched as this fake facade of friendships burned away. All of a sudden, that was gone, and I sat there thinking, well, I don’t know what to do now.

Those things needed to go. They needed to be burned away. But it felt like my whole life was actively disappearing in front of me.

That’s the main difference. In the Ashes, things fade out without you noticing. In the Flame, you’re sitting there consciously watching things burn, and you have feelings about it. You’re pissed off that certain people don’t want to be around you anymore. You’re scared because you don’t know what the next step is. The Ashes are empty. The Flame is desperate.

If you’re in the Ashes right now

Look for the embers. They’re the little sparks that tell you something’s not right and that there’s more than this.

When you find one, hold it. Don’t explode it into a fireball (that’s a whole different article), where you grab that spark and change your whole life overnight. Just look at it. Figure out where it came from, and why it’s sparking now.

I want you to hear that there is something more. It’s going to be slow, and the embers are going to be tiny. But finding those tiny embers is what’s going to help you climb out of the Ashes collapse.

If you’re in the Flame right now

It hurts, and it sucks. I’m not going to pretend otherwise.

But the things burning away were serving your costume and your mask. They weren’t serving the person underneath. And there is a person underneath, one you’re ready to be introduced to.

That’s why I really discourage looking backward. When you say “I just want to be who I was before,” what you’re asking for is the costume back. I get why. Everything seemed fine when you were wearing it. You were the yes person, doing everything everyone wanted, the good little soldier. It felt safe. It wasn’t serving you.

The Flame is about finding a way to serve yourself. It means you have a role to play in your own life, and a say in what happens in it.

So which one are you in?

If you’re flat, or swinging between flat and flooded, you’re probably in the Ashes. Start looking for embers. If you’re watching your life burn and you’re furious and scared about it, you might be in the Flame. It feels worse, and that doesn’t mean you’re going backward.

Not sure? That’s what the You Are Here assessment is for: youarehere.laurentobey.com

Say it was hard, and people nod. Say it was trauma, and suddenly you’re the one being dramatic. Because the word hard is vague, and vague lets everyone off the hook.

When we hear the word trauma, most of us immediately jump to the worst-case scenarios. The PTSD that soldiers come home with. The people who lived through the worst day of their lives. But then there’s everything else. Those are the small cuts.

If you think of your life like a piece of paper, PTSD is a cut straight down the middle. It’s obvious, and it’s impossible to miss that it’s changed the shape of your life. But complex PTSD is different. It’s those tiny, small things. But no, before you come at me, it’s not every negative experience. The things that count are the ones that alter the course of your life, or how you move through it.

And how you move through it is the important piece. It’s the times you swallow what you want to say just to keep the room calm. The decisions you make around someone else’s needs, someone else’s mood, instead of your own.

Trauma doesn’t always feel like trauma. Sometimes it just feels like keeping the peace. But each of those swallowed sentences is a tiny shave off that piece of paper. And over time, the paper gets smaller and smaller without you noticing. Until one day you look down and wonder where it all went.

Right before I got married, my mom and I went shopping. He and I had decided we wanted a rustic wedding, and I really wanted to wear cowboy boots under my dress. So my mom offered to buy me a pair. Her treat.

And he said to me, “Well, what about me? Why don’t I get new boots?”

I swear, I don’t know how I didn’t clock this man's audacity sooner.

When my mom and I got in the car, she asked out loud why she would buy his boots. I could already feel where the night was going. She bought mine anyway, and we had a great day out together.

After she left, he was upset. She’d gotten me something, and he hadn’t gotten anything. So I told him I’d buy him new boots. We went out, he picked the pair he wanted, and I paid for them. We weren’t married yet. No joint account. It came out of my money.

By then I’d stopped expecting to keep anything good for myself. Something nice would show up, and I’d already be bracing for what it would cost me later.

So my mom bought me boots so I wouldn’t have to spend my own money. And I spent my own money anyway. On his.

There’s a name for what that costs you.

Let’s put our lab coats on for just a minute and talk about allostatic load. That’s the fancy science word for it. I guess that’s what happens when you cope by reading scientific research papers at two in the morning. It’s the wear and tear on the body when the stress never fully switches off. Your system is built to brace and then stand down. Mine just never got to the second part.

In 1993, McEwen and Stellar wrote a paper called “Stress and the Individual.” What they found was a reframe for stress. Before that, people thought of stress as one bad event. But what they figured out is that the system in your body that’s supposed to switch off sometimes stays on, when the stress keeps coming and you never get relief from it.

That’s what explains why the same stress wrecks one person and not another. It’s cumulative, and it’s individual. It’s based on your own history, and your own load.

Think back to that small piece of paper. Two people can go through the exact same event. For one, it’s the last shave, the one that finally makes them look down and see how much smaller their paper has gotten. For the other, it’s the first mark on the page, barely a line.

Ultimately, it’s your life and your experiences. You can call it what you want.

But until we start calling it what it is, it keeps getting minimized. By you, and by the people around you. And the more it gets minimized, the more it hurts. Not just you. Because you never know what someone else is carrying when they hear you wave yours away.

Tuesday, November 10th, 8:00 PM Central

Free | Live | Q&A

The holidays run on the assumption that someone will absorb the gap between what a gathering requires and what anyone actually has to give. Someone closes it. If you’re reading this, you already know who that someone is.

This is a working session, not a pep talk.

We’ll go through what the season actually costs you in capacity, not money.

• Which obligations are load-bearing and which ones you inherited by default and never questioned.

• What to do when you’re operating at 40% in a room full of people acting like you’re at 90.

• How to decline something without it becoming the story of the year.

• What happens when you show up as who you are now, in front of people who were attached to the version of you that never said no.

We’ll also plan for January, because that’s usually when the bill arrives and almost nobody sees it coming.

Bring your actual November, not the one you’d rather be discussing. The specific dinner, the specific phone call, the specific person.

What’s included

Everyone who shows up gets the live session with Q&A, plus the full recording and transcript, yours to keep.

Paid members also get the Holiday Survival workbook — your obligations, your capacity, and your actual plan. Plus additional perks HERE.

This one’s free. No catch. I’d rather have you in the room.

You would be told that is high-functioning burnout, a phrase TikTok is fond of. Everyone wants to see how you can keep putting in the work and still come away feeling empty.

Social media will have its way with the story, but it leaves out the finer points. By rights I am not even a case of burnout; those who are familiar with me have made sure of that.

Take my previous position for instance. For a year and a half I was there, did what was required of me at meetings and in my duties, and had no feelings about it. I cared once upon a time until the company took a turn I could not support. From the outside you would not have noticed.

Things were in order at home as well. The housework was done, the kids had their homework and their activities. My husband is quick to point out I have a knack for it, or so he says, my post-layoff superpower.

In a sense I was the very picture of being burnt out. But let us don our lab coats and look at the definition rather than some study.

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Some would have you believe the World Health Organization came up with burnout in 2019. It was in the ICD-10 well before then. The WHO simply put a finer point on it. An occupational phenomenon, they term it, “not classified as a medical condition” but something you may put down as a reason for a doctor’s visit. They have three criteria: exhaustion, a certain cynicism or distance from your job, and an inability to be as effective.

One should not read too much into the third. Mind Garden, publishers of the Maslach Burnout Inventory, would tell you professional efficacy is a matter of how you value your own contribution, not someone else tallying your results.

There is no such thing as a burnout score. The 2016 manual has done away with cutoff scores, not modified them but eliminated them as arbitrary and unreliable. You won’t find an official threshold if you are looking for one.

And here is what is overlooked. According to the WHO, burnout is for work only. Not the kids’ affairs or schoolwork or the house. Those are not jobs.

I see a figure bandied about and put to poor use. A July 2025 study by Dr. Michelle McQuaid and colleagues of 1,000 workers in Australia had 55% of them “quietly cracking”, her report says, and thus 6.2 times more prone to clinical burnout. Put little stock in it. The study is self-reported and there is no peer review. “Clinical burnout” is not a diagnosis the WHO would recognise. A survey cannot put a name to what is not there. Yet the pattern of the quiet strug­gler is undeniable and they are not shielded from it.

That is where it becomes a mess. Burnout is meant to pertain to your job, which is logical enough if you think work is the sole source of your depletion. More often it is the endless runaround of forms and prescriptions and schedules. Burnout does not cover that.

At 3pm no one is interested in your state of mind, provided you keep churning out the goods. You are rewarded for the performance.

We call this Flame in the Spiral, or the precursor to it. What is called for is some direction and an honest appraisal of whether you are making a choice in any of it. A curious question to pose in the middle of a good quarter. Don’t go expecting a five-step plan or to be counselled on conserving your energy by one who has no capacity for refusal.

The definition is open to interpretation and there is no threshold. Why make a wait of it? Put it to yourself: at what point has work been anything but a checklist? And for the sake of your steady output, what have you put on the line? Your evenings, your friends, another person’s patience?

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The answers are there. As for the third part, let it come when it will; people make a mystery of it for no reason.

With Flame you might think you are up to more. In truth you have made room to stop. It is a choice not a reaction. Dan Siegel would term it response flexibility, one of his patients put it as pausing before you make a move.

From where they stand, high-functioning burnout and Flame are indistinguishable. They see a person who can be relied on to get things done. But look at the reserves. With one, the exertion has used up every last bit of energy. With the other there is still some in reserve to pause.

You will know from the way a cancellation sits with you. If you are panicking you are holding on by a thread. Relief tells you the energy is returning.

One could be forgiven for wanting to put the definition aside. There is nothing to be had from qualifying for burnout, it is not an ailment, there is no test or treatment. Should the exhaustion become physical or worse, put the definition to one side and make an appointment with a doctor. The issue is how to maintain a sense of effectiveness.

Don’t bother with the strategies that make you feel better for a minute, they don’t address the problem. When the disparity between expectation and what you have to give is protracted, something has to give and it is often the notion that what you do matters.

There are two ways to go about it. You can contain it. A matter of numbers not boundaries. How many late responses are you putting out? How many evenings? Going the extra mile unasked? For now the number is whatever comes in. Uninspiring but you have to do it.

Or you can provide some direction. Flame is energising but unless you put your mind to it, the energy will be expended on the thing making the most noise, which tends to be someone else’s priority. That is not self-care, it is simply not letting your schedule have its way with you.

Then there are weeks where nothing you do is going to fix it. These seasons arrive ready or not. Flame is what you have for those times. This is of more import than when things are easy. The gap doesn’t present itself in the hard season, it is already there. Flame affords you the space so you have something to show for it when it gets difficult.

It has its price. You will lose what you like as well as what pains you. Any friendship predicated on your giving will be the first to change course once you cease to provide. I have put pen to paper on this in Nobody Told Me I’d Lose the Friends Too, of the place I held in the group only so long as I was giving. Then the extras go, mostly obligations of my own making.

High-functioning burnout runs on a simple premise: you don’t need anyone; you take it all on. To require help is a failure in your eyes, so youwill make your work perfect come what may. It is not a display of strength; it leaves you inexplicably spent, even if the results are flawless.

It is a loss, in a manner of speaking, not progress.

What is most difficult in Flame is to concede it. The load is too much, and I am done with this kind of life. To say only the former is despair, the latter is denial. Most cannot hold both.

Time will see to the third question. You will decide whether to judge yourself or leave it to others.

Hello, my lovely friends!

I want to catch you up on all the changes around here lately.

You’ve probably noticed the new name: The Cost of Functioning.

So many of us are holding it all together, getting everything done, and looking completely fine from the outside, and that’s exactly why nobody asks what it’s costing us. Including us. Functioning by everyone else’s definition comes with a bill, and it usually shows up as exhaustion, illness, grief, or a life that doesn’t quite feel like yours.

Everything I write, film, and record now lives in one place under that idea.

Here’s what you can expect moving forward. Everything falls into five categories:

• Through trauma and grief. This is the OG for my long-time readers. What trauma and loss cost, and why healing isn’t a finish line.

• At work. What it costs to be the one everyone escalates to and nobody checks on.

• In the body. When your body sends bills nobody will read.

• At home. The cost of functioning inside a good relationship, where nobody’s the villain, and you still find yourself disappearing to make it work.

• Underneath it all. The Spiral framework itself, the science behind it, and the deeper pieces that tie everything together.

Then, each week, I will send a Weekly Digest like this (usually shorter). I will include the new articles, resources, and upcoming events. It may also contain digest-only material each week, hint hint wink wink.

Now, I want you to be in charge of your own inbox. I made a SIMPLE one-question survey asking how often you want to hear about new articles, videos, podcast episodes, and resources.

Answer 1 Question

And if this publication isn’t for you anymore, I totally get it! No hard feelings if you need to unsubscribe. I’ll miss you, and you can always find me here or on TikTok.

Talk soon,

Over the past 2 weeks, I have looked into each terrain of The Spiral through the lens of Taylor Swift’s four new songs on The Encore. There is 1 article per song and my final thoughts.

Free posts will always help you name what’s happening to and around you. Paid is where we actually do something about it.

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• Deep dives. Every free piece names a problem. Its paid companion walks you through what to do about it, like the Crash Audit for the days after you finally stop, or the Capacity Ledger for finding out what an ordinary week is really costing you.

• A weekly micro-moments thread. Once a week, we share the smallest thing that felt safe. Answering the phone. Sending the text without rereading it ten times. It sounds tiny, and that’s the point: your brain learns safety through repetition, not size. I’ll be in there with you.

• Your questions, answered. Once a month, I’ll take some of what members are carrying and respond.

• The tools. Worksheets you can actually use, like the Capacity Ledger and the Crash Audit, yours to keep.

If you’re already a paid member, thank you. You’re the reason I get to keep doing this.

When I first started listening, Patient Zero captured me immediately because it’s so open about what it’s about. But as I went through this series, I realized Pink Clouding had the most depth of all of them.

Pink clouding is a term used heavily in the addiction community, but people outside it never really knew what it meant. And I know that, because everything I’ve seen written about this song quotes the exact same Google AI answer you get when you type in “what is pink clouding.”

I’ve been mapping the spiral for years, for myself and for other people, and one glaring piece was missing until this song came out. And that’s what completely knocked me on my ass, because I found a hole in my own framework.

The original spiral said:

• Ashes: the crash, when functioning finally runs out.

• Ember: the first flicker of seeing where you are.

• Flame: the mask burns off.

• Rise: you get to be who you are, and you get back there faster each time.

As I listened to these four songs and arranged them, in my own order, into quite literally a perfect spiral, I realized what my map had been missing all along.

The ashes are not always a crash. Sometimes the ashes look like a huge surge of energy and the ability to do so much more than you ever could before. And actually feel good about it.

When I first mapped the spiral, I built it from my own two big identity spirals, my divorce and my layoff. Both started in a negative, hollow place. The ashes were emptiness. I felt like there was no hope. But Pink Clouding showed me you can be in the ashes and still feel good. You can feel great, even think you’re doing amazing things, and yet still be living your life slightly to the left. Happy, but empty. Happy, but still not you.

The reason pink clouding still lives in the ashes is the cost that comes when those pink clouds begin to clear. When they clear, you start seeing the emptiness. You see that what you’re doing isn’t actually moving your life forward or addressing the elephant in the room. She even names it in the song, gray-rocking where the arrow hit. Gray-rocking is a term that comes from abusive relationships where you act completely unfazed or uninterested in what the abuser is doing. When you’re pink-clouding, you’re gray-rocking yourself. You use those pink clouds to ignore the real wound.

When I was in one of my ashes stages, I turned to research. I wanted to know everything about what I’d gone through, what complex trauma was, how it happened, where it came from. It felt like moving forward. But what I was really doing was staying in the exact same place, looking busy. Staying up too late. The same way I threw myself into writing late at night and called it progress.

That brings me to Patient Zero, the ember. The first time through, I saw myself in it, which hit hard enough. But by the third or fourth listen, I caught what it was doing, then the video just brought it straight to the eyes. In the video, Taylor’s ghost is handing Dakota Johnson ember after ember, and she doesn’t see them at first. That’s how it works. The flickers come while you’re still in it, and the whole task is taking a second to notice them.

Then Babylon, the flame. The performance starts peeling away. The watches, the lifestyle, the image built to portray a certain life, all of it burning away. And what’s left underneath is what got abandoned a long time ago. Love. The truth of who you are. Listen to the choruses. It goes from “‘til it’s gone” to “it’s almost gone.” Almost. It’s not gone yet. Even when the performance burns off, something is still underneath to find.

And Cleveland is what is underneath. The Rise. People are going to say things. People will always have opinions. But when you’ve burned away everything you hid behind to avoid criticism, you get to stand there and say, "I am who I am." Take it or leave it.

That’s the whole spiral, right there in four of, probably, the most criticized songs. Critics have taken a lot of different views of this album, but almost all of them land on the same note. They say it’s too simple. I’ve even seen social media takes saying she had to dumb it down so Travis could understand it, which is one of the most ridiculous things I’ve heard after diving into these songs. They aren’t simple. They’re clear. And clarity is what you get when you finally have enough time to sit in the rise, not before it. They say she self-references, but who actually knows what, or who, she’s referencing. She’s even said some of the songs are about friends, and people still won’t let it go. And then they say it’s superfluous. But I think that’s the whole point. Time after time, you see them judging the outside and missing what the song carries underneath.

Patient Zero, the ember. Pink Clouding, the ashes. Babylon, the flame. Cleveland, the rise. It’s not a straight climb. It’s a journey you go on time after time. The rise isn’t a finish line. But you learn to get back there faster every time.

So take a second and look. Where are you right now, in the bigger spiral and the smaller ones? Even if you feel good, are you happy ashes or sad ashes? Or are you mid-flame, everything barreling down around you, and you don’t know what you’re going through?

That’s the question this whole series was for. Where are you right now?

The noise

The first verse of “Cleveland!” is basically a highlight reel of everything people have said about her. She’s not a girl’s girl. Why is she dressed like that? She’s not even that cute.

It hasn’t stopped. This week alone, I read one article saying her new songs are stuck in high school, and another reminded me she was criticized for her previous album for being too dark and swearing too much, people even called her a witch. Different verdicts, same comment section: poor little billionaire. Now people are upset she hasn’t released her wedding photos, as if choosing to be a singer-songwriter meant choosing no privacy, or choosing to stop being human.

People see you from wherever they’re standing in their own life, with their own hurts, and whatever they decided about you before you ever opened your mouth. One critic hears high school. Another hears too much darkness. Both verdicts say more about where the critic is standing than about her. But when you’re on the receiving end, you feel it all. You take in the negative, and you never get to see what’s creating it.

It’s easy to say criticism shouldn’t hurt, especially when it’s aimed at someone with money and famous friends. But she still has a human nervous system and a human brain, and there’s research showing it. In a 2003 study published in Science, Naomi Eisenberger and her colleagues found that being socially excluded activated some of the same brain regions involved in physical pain. Rejection isn’t a figure of speech. Your brain processes it a lot like a physical injury.

If a regular person opened Facebook and found friends and strangers alike calling her these things, we’d feel terrible for her. People would reach out and comfort her. When it’s someone famous, she isn’t allowed to hurt. It’s just the media. It’s just people talking: poor little billionaire.

So when Taylor writes about shame, she’s writing about real injury. The same goes for the rest of us.

Seen for real

This whole series has been about masks.

In Pink Clouding in the Ashes, capacity came back all at once, and we used it to build a version of ourselves we wanted to be. It was still someone we created, and it fell away because it wasn’t true. That’s why, when the pink cloud lifted, she walked away. She wasn’t the person she had put forward.

In Patient Zero in the Ember, she’s watching another woman fall for the man who dimmed her. He charmed everyone, and he loved how everybody loved him more than he loved either of them. He saw the mask and loved what it reflected back, and never met what was underneath. Being seen by the wrong person is how the light gets taken.

In Babylon in the Flame, he’s climbing for an image while she’s home hanging Christmas lights, trying to be what he wants, until the mask burns off and the truth underneath shows. That part is harder than it sounds. When you’ve worn a mask long enough, the face underneath feels like a stranger’s.

“Cleveland!” is what comes after. She meets someone who loves the parts she was criticized for. He likes that she’s quirky, that she’s silly, that she dances like nobody’s watching when everybody is. Then he took her to Cleveland, his hometown, to meet his people. Being seen by the right person looks like being woven into his actual life, not kept out of the picture.

Being loved for the image is exhausting, because you have to keep the image up. Being loved underneath it is where you finally get to rest.

I’ve lived all three of those songs. I’ve spent a pink cloud too fast, been dimmed by someone who only saw the mask, and decorated a house for someone else’s image. Then I found my own Cleveland.

Co-regulation

One Christmas, Scott was helping me put together this climbing dome thing for the kids in the backyard. It had a gajillion and a half pieces, and none of them seemed to fit where they should. I got so irritated that I threw a couple of pieces on the ground and had a full temper tantrum.

He just laughed and kept building.

That’s when I realized he wasn’t going to run away because I was being me. He loved me with all of it, flaws included. We complement each other. I don’t have to pretend to be someone I’m not around him.

That’s co-regulation. Your nervous system settles in the presence of someone else’s calm. It doesn’t have to be a partner. I have a whole chapter about this in Spiraling Into Control. It can be a best friend. It can be a parent. It can even be a dog. One study of 240 married couples measured stress responses with a spouse in the room, a friend, or a pet, and pet owners had the lowest reactivity and quickest recovery when their pet was there.

Having a co-regulation partner isn’t the same as using one, though. Co-regulation works when the presence is steady, when it feels safe, and when you actually let yourself lean on it. A dog in the next room while you doom-scroll isn’t co-regulation. A dog’s head in your lap while you breathe is. If the person you’re leaning on is as dysregulated as you are, you’re just two storms inside the same teacup.

The Rise

For me, Rise means becoming who I am.

It doesn’t mean the Spiral is over. There will be more Ashes, more Embers, more Flames. But because I’m grounded and I know who I am, I get back to the Rise, back to me, quicker every time.

Scott was the one who co-regulated me through the hard times at first. What that taught me is to be myself whether he’s in the room or not.

That’s what I hear in “Cleveland!” The criticism didn’t stop. She just has somewhere to land now, and it rolls off faster.

That’s the whole song in four words. You don’t have to like me. I like me, and he likes me. Sounds like a you problem, not a me problem.

So, where do you land?

• Who gets the version of you that’s under the mask?

• What’s your calming presence: a person, a place, a dog?

• When criticism hits, how long does it take you to find your way back to yourself?

If you don’t have an answer to the second one yet, start there. You don’t need a Travis. You need one presence that doesn’t flinch when you’re being you.

Everyone wants to talk about this song as a miserable guy who just can’t accept his life. There’s so much more to it than that, and if we get stuck on the bad-relationship aspect, we miss the real lesson.

The ladder

The song opens with someone who’s never satisfied. The neighbor’s lawn looks better. The hand-me-downs should have been new. There’s always a next job, a next thing, a next rung. They feel suffocated by their current life.

Then the chorus hits, and it uses a song as a metaphor for a life.

One day, that song, that life, isn’t available anymore. The life you couldn’t stand turns out to be the one you wanted all along. You don’t know how fantastic it was until it's gone.

I’ve been on that ladder. I wanted the title. I wanted the money. I wanted to feel important, like I was special, like I was someone who mattered there. I wanted people to see me as successful. Like my life was worth something.

Sometimes, when the next rung isn’t there, we build it ourselves. We want perceived success so badly that we start making it up. It starts with a gleam of truth, then gets stretched a little longer each time you tell it. Eventually it gets so big you can’t reach it, can’t contain it, can’t even get your own arms around it anymore. That’s how the mask stops being something you put on and gets cemented into your life.

Very quick lab coat moment. A 2016 study out of University College London found that small self-serving lies tend to grow over time, and the brain’s alarm response to them gets quieter with each one. The first stretch feels wrong. After enough of them, it barely registers.

The whole time I was climbing, I felt nothing inside, because I wasn’t doing a job that fulfilled me. I was doing what fulfilled the role I was playing.

That’s why I crashed so hard into the Ashes when the role was gone. (I get into that whole story in the book.) I had used the role to define me. It was the mask and the costume. Once it was gone, I saw what I’d been missing: what was at home, and what I actually wanted, which was to write, to help people, and to serve somewhere I could see the difference I was making. All of that faded while I focused on doing more and looking better.

That’s why I’m so passionate about helping people and workplaces build satisfaction that belongs to the person, not just the role.

The Christmas lights

Then there’s the other side of the mask. I wore that one, too. Yeah, I’ve made my rounds through The Spiral many times.

This story mirrors my own so well that it is cool and creepy at the same time. I was trying so hard to make that life a home. One year, we’d taken all the Christmas decorations down, and the living room was covered in them. Madison was two, barely standing, holding on to the tub and pulling out Christmas lights, making an even bigger tangle than they already were. We all know how Christmas lights get, no matter how nicely you wrap them at the end of the year.

He told her to stop. She didn’t, because, well, she was two. Then he yelled.

I remember it so vividly. Damian was sitting on the coffee table. Madison plopped down on her butt and started crying, and that upset him, too: Why are you crying? Then he stormed out onto the front porch.

That was another Ember moment. Why am I living like this? When did this become an okay part of my life?

The flame

The Flame is where that question is answered.

What I couldn’t see then was that we were both wearing a mask. He was climbing for an image, and I was decorating for one. Two people performing a life, and neither of us living in the actual room. We were both living for more.

His mask was the ladder. Mine was the home. I was trying to keep the beautiful house and do all the beautiful things, as if the right Christmas could make it the right life. It would never be what he wanted, and I kept decorating anyway.

Years later, I’d wear the same mask at work. Different costume, same rule: do more, look better, and maybe the role will finally feel like enough.

A mask holds up until the moment it doesn't. Mine burned off after that night, with a two-year-old crying on the living room floor. After that, the decorations were just decorations. The flame revealed what was under the mask, and underneath it was the only thing that mattered: my kids, in that room. And once the mask burns off, you can't put it back on, no matter how many times you try.

It’s easy to turn the past into a weapon against yourself. I already messed it up. I’ll never get that back.

Meanwhile, the best parts of the life you have now are sitting right in front of you, and you’re too busy mourning the last one, or chasing the next one, to see them.

So, where’s your ladder?

You don’t have to wait for a two-year-old on the floor to find out what your mask is costing you. You can check now, while the lights are still up.

• What rung am I reaching for right now, and who told me I needed it?

• Is any part of the story I tell about my life a little bigger than the truth?

• Who’s in the room that I keep looking past?

If you answered any of them faster than you wanted to, that’s your flicker. Pay attention to it.

Take the mask off long enough to look around the room you’re already in.

The first thing he did was see me.

Junior year of college, I worked multiple campus jobs, helped other people with their horses on top of caring for my own, went to class, and tried to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. From the outside, I had it handled. I had nearly a 4.0 and was president of the campus events organization.

When you look like you have it handled, nobody looks any closer. But I felt completely unseen. No one understood me. No one got it. I’d felt that way for a long time, back through middle school and even elementary school.

Then someone did, or I thought he did. He seemed to. For the first time in a long time, I could breathe and relax. I caught myself slacking on schoolwork and my campus jobs, and I noticed, but I didn’t care much, because the feeling I got from being with him mattered more.

If you’ve been over capacity long enough, you know that feeling. Help is nice, but being seen feels like fresh oxygen.

That’s why this happens to capable women so often. I have a master’s degree. I was patient zero. Intelligence doesn’t protect you here. If anything, it’s a disservice. Our lack of capacity is what leaves us open. We were raised on try harder, do more, and we learned that carrying more than we could hold was how we earned acceptance. So when someone shows up who seems to lift some of that off you, it registers as love, as the thing you’ve been waiting for and searching for so long.

Reflected light

The line in “Patient Zero” that really made me stop was:

By the time we were living together in Colorado, I was so over capacity. I was working multiple jobs and finishing grad school. I’d realized the degree I’d worked so hard for wasn’t exactly what I wanted, and my landlord was riding me over ridiculous things. Who insists on watering a hundred-year-old oak tree daily? Seriously, who does that?

Again, he took some of it off my plate.

What I didn’t notice was everything else leaving with it. Going out with friends became a problem unless they were our friends: people he knew, situations he could control. Taylor sings that he loves how everybody else loves him, and that’s the part I missed. He took the weight, then the light, and the weight came back heavier than ever.

It’s easy to hear a song like this and go straight to relationships. It doesn’t only happen there. I’ve had a boss who got to bathe in my reflected light, too. My work was behind the scenes by design, and that was fine. But the light should have been shining on the work and the people it was for, not a single person. And it wasn’t just one boss it happened with.

The flicker

I can’t tell you when my light went out. I don’t think anyone in these particular situations can, because the dimming happens so slowly you never notice it. What you can notice is a flicker. I call it an ember.

My first one came in a church class built on the twelve steps. I was on the ninth, making amends, and I was thinking about my mom and my dad. All at once, I saw how I’d treated them and what I’d said. My dad had already passed. It was my aha, oh crap moment. He tried so hard, and I said those things to him and never listened, never really saw him, the very thing that haunted my own thoughts.

The person I’d become wasn’t who I wanted to be, or who I ever thought I’d be.

Nothing changes yet in the ember. You just see where you are for the first time.

Notice where mine came from, though. I didn’t see my own dimming. I saw the ember in how I’d treated the people who loved me.

The ghost

In the video, Taylor keeps knocking over Dakota Johnson’s drinks because Colin Farrell is poisoning them. At the end, you find out she’s been a ghost the whole time. She can’t say anything. All she can do is knock over the glasses.

That’s exactly what it’s like to love someone who’s in it. My family tried. God, they tried so hard. Some of them said it outright; others didn’t have to. It didn’t matter. I wanted to be seen. I thought I was being seen. I wanted the relationship to be true, and I wasn’t going to hear it from anyone.

Now I’m on the other side of the glass. As Taylor likes to remind us, I’ve seen this film before, and I didn’t like the ending.

When I recognize the pattern in someone else, even with a different person, everything in me wants to warn her. Taylor names the conflict exactly:

What I love is that she doesn’t stop there. She’s said all of it to his face. To the woman, she says she’s been expecting her call.

I don’t know if that’s the whole answer. What got me out wasn’t anyone’s warning. It was seeing the fighting and the chaos through my kids’ eyes and knowing that wasn’t the relationship I’d want them to be in.

The video never shows whether Dakota gets out. We just see her standing at a grave with two roses, then leaving one. And in the scene where she drives TikTok crazy, she takes a rose with her.

If you’re the ghost right now, keep knocking over the drinks. When the call comes, pick up.

But by the second, third, and fourth listen (because why would anyone sleep on a Thursday night?), I stopped bopping and started actually listening.

Underneath the catchy pop beat is an apology. The grown-up kind, where you look back at a version of yourself and ask what that season cost you, and what it cost the people around you.

As much as I love analyzing Taylor’s songs, this here is a look into the psychological underpinnings of what we here is the songs. This is part 1 of a 5 part series.

The story’s song goes like this. She meets someone at the worst possible moment, right after something else has cut her open. Everything around them is pink and beautiful, and she loves being wanted. She lets promises get made. Then as the fog clears, she walks away because she doesn’t want to let him down, and leaves him floating up there on the cloud.

And years later, after gaining perspective, she’s still wondering how to say sorry.

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What pink clouding actually is

The term comes from the recovery community. It describes the high right after you get free of something. Everything feels possible. You feel lighter. You feel, you know, our favorite word: fine.

The trouble is that the cloud doesn’t show you what’s still underneath it. The pretty pink is hiding the deeper cost.

Outside of recovery, people pink cloud all the time. It’s when your capacity comes back all at once: after a breakup, after finally quitting a job you hated, after a season that nearly flattened you, when the air finally starts coming back. And the very second that capacity returns, you start spending it. A new relationship. A new project. A whole new version of yourself and your life. You very rarely stop to check whether the ground you’re building on is solid, because you’re not actually standing on the ground. You’re standing on a cloud.

My pink cloud

I’ve wanted to be a writer since I was seven, sitting in the back of my parents’ car with a yellow legal pad, writing stories. So when I sat down to write Spiraling Into Control, I knew. This was it. This was what I was meant to do.

And I stayed up for four days straight.

I worked my full-time job during the day. I did the kid stuff. Then I sat and wrote all night. From the outside, people just saw me getting things done. Nobody saw me awake in the middle of the night. Honestly, I worried at the time that I was having something like a manic episode, because who stays awake for four days and four nights and doesn’t crash?

Somewhere around the third or fourth chapter, at 3:30 in the morning, Damian got up for a drink of water, walked into my office, and looked at me like I had four heads. He asked what the hell I was doing awake. It was honestly a very fair question. I have been an early-to-bed person my entire life. I go to bed when the kids do. On weekends, I’m in bed long before they are.

There was a massive irony in that I was writing about, at 3:30 in the morning, was my time in the Ashes after my divorce.

I was in the Ashes while writing about the Ashes. I just couldn’t see it, because the pink cloud was keeping me floating.

The happy kind of Ashes

In the Spiral framework, there are four terrains. (You can read the deeper dive in The Primer) The first is Ashes: you’re running on autopilot, getting it done, doing what needs doing, but not feeling your truth. I describe it as living your life just left of your actual body.

We always picture Ashes as collapse. You can’t think, can’t do, can’t feel. You’re just functioning the best you can.

But Ashes has a disguise nobody warns you about. Sometimes autopilot feels incredible. You’re producing. You’re focused. You feel more alive than you have in years. That week, I would have told you I was more present than I’d ever been. It felt like presence, but it wasn’t. My mind was locked onto one thing, and the rest of my life was running on autopilot around it.

After four days my body stepped in, and I started sleeping again, but still not until 2 or 3 a.m., and I was still up with the kids at 6, then off to work to do it all again. That was Ember, the terrain where you start noticing something’s off before you can really do anything about it. I was literally writing about the terrains and couldn’t see I was standing in one.

Several days later came Flame. I reread everything I’d written and deleted every single word. I looked at it and thought, this isn’t what I want to say. This isn’t who I am. I have so much more to tell people.

Then Rise. I grounded myself and wrote the book I’m actually proud of.

A whole spiral in about a week, hidden inside what I would have called the best week of my life.

We’re taught that life is linear. Even when we are finally able to admit it isn’t, we don’t think about the fact that you can spiral inside a spiral. The cloud doesn’t stop the cycle. It just hides it better than anything else can.

Who else felt it

What Taylor gets so right int he song is that when we’re spiraling behind a pink cloud, we don’t realize it doesn’t stay contained inside us.

I don’t think I was extra snippy that week, but I’m sure my kids felt it. My husband felt it the weekend it bled into. I was physically there, and my brain was somewhere else entirely.

That’s the story underneath the song. Capacity starts coming back to her inside that relationship, and with it comes her Flame moment: the realization that this isn’t her. She doesn’t know how to handle that, so she leaves, hoping to spare him. Years later, with some distance, she can see it hurt him just the same.

She isn’t apologizing for being happy. She’s apologizing for what her happiness cost someone standing close enough to feel it.

When capacity comes back

When capacity starts coming back, it feels so good to finally be able to do something that we fill it right away. I’ve made that mistake over and over. Sometimes it’s turned out beautifully: I jumped into a relationship with Scott moments after my divorce was final, and that turned out to be a wonderful thing. Other times, filling that capacity shot me straight back into the Ashes.

The pink cloud isn’t the enemy. If I hadn’t written for those four days, the real book wouldn’t exist. Those days showed me I could actually do this. But the cloud isn’t a place to rebuild your whole life. It’s a place to rest, notice what capacity you’re getting back, and decide what’s worth spending it on. We almost never take that beat.

So if you’re floating right now, or looking back on a pink cloud of your own, a few questions worth sitting with:

• What am I building up here that I’ll need to check once I’m back on the ground?

• Who’s standing close enough to feel this with me?

• What did I just get free of, and have I actually let myself feel it yet?

At the end of the song, she hopes he landed safely, and that he’s happy now.

That’s my hope for anyone up there right now. Land safely. And land somewhere happier, not back in the Ashes.

It runs about three days. The first is the drop. The second is where the symptoms peak and the guilt starts arriving. And by the third day, there’s usually a flat stretch that feels close enough to normal that people call it the end of it, get up, and resume.

Three days is also, as it happens, exactly the recovery window that sleep researchers have tested and found insufficient. We’ll get to that in a second, though.

Which is why I want to do something with these three days, audit them.

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The auto-reply is the last thing to go on, after the work it is supposedly covering for has already been done. It is also the only part of the arrangement that gets a clean break.

Then comes the part everyone can describe without being asked. A bad first night’s sleep, which is normal. An early waking on a day with nothing in it, which is less normal but easy to explain away. And somewhere in the back half of the second day, usually after the first genuinely unstructured afternoon, a sore throat. By the third morning it is a full cold, or a migraine, or that flattened fatigue that turns the rest of the trip into an obligation nobody is managing to enjoy.

This summer I took my kids on an RV trip in the Northeast. My daughter had been begging me for over a year to go and see a chocolate factory, so where did we go? Hershey, of course. Then we swung by New York City and Boston and Philadelphia. In some sense, it was a dream trip for each of us. My husband knocked a lot of baseball fields off his bucket list to see all of them. My son and I got to see Hamilton on Broadway (yes, it was worth every second), and my daughter got to eat an extremely unsafe amount of chocolate.

All the perfect makings of the perfect trip. Except that a small tingle the day before turned into a full-on illness by day 3. As a mom, I would think I was prepared for this sort of thing. It happens every time. But each time I say, nahhh I’m good. This time my body let me know by day 10 how very very not good I was.

This all-too-common experience tends to get filed under one of three explanations. Bad luck, a weak immune system from whatever was going around the second grade, or the dreaded inability to relax, with the sore throat offered as proof. That third explanation usually produces a resolution to get better at time off, which is a remarkable promise to make oneself while running a fever.

All three put the problem inside the vacation. The symptom showed up there, so that must be where the trouble is.

Worth looking at the timing again. Not the sore throat. The week and a half in front of it.

The strongest evidence here is also the oldest, and it involved doing something to 394 people that would be nearly impossible to get approved now. In 1991, Sheldon Cohen’s team asked healthy adults how much stress they’d been under, then dripped five different respiratory viruses into their noses, quarantined them, and waited (Cohen, Tyrrell & Smith, New England Journal of Medicine).

Everybody got the same dose. Colds turned up in about 27% of the least-stressed and about 47% of the most-stressed. Remarkably, the pattern held after accounting for age, sex, education, allergies, weight, season, sleep, smoking, drinking, exercise, diet, and whether they already carried antibodies to the exact virus they’d been handed.

It is one of the few studies in this area where the exposure was identical and the only real variable was the life each person walked in with.

The timing isn’t just a coincidence. Cortisol, yes, the same one making its way around TikTok recently, spends a good deal of its day keeping inflammation from getting out of hand. If you run the system hard enough for long enough, instruction starts to land less well. In a 2012 study (we’re approaching the end of the sciency parts, hang on), people who’d recently been through a prolonged threatening stretch were measurably less responsive to cortisol’s anti-inflammatory signal, and the ones who were produced more inflammation when given a virus (Cohen et al., PNAS). The brake still works. The pads don’t.

These are troubles that show up specifically when the pressure lifts. A headache clinic in the Bronx had 22 patients log their stress twice a day for three months. Steady high stress didn’t predict migraines at all. The drop did — somewhere around 1.5 to 1.9 times the odds in the six to eighteen hours after stress fell, and more than four times the odds at six hours when they counted any decline whatsoever (Lipton et al., Neurology). Twenty-two people is not many. Call it a suspicion.

Two Dutch researchers, in 2002, decided to call it leisure sickness. They asked 1,128 men and 765 women whether they recognized themselves in a description of getting ill on weekends and holidays. About 3% said yes; rerun this study in 2026, and I’m guessing we’d be looking at triple to quadruple, but that’s just me. What set these 3% apart was how much work they believed they had, how responsible they felt for it, and how hard it was to put down (Vingerhoets, van Huijgevoort & van Heck, Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics).

One caveat before we leave the lab coats behind. None of these studies can tell you where your particular cold came from. They compare groups, not people, and none of them were looking at vacations specifically. And if the symptoms keep showing up, or keep getting worse, that is a conversation for an actual doctor and not a newsletter.

You made it through the science! Congratulations, you are officially a CoF Nerd!

So the illness isn’t the price of the vacation itself. It’s a late invoice for the stretch that made the vacation necessary.

Because in preparing for the vacation, output continued through the final hour. The handoff document got written. The email got answered. Every party with a claim on that output received it in full and on schedule, right up until the auto-reply went on. Not to mention booking the dog hotel, cleaning out the fridge, watering the plants, and making sure the kids packed underwear and not just stuffies, ask me how this is now on my pre-trip checklist.

Every item on that list got done. The only thing that slipped was noticing what it took to do them.

Rest is where the bill came due, because rest was the first moment the system could afford to let anything be felt.

In the Spiral, this is the Ember, the stretch where noticing comes back before capacity does. Where you start getting a flood of information and understanding, but you still can’t make yourself do anything about it.

There’s no pre-vacation protocol coming. If that’s why you are here jiving with us at cost of Functioning, I think you hit the wrong subscribe button. I don’t do that. Most advice you get around this quietly assumes control over that week and a half, but hello, anyone who had that wouldn’t have needed the sprint.

So, what would have to be different for you to slow down on day nine rather than day one? Not whether you should. What conditions would need to exist?

Asked plainly, most people can answer in under a minute. Coverage. One colleague who could hold something. Money. Somebody else who knows where the passport is. The answers are usually structural, usually specific, and almost never about your relationship with rest.

So, let’s look at the timeline days 1-11 leading up to the trip.

On day four there is still no plan. There is a rented bed, an itinerary still stuck to the fridge, and several people who have been looking forward to this for a year. The honest accounting on day four is one of subtraction. We’re not going to make it to the aquarium. Dinner tonight is takeout.

Day nine is the sneaky one. Something comes back, and it is tempting to call it energy, but it is closer to interest. The instinct is to spend it immediately making up for days three through eight. Cram the museum. Make the big dinner. Be fun again. That instinct is the same one that built the sprint in the first place, and it tends to bill the last two days of the trip plus the first week home.

So the working question on day nine is not what can be salvaged. It is what was never going to happen, and whether anyone is willing to say so out loud before the final morning. There is a real difference between a plan that quietly got dropped and a plan that got decided against. Mostly the difference is who ends up carrying the guilt for it.

Your immune system isn’t the thing that failed on day two. It’s the only part of the arrangement that ever submitted an itemized bill.

Not, oooh, wait until the surprise at the end, long. Actually long.

This is the whole thing in one place — my mess, the framework that came out of it, all four terrains, and the reason every wellness tool you’ve been handed keeps sliding off you like water off a duck.

Pour something. Sit down. If you only read one thing I’ve written, make it this one.

Oh, another quick warning: I’m me. You get what you get. I cuss occasionally and self-deprecate myself and many other things. So, if you’re cool with all that, let’s dig in.

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Short Cuts:

1. The bedroom floor

2. It wasn’t your effort

3. What the Spiral is

4. The three laws

5. The four terrains

6. The wrong tool for the terrain

7. How to use this

8. TL;DR - It won’t link, but it’s at the bottom 😂

I. The bedroom floor

I was sitting on my bedroom floor, cross-legged, wondering if my fingers were supposed to touch.

I’d handed my kids their tablets and closed the door, which already felt selfish. Spine tall. Hands resting somewhere intentional. I adjusted my legs, then my back, then my shoulders, and couldn’t work out whether I was supposed to be comfortable or disciplined. It occurred to me that there was probably supposed to be a candle.

Then the voice on the app came on, calm and confident, like it had never once tried to quiet a mind like mine.

Close your eyes. Bring your attention to your breath.

I closed my eyes and immediately saw everything I wasn’t doing. Laundry still in the washer. Dishes in the sink. Emails unanswered. The sound of a tablet hitting something in the other room, crap that’s going to cost me money.

She said my thoughts would float away like birds. I wondered if my jaw was clenched too hard, and how long ten minutes actually is, and then I noticed the dog hair all over my leggings and felt completely ridiculous sitting there trying to regulate while covered in evidence that I hadn’t vacuumed in days.

Then she told me to notice my thoughts without judgment, and I felt a wave of panic, because my thoughts were nothing but judgment. About myself. About how bad I was at this. About how everyone else could presumably manage it.

By the end I felt worse than when I started. Not calmer. Not clearer. Just more aware of how loud my mind was and how incapable I seemed of quieting it.

I wasn’t only overwhelmed; now I was overwhelmed and failing at the thing that was supposed to help.

So why was I even on that floor in the first place? Because my boss had prescribed me a business coach to improve my “executive functioning and communication strategies,” and she’d spent the first ten minutes of our call talking about my energy. My vibration. Opening myself to the frequency of success. Raising my vibration, she said, like it was as simple as adjusting a dial.

She was lit up about it. Genuinely convinced she was handing me the key to everything.

And I sat there thinking: I can barely get out of bed. I can barely feel my own face. What dial?

But I smiled, because smiling was a reflex by then, and told her it sounded great and I’d give it a try.

II. It wasn’t your effort

It took me an embarrassingly long time to understand that the problem wasn’t how hard I was trying.

These are not bad tools. Some of them are excellent. They’re just built for a system that isn’t currently in survival mode.

Being told to meditate when you’re in the Ashes (keep reading, we’re getting to what this means) is like being asked to do yoga while treading water in the middle of the ocean. The instructions aren’t wrong. The timing is.

The “industry” has been handing you the wrong tool for the terrain you were standing in.

That’s what this is here to fix.

III. What the Spiral is

The Spiral is a map of four states your nervous system moves through. I call them Ashes, Ember, Flame, and Rise.

You’ve been in all four. You’ll be in all four again. They aren’t levels, they aren’t stages, and they aren’t a personality type. They’re terrain — places you pass through, each with its own weather and its own requirements.

Why a spiral and not a line

Almost every recovery model you’ve been handed is a line. Stages of grief. Steps to healing. A before and an after, with you somewhere along it, hopefully further than last year.

Lines have a problem: they only allow one interpretation of going backward. If the model is a line and you end up somewhere you’ve already been, then something has gone wrong. You relapsed. You regressed. You lost the progress. You failed.

That is not what happens, and I’d argue that belief has done more damage than most of the things people are actually recovering from.

Circles aren’t right either, though they’re closer. A circle says you come back around — true — but it also says you arrive at exactly the same place, unchanged, doing this forever. That’s the version people are terrified of. I’m going to be like this for the rest of my life.

You come back around to the same terrain. Ashes again. Ember again. That part is real, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. But you don’t come back to the same point — you come back further out, at a different altitude, carrying everything the last pass taught you.

Same weather, different position on the mountain.

Which means the two things people fear most about this are both half wrong. You don’t escape the cycle, and you were never going to. But you also don’t repeat it. You’re not doing laps. You’re climbing.

Why that matters more than it sounds

Because it changes what a return means.

The single most common thing I hear is some version of I thought I was past this. Somebody has two good years, lands back in Ashes, and concludes the two years were fake. That all of it has to be done again from scratch.

They haven’t gone back. They’re on a different pass through the same terrain, arriving with things they didn’t have last time — a name for it, an idea of how long it lasts, some sense of what makes it worse.

That’s not the same trip. It only looks the same from directly above.

What it isn’t

It isn’t a ladder. There’s no top. Rise is not the goal and Ashes is not the failure — they’re both just places, and you’ll stand in both more than once.

It isn’t a diagnosis. This is a self-locator, not a clinical instrument. It won’t tell you what you have. It’ll tell you where you are.

It isn’t a path back to a fixed version of you. Your nervous system is adaptive and intelligent, and it moves forward — not backward toward some earlier ideal state that, if we’re honest, never actually existed.

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IV. The three laws

Everything else sits on these.

1. You will return to each terrain.

You’re a human with a nervous system living in a world that keeps happening.

This is the law people fight hardest, and it causes the most unnecessary suffering by a wide margin. Returning is not regression. It’s the mechanism. It’s what the system does.

2. You return with more awareness.

Same terrain, different altitude. The fourth time you land in Ashes, you’re not the person who landed there the first time. You know what it is. You know it’s temporary. You know what it needs, and — more importantly — you know what makes it worse.

That’s not nothing. That’s most of it, actually.

3. Rising gets faster.

This is the only promise in the entire framework, and it’s the one I’d stake everything on.

Nobody stops spiraling. The goal is to shorten the trip through — what used to take six months takes six weeks, then a week.

I can’t stop the fall. I can shorten the climb. That’s the whole offer.

V. The four terrains

🌑 Ashes

What it is: conservation. Not failure — conservation. When the load has been too heavy for too long, your system does the sensible thing and starts shutting off everything that isn’t strictly required. Emotion is expensive. Curiosity is expensive. Wanting things is extremely expensive. So they go offline first.

From the inside: flat. Not sad, not devastated — flat. You do the day and don’t remember most of it. You clean the whole kitchen and come to on the back porch with no memory of walking out there. Somebody asks how you are and “fine” is out of your mouth before you’ve had a thought about it.

From the outside: completely functional. This is why nobody asks. You’re still getting everything done, and getting things done is the only signal most people know how to read.

What it gets mistaken for: laziness. Depression, sometimes correctly and often not. Being “over it.” Coping well. Being remarkably calm about something you should probably be more upset about.

What Ashes needs: subtraction. Fewer things, not better systems. This is the one terrain where doing less is the actual work, and where every instinct you have — push through, get organized, make a plan, fix it — makes it last longer.

One thing to do: take one real thing off the list this week. Not the smallest one. One that matters.

One thing to stop: trying to feel something. You’re not blocked. You’re conserving, and it’ll come back on its own schedule.

A note, because it matters: if this is heavier than a map can hold — if you’re not sleeping, not eating, or having thoughts that frighten you — please talk to a doctor or a therapist. A framework is a useful thing and it is not care. If you’re in crisis, resources are here.

🔥 Ember

What it is: something coming back online. Noticing returns first, usually before capacity does, which is exactly why this terrain is so uncomfortable. You can feel things you couldn’t feel a month ago, and you don’t yet have the room to do anything about them.

From the inside: tender and irritable at the same time. You’ve started noticing the jaw, the shoulders, the way you hold your breath. You’ve started saying out loud that something isn’t right. You want things again, faintly, and wanting is exhausting.

From the outside: often worse than Ashes. People frequently get more visibly upset in Ember than they ever were in Ashes, which confuses everyone, including them.

What it gets mistaken for: getting worse. Backsliding. A breakthrough. It’s none of those — it’s the lights coming back on in a house you haven’t looked at in a while.

What Ember needs: permission to notice without acting on it. This is the hardest ask in the whole framework, because noticing feels like it demands a response.

One thing to do: name one thing out loud to one person. That’s it. Don’t fix it.

One thing to stop: turning it into a project. The most common way people lose Ember is by reading nine books, researching the diagnosis, and building a plan. That’s not progress. It’s a very convincing way to stay busy instead of staying with it.

🔆 Flame

What it is: mobilization. Energy is back and it’s moving. This is the terrain the world rewards — you’re productive, decisive, getting things done, and people are impressed.

From the inside: momentum, with a slight edge underneath it. You’re doing rather than feeling, and doing is easier. Sleeping badly, running fine. Nine plans for the next six months.

From the outside: thriving. Back to yourself. Finally doing well.

What it gets mistaken for: recovery. And sometimes it is. But Flame and panic run on identical fuel and look identical from the outside, and the difference isn’t whether you’re moving — it’s whether you could stop if you wanted to.

What Flame needs: containment and direction. Not more energy. A channel for the energy you’ve got, and an honest look at whether the pace is a choice or a requirement.

One thing to do: pick one thing to finish, and let two things go unfinished on purpose. Notice what that feels like. The feeling is the information.

One thing to stop: starting things. Flame’s appetite is bigger than its capacity, and unchecked Flame goes to Ashes — the most common route into Ashes there is.

🌤️ Rise

What it is: footing. You can hold more than one thing at a time — the hard part and the ordinary part, in the same day, without one erasing the other. You’re making choices instead of reactions.

From the inside: ordinary, mostly. This is the thing nobody warns you about. Rise doesn’t feel like triumph. It feels like a normal Tuesday where nothing is on fire and you’re actually there for it.

From the outside: roughly the same as Flame, which is why people chase Flame thinking they want Rise.

What it gets mistaken for: the destination. It isn’t. Rise is a terrain, not a finish line. You’ll leave it, and that isn’t relapse — it’s how the system works. Anybody selling you a permanent version of this is selling you something.

What Rise needs: reps and evidence. This is where capacity actually gets built, which makes it the terrain to use rather than the one to protect. What you build here is what shortens the next Ashes.

One thing to do: one thing that’s slightly more than comfortable. Building requires load.

One thing to stop: treating it as fragile. Tiptoeing around a good stretch so you don’t disturb it is how you waste the only terrain where growth is actually available.

VI. The wrong tool for the terrain

Here’s the table I wish somebody had handed me on that bedroom floor.

Almost every piece of advice you’ve been given was good advice for a terrain you weren’t standing in.

That’s not your failure, and mostly it isn’t the adviser’s malice. It’s that nobody asked where you were first.

VII. How to use this

Locate before you act. Before you decide what to do about how you’re doing, work out where you are. The answer changes the instruction completely.

Check weekly, not daily. These terrains move on the order of weeks and months, not hours. A bad Tuesday isn’t a terrain change.

Watch the recovery time, not the state. The number that matters isn’t which terrain you’re in. It’s how long the last hard stretch took compared to the one before it. That’s the only real measurement of progress in this system, and it’s the one that gets better.

Expect to be wrong about Flame. Most people misread it, in both directions. Ask the stopping question: could I stop if I wanted to?

VIII. What’s next

This is the map. It’ll tell you where you are and point you in a direction, and for a lot of people that’s genuinely enough.

What it doesn’t do is get into the weeds of any one terrain — the full protocol, the specific traps, what to do when it won’t shift, how to tell the difference between real movement and one good week. That’s what the four terrain guides are for, one per state, and they go to paid members of The Cost of Functioning.

And if you’d rather work it through with people than read about it, that’s the live room. Each quarter I run a season — six weeks, one terrain at a time, with whatever the people in the room actually bring.

You’ve been handling it. I believe you. I just think there’s a better question than whether you can.

Where are you, and what does this place need?

— Lauren 💜

Rise is the terrain everything else in the wellness industry is selling, and it’s the one most likely to be misunderstood by the person standing in it.

Because you’ve probably been taught that this is where you arrive. That the work has an endpoint, and the endpoint is a version of you who has processed enough, understood enough, and regulated enough that the difficult things stop landing.

That is not what this is.

Rise is a stance, not an address. It’s the ability to hold loss and clarity at the same time. To know where you are in the cycle and what the terrain requires. To trust your footing on ground that is still, occasionally, going to move.

You will leave here. That’s not a warning about failure. It’s the structure of the thing. And the entire value of this terrain is what you do while you’re standing in it — because what you build here is what determines how the next descent goes.

YOU ARE HERE: RISE

What may be happening: integration. Not activation, not recovery from activation. Capacity and clarity available at the same time.

What you may notice: less internal effort. Saying no without the paragraph. Being wrong without collapse. Feeling something without becoming it.

What matters right now: reps and evidence. Spending capacity deliberately instead of by default. Learning your own early warning signs while you can see them.

What can wait: nothing, actually. This is the terrain with the work in it.

What makes this harder: treating this as arrival. Taking on everything you dropped, because now you can. Protecting the state by shrinking your life around it.

What you’re looking for: not permanence. A shorter return. The metric isn’t whether you leave. It’s how long it takes to come back.

Your job in Rise is not to stay here. It’s to build what you’ll need when you’re not.

Read more

Flame is the terrain people wait for and then don’t recognize when it arrives, because it doesn’t feel like recovery.

It feels like agitation. Like being difficult. Like something’s gotten into you that you can’t fully control, and you’ve started saying things you would never have said a year ago, and the people around you have begun using the word “changed.”

The energy is back. What hasn’t come back yet is your ability to aim it.

That gap is what this guide is for. Not because the energy is dangerous — it’s the most useful thing you’ve had in years — but because it arrives before the steering does, and what you do in the interval determines whether this terrain builds something or leaves you a mess to clean up from Ashes.

There’s one honest thing to say before the card, because most writing about this state won’t say it: Flame costs you things. Not just the things that were hurting you. Some things you love. Anyone who tells you that stepping into your own life is free is selling you something.

YOU ARE HERE: FLAME

What may be happening: activation has returned. Preference has become audible. What you see has started converting into what you’ll no longer do.

What you may notice: anger with a target. Impatience. Restlessness. Saying true things and not walking them back. A physical inability to keep performing the arrangement.

What matters right now: direction, not volume. One true sentence at a time. Somewhere for the energy to go that isn’t a person.

What can wait: the permanent version. The final conversation. Anything you can’t undo.

What makes this harder: letting other people talk you out of it. Letting other people talk you further into it. Confusing containment with suppression.

What you’re looking for: not calm, and not victory. Rise. Certainty that doesn’t need volume. Energy that stays available without spiking.

Your job in Flame is not to control the fire. It’s to give it somewhere to go.

Read more

Ember is the terrain people are most likely to walk straight through without recognizing it, because it doesn’t feel like a state. It feels like an interruption.

Something surfaces. A flash of this isn’t right, or I don’t want this, or how long have I been doing this. It lasts a few seconds. Then the day requires something and you’re back in it, and by evening you’ve filed the whole thing under stress or hormones or not enough sleep.

That flash was the terrain. And the reason it didn’t feel like progress is that Ember returns your ability to see long before it returns your ability to do.

Which is why this guide has one job: to keep you from wasting the noticing. There are two ways to waste it, and they point in opposite directions. You can smother it — talk yourself out of it, decide it doesn’t count, get busy. Or you can grab it and demand it produce a decision immediately, which collapses it just as reliably.

Here’s the page that matters. Everything after it is depth.

YOU ARE HERE: EMBER

What may be happening: awareness is coming back online ahead of capacity. You can see it. You can’t act on it yet. Both are normal.

What you may notice: flashes of something is wrong here. Irritation with an object. A preference. Noticing a pattern while it’s happening instead of three days later.

What matters right now: letting what you notice register without arguing with it. Keeping some record of it. Not requiring it to produce a plan.

What can wait: the decision, the conversation, the exit, the announcement.

What makes this harder: demanding action from awareness that isn’t ready to move. Researching instead of noticing. Waiting for someone to confirm you’re right.

What you’re looking for: not resolution. Flame. Energy with a direction. Anger with an object. Wanting something specific rather than just not wanting this.

Your job in Ember is not to decide. It’s to stop erasing what you see.

One exception, and it matters: if what you’re noticing is that you’re not safe, the guidance to wait does not apply to you. Skip to section eleven.

Read more

Most guidance assumes you have something to work with.

It assumes you can make a decision, hold a plan, feel your feelings on request, and take one small step toward something better. It assumes the tank is low, not empty. It assumes what you need is a nudge.

If you’re in the Ashes, you don’t need a nudge. You need someone to stop asking you for things.

So before anything else, here is the whole guide in one page. If you read nothing further, this is the part that matters. Everything after it is optional depth for when you have more to spend.

YOU ARE HERE: ASHES

What may be happening: your system has cut power to anything not required for survival.

What you may notice: flatness, fog, heaviness, time going strange, small sounds feeling like assaults, exhaustion that won’t convert into sleep.

What matters right now: food, water, medication, rest, one safe contact, fewer decisions.

What can wait: the plan. The conversation. The decision. The version of you that has energy.

What makes this harder: treating conservation as failure. Adding shame to exhaustion.

What you’re looking for: not Rise. Ember. A flicker of irritation. A preference. Wanting something. Noticing that something bothered you.

Your job here is not to manufacture movement. It’s to make enough room that movement becomes available again.

Read more

Here’s what the live room actually is, in case you’ve been wondering whether it’s for you.

Every Monday for six weeks, we take one piece of this apart — not in the abstract, but with the actual situations people bring in. Somebody’s flat and can’t work out why. Somebody’s got nine plans and hasn’t slept in a week. Somebody had two good years and just landed back somewhere they thought they were done with.

I teach for about twenty minutes, and then we work.

Mondays, 8pm CST, starting October 19.

• Oct 19 — What is it costing you? Capability, capacity, and why we keep measuring the wrong one.

  Join Here

• Oct 26 — Ashes. Conservation, not collapse. Why doing less is the actual work.

• Nov 2 — Ember. The uncomfortable one. Noticing before you have room to act.

• Nov 9 — Flame. Momentum and the thing that looks exactly like it.

• Nov 16 — Rise. Not a finish line. What to build while you’ve got the footing.

• Nov 23 — Recovery time. The only number that matters, and how to shorten it.

Sessions run about ninety minutes. All of them are recorded and transcribed, so if you miss one it doesn’t cost you the season — and if you’d rather send your question ahead and stay off camera the whole time, plenty of people do exactly that.

Yes, the last one lands the Monday of Thanksgiving week. That’s on purpose. If there’s a week you want a straight conversation about load before it arrives, it’s that one.

How to join

The room is for paid subscribers. Eight dollars a month, eighty for the year, and the annual works out cheaper than the season.

Not sure which terrain you’re standing in? Take You Are Here → Twelve questions, ninety seconds. It’ll tell you which week to pay closest attention to.

See you Monday the 19th.

— Lauren

I wish I could give you a beautifully tidy niche statement here. Actually, no. I don’t. They make me itchy.

What I can tell you is why we’re here

👀 What we miss because somebody is still functioning.

🔋 Capacity and why we keep treating it like a character trait instead of something contextual.

🧠 Trauma and chronic stress and the nervous system, but also work, motherhood, relationships, ambition, grief, boundaries, identity, and the genuinely bizarre things we’ve collectively agreed count as normal.

🙋‍♀️ Why the person who never asks for help gets praised for being independent instead of occasionally being asked why asking feels so expensive.

📥 Why workplaces keep handing more work to the person who handles more work and then seem sincerely surprised when that person develops an eye twitch.

🧯 Why we wait for people to fall apart before we believe the load was heavy.

💬 The stories we tell ourselves because we’re still getting shit done.

There will be science here, and personal stories, and things I learned through trauma work, and things I learned because life apparently enjoys field research. There will be cultural commentary, questions I don’t have neatly packaged answers to, and more than one rant that started because I saw something ridiculous while scrolling my phone.

What there won’t be is any instruction on how to become your highest, most enlightened self. I don’t know who she is, and honestly she sounds exhausting.

Who this is probably for

If you’ve made it this far you likely already know, but specifically:

The one who’s fine at work and gone by six. The one whose childhood was genuinely normal, decent parents, nothing to point at, but still can’t work out why she’s like this. The one carrying something ongoing, an illness or a caregiving situation or a hard season that’s lasted three years, who everybody stopped asking about months ago. And the one who’s already done the work, got the therapy and the books and possibly a diagnosis, and came away with a very good explanation and absolutely no direction.

It’s probably not for you if you want a healing journey, a finish line, an earlier version of yourself to get back to, or someone to help you decide who to blame. I don’t do those, and I’ll be arguing against them fairly regularly.

Subscribe now

What you’ll actually get

One essay a week, free. Some of them will name something you’ve been doing for years without a word for it. Some will explain what’s actually happening in your nervous system, properly, without a single crystal involved. And some will be about orientation, which is where you are and what that particular place needs from you. That is where my framework comes in. Four states/terrains, not a ladder. A map.

A few times a year I run a season of live sessions, six weeks, working through one state at a time with whatever people bring into the room. The teaching from those becomes the podcast. Being in the room is for paid subscribers, and I’d rather be upfront about that split: the map is public, where you are is personal.

Start here

You Are Here →

Twelve questions, about ninety seconds, and you’ll get a straight answer about which of the four states you’re standing in right now and what it needs from you this week. Free, no email required to see your result.

Who’s writing this

I’m Lauren Tobey. I wrote Spiraling Into Control, I host The Spiral Podcast, and I have degrees in psychology and adult learning, which is a nice way of saying I’ve spent fifteen years figuring out how to teach things to tired adults.

I also spent ten years in a marriage that ran on my ability to absorb things, and came out of it looking for an explanation. What I found was an industry that was excellent at telling me what was wrong with me and useless at telling me what to do about it. Diagnosis after diagnosis, no direction, and underneath all of it a quiet assumption that there was an earlier version of me waiting to be restored.

There wasn’t. There never is. Your nervous system is smart and adaptive, and it moves forward, not backward toward some ideal state that never actually existed.

Maybe you’re handling it beautifully. Maybe nobody else knows how heavy it is. Maybe you haven’t dropped a damn thing.

I believe you. I just think there’s another question worth asking.

What is carrying it costing you?

That’s the conversation I want to have here. Pour something good, pull up a chair.

— Lauren 💜

And somewhere in there, you stopped being able to find yourself.

Lauren Tobey spent ten years inside a marriage that ran on her ability to absorb things. By every visible measure, she was fine — working, parenting, functioning, capable. Nobody asked, because there was nothing to see.

When it ended, she went looking for an explanation and found an industry that was very good at telling her what was wrong with her and useless at telling her what to do about it. Diagnosis after diagnosis. No direction. And underneath all of it, the quiet assumption that there was a previous version of her waiting to be restored.

There wasn’t. There never is.

Spiraling Into Control is what she found instead: that survival responses can look remarkably like competence. That numbness passes for control, and shutdown passes for maturity, for years before anyone notices. And that the way out isn’t backward toward who you used to be — it’s forward, with better information about where you actually are.

The book gives you a map.

Four terrains your nervous system moves through — Ashes, Ember, Flame, and Rise — and three laws that govern the movement. You will return to each one. You return with more awareness each time. And rising gets faster.

That last one is the only promise the book makes. Not that you stop spiraling. That the climb gets shorter.

Not sure where you are? Take the assessment