Medical Monday · Joyful Journey Home

The In-Between: Why Too Much and Nothing Are the Same Problem

By Carlett Badenhorst, Station Director, JustGospel Radio · Medical Monday Series · 9 min read

"Arise and eat, for the journey is too great for you." — 1 Kings 19:7

There are two kinds of exhausted people, and they rarely recognise each other.

One of them cannot stop. The calendar is full, the to-do list never empties, the phone is always in hand, and stillness feels like a threat rather than a rest. The other cannot start. The to-do list sits untouched, the bed feels safer than the day, and motivation has gone somewhere it cannot be reached. One looks like ambition. The other looks like laziness. Neither label is accurate, and both people are usually carrying the same wound in different clothing.

Psychology has a name for the territory between these two states. The Bible has been describing it for thousands of years, in a story most people skip past because the man at the centre of it had just done something extraordinary. He called fire down from heaven. And one chapter later, he wanted to die.

The Brain Doesn't Have Two Settings — It Has a Window

The psychiatrist Dan Siegel describes something called the Window of Tolerance: a band of nervous system activity inside which a person can think clearly, feel their emotions without being overwhelmed by them, connect with other people, and make sound decisions. That window is where God designed human beings to function.

Above the window is hyperarousal — anxiety, racing thoughts, compulsive busyness, the inability to sit in silence without reaching for a phone. Below it is hypoarousal — numbness, flatness, the sense that nothing is worth doing and nothing can be felt. They look like opposites from the outside. From the inside, they are the same emergency: a nervous system that has left the place it was built to live in.

This matters because the instinct, in both directions, is to fix it with more discipline. Push harder if you're in the nothing. Slow down through sheer willpower if you're in the too much. Almost nobody manages either, because willpower was never the mechanism that moved them out of the window in the first place, and it isn't the mechanism that will move them back.

The Patterns Show Up Everywhere, Not Just in Food

The binge-restrict cycle is the most familiar version of this, but it is far from the only one. There is overfunction followed by collapse — the person who carries everyone and everything until their body forces a stop their mind refused to choose. There is emotional flooding followed by emotional numbing, where every situation feels like a crisis until, one day, nothing feels like anything. There is oversharing followed by vanishing, where a relationship opens too fast and then closes completely the moment it can't hold the weight. And there is the one almost nobody says out loud in church: the spiritual high followed by the spiritual drought, where the conference or the breakthrough Sunday that felt electric gives way two weeks later to a devotional life that feels like talking to a wall.

Proverbs 25:16 has a strange little proverb tucked inside it that speaks directly to this: if you find honey, eat just enough — too much of it, and you will be sick. Even good things, taken without limit, make a person ill. The wisdom writers were not strangers to the idea that excess in any direction, including spiritual excess, has a cost.

Elijah Under the Tree

The story is in 1 Kings, and it deserves to be read as one continuous arc rather than two separate chapters, because the contrast is the entire point.

In chapter 18, Elijah stands alone on Mount Carmel against 450 prophets of Baal, prays a single prayer, and fire falls from heaven, consuming the sacrifice, the wood, the stones, and the water in the trench around the altar. It is the most dramatic public vindication in the Old Testament. He orders the execution of the false prophets, prays for rain after three years of drought, and outruns the king's chariot for seventeen miles in the power of the Spirit. That is hyperarousal at its most justified and its most exhausting. The mountaintop, the maximum, the all.

Chapter 19 opens one verse later. Jezebel sends a single threatening message. And the prophet who just called down fire runs into the wilderness, sits under a juniper tree, and asks God to let him die. It is enough. Take my life. I am no better than my ancestors. That is hypoarousal. The total collapse that so often follows total exertion, arriving with no warning and no apparent proportion to the trigger that set it off.

He himself went a day's journey into the wilderness, and came and sat down under a juniper tree: and he requested for himself that he might die.

What God does next is the part of the story worth sitting with longest. He does not send a rebuke. He does not remind Elijah of Carmel, or ask where his faith has gone, or deliver a theological correction. An angel touches him and says: arise and eat. There is bread, baked on coals. There is a jar of water. Elijah eats, and sleeps, and the angel returns and says it again — eat, because the journey is too great for you. Only after the second meal and the rest does Elijah travel on, forty days, to a cave at Horeb, where God finally speaks. Not in the wind that splits mountains. Not in the earthquake. Not in the fire. In a still, small voice — a gentle whisper that could only be heard once the body had stopped running long enough to listen.

What the Extremes Actually Cost

Living too far above the window keeps cortisol elevated for too long, and elevated cortisol damages the hippocampus, suppresses the immune system, and eventually makes genuine rest neurologically difficult to access at all — which is why some people say, without exaggeration, that they have forgotten how to relax. Living too far below the window does something different but related: the dopamine system flattens, a state psychologists call anhedonia, where things that once brought pleasure simply don't anymore. Not because the things changed. Because the instrument that registers them has gone quiet.

Spiritually, the flattened state is often misread as abandonment. God isn't there. My prayers hit the ceiling. Worship doesn't move me the way it used to. The truth is harder and gentler at once: a hypoarousal state makes it difficult to feel anyone, not only God. That flatness is physiological. It is not God's verdict on the relationship. But it is genuinely hard to believe that from inside the flatness, which is exactly why this needs to be said out loud, by someone who isn't currently in it.

The Way Back Is Smaller Than You Expect

For the person above the window, the return rarely starts with a dramatic life overhaul. It starts with naming the state honestly — I am above my window right now — without the shame that usually follows. It continues with the body, not the schedule: slower breathing, real food, water, the deliberate stillness of feet on the ground, because the nervous system responds to the body before it responds to logic. And it asks for one thing to be put down, not everything — the single highest-cost commitment, identified honestly and released as an act of trust rather than failure.

For the person below the window, the order reverses. Motivation will not arrive first; it follows action, almost always, which means the smallest possible step has to be taken without waiting to feel ready for it. Isolation needs to be interrupted, even by one honest sentence to one trusted person, because connection is one of the fastest routes back into the window. And rhythm helps more than most people expect — which is likely why David's harp, played for a tormented Saul in 1 Samuel 16, is one of the earliest recorded uses of music as nervous system regulation, three thousand years before the term existed.

Temperance is listed as fruit, not as a personality trait some people are born with and others aren't. Fruit grows. It is cultivated, slowly, by small returns to the window every time a person notices they've drifted from it. The in-between is not a single decision made once. It is a practice, the same way Sabbath was never meant to be one good day but a rhythm woven into the structure of every week — work and rest, output and restoration, sown season and fallow season, on a cycle no person and no land was built to skip indefinitely.

The Quiet Is Not Empty

The in-between rarely makes a good story. Nobody photographs the Tuesday evening when someone put one thing down, breathed slowly, and went to bed early instead of pushing through. There is no testimony in that, not the kind that gets told from a platform. But it is, very often, the most important thing a person does in an entire year, and it is exactly where God has always chosen to meet the worn-out and the numb alike — not in the fire, but in the whisper that only becomes audible once the running stops.