I haven’t written for a bit on the nervous system/coping stuff I tend to spout off about because — I’ve been numbing! Yay!

Seriously. Numbing is a built-in feature of our nervous system, and it’s a damn good thing. Numbing helps us manage pain and fear. It often follows experiences of emotional intensity, and can lead to or be part of an experience of depression (but not always). Sometimes depression is a secondary reaction — shame, blame, grief — to the experience of numbing or shutting down in a culture that does not value it as a necessary response or state of being.

Numbing is designed for just such an occasion as this: helplessness. We are in distress we can’t get out of. We have control over some things, and circumstances are constantly changing both inside and outside our lives, but let’s face it, this is going on a long time, and will be going on longer.

In hyper-capitalist American culture, we tend to glorify productive forms of numbing and shame unproductive forms. We’re all for people who numb out by guzzling coffee and working eighteen hours a day. We’re super down on folks who lie around eating cookies and watching the Hallmark channel. But I’m here to tell you that both serve a purpose.

A lot of mental health diagnoses are based on the idea that there’s the “normal” world, and then there are “abnormal” reactions to that world, leading to disorders. This was wrong to begin with. But now much of what was upheld as normal “functioning” — more accurately, normative “functioning” — has been thrown in the air like 52-card pickup. Those who have had the privilege of being protected from the collective crisis going on all along for so many people are now in crisis themselves, or having their first experience of large-scale distress (don’t get me started on “we’re all in this together”). With loosening around normativity, what a great opportunity to shift from shaming and blaming and pathologizing “symptoms” to appreciating the wisdom of different modes of coping, and approaching attempted change from the perspective of cost-benefit analysis.

There is nothing inherently wrong with spending weeks on the couch watching that Tiger thing everyone’s watching. It is only worth considering attempts to shift once the costs outweigh the benefits, or you end up stuck in one mode super long term. Then it becomes what we could call a high-cost coping strategy, and you may be better served by a tweak or a swap.

For me, after being sick last week and experiencing a wave of emotional intensity, relative emotional numbness was a welcome and healthy relief. It’s like when deer get startled, they will often go find a safe dark place to collapse and let their nervous systems recover until they’re regulated again. I’ve been in slow-mo with low energy and low motivation for several days such that now, some things really need to get done. So I will try to mobilize some energy tomorrow, and with it may or may not come a wave of feeling that I’ve been detached from. The nervous system is constantly attempting to regulate itself, resource itself around coping, optimize processing, and flexibly shift between various states of arousal, preparedness, and connection.

You’re doing great! Thank your nervous system today for the sophisticated ways it’s getting you through this.

Here’s a picture of a deer.