The term "vulnerability hangover" was coined by researcher and author Dr. Brené Brown to refer to the stomach-churning feeling you might experience after being truly open with a partner, having a private facet of your life shared with office colleagues, or after posting something personal on social media.
At times, this can be a purely not-good feeling.
If you overshare in a setting where doing so is inappropriate (or at an inappropriate level or about inappropriate subjects) and thus negatively impact your colleague's perception of your character or professionalism—that's not ideal.
In other circumstances, though, this feeling may result from a brave, overall positive act, rather than just a brazen one.
Opening up about something traumatizing that you've been burying deep, but which might benefit from sunlight, earnest assessment, and possibly the perspective of someone else—that's not easy, but it can trigger the same sense of, "Now I'm forever exposed and I'm exhausted as a consequence."
This exhausting, head- and stomach-ache inducing "hangover" is thought to be the result of frantic cognitive effort (flipping through the infinite possible social outcomes of what was shared) combined with a concomitant sense of public exposure.
That latter effect is similar to what folks experience when engaging in public speaking: an at times overwhelming sense of anxiety and hyper-vigilance related to concerns about one's social status, identity (self-perceived and other-perceived) and the possibility of failing in some imagined, possibly spectacular and permanent way.
There's an element of the Spotlight Effect in both public speaking and social sharing, because in both contexts we tend to assume we're being noticed more than we are.
In particular, we imagine all of our flubs, shortcomings, stutters, and pit-stains are at the forefront of everyone else's mind, when in reality most people on the other end of our communications are just as obsessed with their own potential failures and imperfections, not fixating on (or even noticing) ours.
Virtual communications can amplify this feeling because of the limited (or flawed) data we receive from the folks on the other end of our divulgences (caused by emotionless, text-focused dialogue, jittery or chest-up webcam body language, and misinterpreted emoji, among other issues).
The hangover feeling sometimes associated with this kind of exposure is thought to be connected to the energy-drain our brains experience while working through a perceptually stressful, threat-laden scenario, alongside the fight, flight, or freeze response our sympathetic nervous system triggers when we work through our biological "Is this a threat? What should I do?" checklist.
This process floods our bodies with hormones and neurotransmitters that, in aggregate, activate a stress response that can be beneficial when we have to survive a dangerous situation, but which is less ideal when we're riled up from sharing something personal on Instagram or divulging a secret to a spouse.
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