The Calm Before the Internal Storm.
I used to think the people who burn out were the ones who fall apart.
You know—miss deadlines, cancel meetings, stop showing up. However, I never missed a deadline. I never showed visible strain. I held my tone in meetings. I delivered the work. I stayed calm.
So, I assumed I was fine.
Nevertheless, there was a moment—standing mid-sentence in a conversation—when I just… blanked. The words left me. The thread vanished. It was not dramatic, but it shook me. Because for the first time, I realized I was present physically but unavailable internally.
Moreover, I could not fake my way past that.
What I did not understand at the time was that I was not broken. I was overloaded—silently, gradually, and biologically.
The Silent Accumulation: Allostatic Load
The body does not signal strain in clear language. It whispers. It blunts your emotional range. It disrupts recall. It compresses nuance. What scientists call allostatic load—the physiological ‘wear and tear’ on the body from chronic or repeated stress without adequate recovery—involves the cumulative impact of various neuroendocrine, cardiovascular, and metabolic systems attempting to adapt to stress. Over time, this adaptive process can lead to dysregulation and energy conservation, often in subtle, unnoticed ways (McEwen & Gianaros, 2010).
You do not collapse. You operate with less and less internal bandwidth. Your clarity dulls. Your presence fades. Nevertheless, you are still “high-functioning.”
That is what makes it so dangerous. Because everyone, including you, assumes everything is okay.
The Male Predicament: Normative Alexithymia
Men are especially prone to this kind of containment. Research indicates that many men, due to societal conditioning and learned coping mechanisms, may gradually lose access to their emotional vocabulary—a phenomenon termed normative alexithymia (Levant et al., 2009). This condition is characterized not just by difficulty expressing emotions, but by a diminished ability to identify and describe one’s own feelings. We are taught to power through, not pause. To manage, not name.
So, when disconnection starts, we override it.
What I have learned is that disconnection is the body’s last line of defense. It is not emotional fragility. It is physiological protection, and unless we interrupt it, the erosion continues—quietly, invisibly, but persistently.
Finding Release: The Path to Offloading
My first interruption was not a grand moment. It was a quiet one—a private decision to stop absorbing and to let something out. I did not need to analyze it. I just needed to end the accumulation.
What followed was not clarity, but relief. My system could breathe again.
That is what offloading became for me—not therapy, not storytelling. Just a moment when something exited the system that I did not even know I was carrying.
How much longer do I want to appear fine, if it costs me my ability to actually feel fine?
References
Arnsten, A. F. T. (2009). Stress signalling pathways that impair prefrontal cortex structure and function. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 10(6), 410–422.
Levant, R. F., Hall, R. J., Williams, C. M., & Hasan, N. T. (2009). Gender differences in alexithymia. Psychology of Men & Masculinity, 10(3), 190–203.
McEwen, B. S., & Gianaros, P. J. (2010). Central role of the brain in stress and adaptation. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1186(1), 190–222.