Numbness is Not What It Seems

Numbness makes life unavailable. We can't feel our "Yes" or our "No," so discerning the way forward becomes next to impossible. How can we see and feel what we want in life, when we can't access the real-time data available to us through our senses?

Left unchecked, numbness has a devastating impact on our work, our relationships, and our sense of connection to life.

Numbness shuts down our capacity to receive information, narrowing the aperture of what we feel. As the color spectrum of our experience dims, it gets harder and harder to motivate ourselves towards dreams and goals.

When we’re numb, we’re disconnected from our deeper purpose in life. The achievements we formerly took pride in feel hollow, and our usual self-care falls flat.

Numbness has a devastating impact on relationships because we often unintentionally distance and lose connection. A thick fog separates us and others, and no matter how hard we try, it lets nothing through. We watch from afar as we go through the movements of our day, feeling growing unease and asking ourselves if this is what life will be like, from now on.

Numbness can even cause us to question our closest relationships, particularly our intimate partnerships. Emotional distance becomes the new normal. During intimacy, numbness can show up as performativity — or we avoid being intimate altogether. Whenever we wonder why we don't feel anything, it can be easy to conclude that it’s our partner or our relationship that needs to change.

The Neurobiology of Numbness

Numbness is trauma response. It's a survival mechanism that follows chronic stress or trauma. It happens after our nervous systems have been over-activated into a stress or trauma response for a prolonged period of time.

Eventually, our nervous systems can no longer sustain the high levels of activation that happen in a fight or flight response, and we collapse. The oldest, most primal part of our nervous system takes over. At a certain point, the nervous system decides it's better not to feel anymore.

We shut down and literally stop feeling.

Numbness is the body's intelligent answer to experiencing too much, too fast, or too soon. The body responds by raising our threshold for sensation. It's an attempt to create safety, but from a withdrawn and unresponsive place. 

And t’s too high a price to pay.

We often see numbness as something to push through and “get over.” When we don't feel what we want to feel, we think that we need to feel more. In an attempt to feel, we push ourselves into even more intensity. But this only continues to overwhelm the system and makes the numbness worse.

Because we're eager to feel something — anything — again, it's easy to interpret the overwhelm of pushing through as a good sign. After all, it’s a feeling. And we may not have felt anything for a long time. It’s easy to habitually override our threshold for what our bodies can reasonably handle.

Think back to times we’ve been in large crowds, or loud music concerts, or packed too much of our to-do lists into one day. There's a spacy rush of energy that can feel good, if all we've been feeling is numbness.

But what we're noticing isn't authentic feeling, it's just more overwhelm.

It's easy to chase a downward spiral of more and more intensity and overwhelm, because feeling the rush of it is better than feeling nothing. But chasing high sensations only entrenches the numbness even more.

Because numbness is a response to overwhelm, creating “more” only reinforces the nervous system's choice to shut down. We can't get over numbness by doing more, trying harder, or pushing ourselves.

How to Work with Numbness as a Stress or Trauma Response

When all other options have failed, numbness is our nervous systems' final effort to create safety. It's a sign that we need to take drastic action to create a shift. It can involve making lifestyle adjustments or getting support to change how we orient towards family, work, and obligations.

Whatever we do, we need to give our nervous systems what they need to heal.

Our culture is great at pushing us towards high achievement. We reward high performance. The external validation we get when we excel makes it easy to ignore our bodies’ signals that we need to do things differently.

But others don't reward us for slowing down. We often feel the panic and fear of missing out when we try to rest.

Committing to healing numbness takes dedication. There is no quick fix, although I use several trauma healing modalities that are extremely effective in the process.

I often see people try to bypass the slow and gentle work of regrowing the nervous system by gravitating towards the intensity of plant medicine experiences, heavy-duty spiritual processes, or multi-day silent retreats.

But there are no shortcuts for the inner and outer shifts that need to happen if we are to create authentic inner safety.

After all, the numbness didn't just arrive unannounced on our doorsteps and take residence inside us, refusing to budge. It's intelligent. The numbness is trying to protect us, not do us harm. We need to learn how to work with it, so that our nervous systems recalibrate.

Here's what I've found works best.

3 Ways to Work with Numbness

1. Slow down. Way down. This is hard.

This first step is the most difficult because it goes against all the programming we've received from our culture about what it means to be successful and high achieving. To heal numbness, we need to become willing to listen more to ourselves and our needs than to external demands and benchmarks. We need to be willing to discern, evaluate, and say "No, thank you."

Slowing down is anathema to an overloaded nervous system in numbness mode. Urgency and action are preferable to pausing long enough to feel. Over time, the nervous system builds up a thick skin of resistance to slowing down.

The brain will also try everything to keep us from slowing down. Thoughts about to-do lists, interpersonal challenges at work, or rumination will stand between us and our attempts to slow the pace and focus inside.

I have come to understand that the brain will do all it can to maintain the status quo, because healing is an uncertain path, and the outcome is unclear. The brain believes that it's better to stay with the familiar feelings of numbness than to risk being overwhelmed, yet again, by too much feeling.

2. Orient to the present moment.

Learning to be in the present moment is the best mindfulness practice there is. Thinking about the past or the future distracts us from our experience of numbness and shutdown. We aren't present in the body when our thoughts have taken us out of the "now."

Setting an intention to be in the present moment is a powerful anchor.

Orienting is a trauma navigation skill that can gently bring us back to the present moment. We can use it to titrate more presence into our experience of life. When we orient and bring ourselves back from wherever our thoughts displaced us, outside the body, the first thing we feel is often "nothing."

But numbness is a feeling. Feeling nothing is a feeling. Even if we don't like it, numbness has a felt sense to it. We can feel empty, cold, frozen, airy, or even dissociated. Our minds might momentarily go blank. We might even hold our breath, without realizing it. There is information in each of these somatic responses. They indicate that underneath the layers of numbness, there is something waiting to be felt and moved through.

3. Learn somatic tools to create inner safety.

Numbness is a shield for stress or trauma responses that haven't completed and are still held in the body. They’re there because, back when we went through those stressful or traumatic experiences, our brain and body decided that they were too much to digest. We stored these unprocessed sensations and feelings of overwhelm in the body, where they link with other similar unprocessed memories. These linked networks of unprocessed sensations remain within us until we safely and gently access them in order to heal.

We can only heal when we feel enough inner safety to know that we can go to these unprocessed memories and allow them to process through to completion. This is the foundation of trauma healing. It's why somatic tools like body focus, breathing, sounding, and movement are essential to learn and lean into, as ways to process the intensity of past experiences.

An embodiment practice is a mindfulness practice for the body, focused on strengthening the body-mind connection for greater wellbeing. It's a reliable way to create an inner experience of safety, which may be something that some of us have never experienced before.

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Numbness was a milestone on the map of my healing journey. It helped me recognize where I didn’t feel safe, inside.

Rather than bypassing it, I allowed it to become my biggest teacher. It led me to an embodied experience of what inner safety feels like. Learning to work with it, rather than fight it, helped me shift decades-long patterns of complex trauma.

Once we find safety, we can map our way back to it again and again.

When we judge our numbness, we see ourselves as deficient or believe there's something wrong with us. We feel like we're missing out on life, but we don't know what to do to change it.

When we see numbness as an opportunity to heal our nervous systems, we allow ourselves the slowness and space to heal.

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