The Steady Drift: How We Lose Ourselves Without Noticing
There is a specific kind of quiet that settles in over time—not peace, but detachment.
For me, it started with emotional flatness. I was still doing the things—work, family, tasks—but everything felt dulled. I was not sad. I was not angry. I was not even stressed. I was just… low volume.
I could smile in conversation, even laugh when appropriate. However, I noticed that nothing landed. Joy did not light me up. Frustration did not move me either. I was living like someone who had left the room, but kept the lights on.
At first, I thought it was just fatigue. However, as the weeks stretched on, I started asking myself harder questions:
Is this just how life feels now? Or have I become unreachable to myself?
It took a while before I discovered what this was.
Understanding Functional Freeze
Neuroscience identifies this as functional freeze, a state often described within Stephen Porges’ Polyvagal Theory (Porges, 2011). It represents an autonomic nervous system response where, to conserve energy or cope with overwhelming threat, the body maintains outward productivity while internally inhibiting access to sensations and emotions. This is a highly adaptive, though often unnoticed, physiological shutdown.
You are not broken. You are adapting.
The Erosion of Emotional Access
Moreover, in men, this can go completely unnoticed. We are conditioned to see “emotional neutrality” as normal. However, there is a difference between being steady and being numbed out. We just were not taught to recognize the difference.
This diminished internal experience is also a critical component of normative alexithymia (Levant et al., 2009). It extends beyond a mere lack of outward emotional expression to an actual erosion of internal emotional access and processing, making it difficult to distinguish between emotional stability and true numbness.
The Power of Small Releases
When I finally let myself acknowledge that something had gone quiet in me, I did not try to fix it. I did something small: I wrote something down that I had not said. I folded it. I let it go.
No drama. No analysis. Just a physical clearing.
Something lifted—just slightly. Like a door opening an inch. Enough to remind me I was still in there.
I have come to believe that numbness is not failure. It is saturation, like anything that’s full—it does not need understanding. It needs release.
If you have not felt much lately, maybe it is not because you don’t care. Maybe it has just been too long since something left.
References
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.
Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation.
W. W. Norton & Company. Smith, R., Lane, R. D., et al. (2017). Maintaining the feelings of others in working memory. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 12(5), 848–860).