The Summer Time Blues?

I know you’ve all felt the wintertime blues. You miss your bike and adventures, you curse the snow, you pray for spring to start in January. But I’m not talking about that.

I’m talking about post-goal depression. You spend so much time planning, anticipating, and fantasizing about a trip or goal, and then the high wears off pretty quickly when it’s over. Just a week ago you were out there, making memories, and now you’re sitting at a desk at work? How depressing.

Planning the rally takes up a lot of my time but it also helps battle the wintertime blues. So well that I have been too distracted the last two winters to really suffer much. This year also included planning for a brief return to Alaska which just added to the distraction and helped combat wintertime blues even more.

But now it’s August, and all my plans have happened. There isn’t anything else to plan or prepare for. The bikes are sitting, ready to ride, but there are no epic adventures in their near future. So it makes me sad for some reason. I’ll enjoy the memories I made this summer come winter, but right now I feel lame cause I’m not currently adventuring. It’s a weird feeling. It’s like I’m fighting wintertime blues in the middle of summer. My brain NEEDS the next thing to focus on.

I THINK this can mostly be attributed to our brains chasing dopamine. Having your brain activated and in full-on planning mode is exhilarating and keeps the feel-good chemicals flowing. You get so caught up in it that you forget it will end at some point. Then your levels really spike as you go do the thing. The second you get home, it’s like someone shut off the serotonin faucet and that high will only carry you so far. I often feel like I crash a week or two after a big trip and have to dig myself out of the hole before normal life can start again. I have seen it said so many times that the best cure for the wintertime blues is to plan your next adventure. While I stand by that idea, I’m not sure it’s the best advice for post-goal depression. We need to take the trip back down from the high and return to our baseline for a bit to make sure we fully appreciate the memories we made. Rushing into the next adventure to avoid feeling sad would be akin to suppressing your feelings with chemicals. I don’t mean to be insensitive to people who suffer from real issues like substance abuse, I’m just drawing a vague parallel. I wish I lived a life that would allow for unlimited adventure with no real responsibilities. But, I don’t. So it means that there will ALWAYS need to be a return to normal life…..and the longer that return to normal is spaced out, the more likely it will cause real depression when it does happen.

At this point, you’re probably wondering what my big reveal is going to be. What is the secret foolproof technique that I recommend to help YOU recover from post-goal depression?

Well, I don’t rightly know, I don’t have a psychology degree. As I’ve said many times, “I’m just some fucking guy.” All I can do is tell you what I do. I try to be hyper-aware of my depression and I try really hard to just allow it. It can really consume your life and affect even the most mundane things. Being aware has helped me to realize when something is not playing out the way it normally might and I can then react to it differently even in my depressed state. I have struggled my entire life with suppressing emotions, and actively allowing myself to feel depressed has proven to make the low points pass faster. That’s all I’ve got for you.

I get it, this was a weird post. I don’t even have a cool picture for you to look at! But I think my brain needed to get these words out so my eyes could bring them back in to be reprocessed. My intention was for the main takeaway here to be: we, as motorcycle riders, have been gifted with adventurous spirits that despise the mundane parts of life. And sometimes that might make you sad……and sad is ok.

Ok, enough of that. Go do some rad shit.