Hiya!
How’re we all doing?… I know that’s a bit of a loaded question, especially for those of us who have been paying attention to the world & the goings on there within. To a bit of a degree, that’s what we’re talking about today. Not necessarily the global news but the loaded question that I posed to you all at the beginning of this blog. I want to talk about something that it seems a lot of us are dealing with right now that specifically makes that first question a tricky one to answer, functional freeze.
If you’ve never heard the term, functional freeze happens when the nervous system gets overloaded & goes into a kind of overstimulated protection mode. Think of it as getting past the point of flight or fight to our third option, freeze. Kind of like a possum playing dead, the body simply goes into a state of shut down where it prioritizes the basic functions above anything extra or strenuous.
That’s where I think I’m finding a lot of us these days, at least that’s where I’ve been finding a lot of the folks I talk to on the regular & I definitely find myself included in that group. I mean, hell, here I am writing a blog that’s due on a Saturday night for me late into the evening of Sunday. Even climbing up the stairs to do this blog felt to be a bit of a challenge for me if I’m being entirely transparent.
Right off the bat I can feel a few of you probably keying this in to another phenomenon that happens to those of us who are neurodivergent. That’s something that we call executive dysfunction. The key difference here is that executive dysfunction happens because of a lack of dopamine or a lack of a perceived ‘reward’ around a task we’d physically incapable of pushing ourselves into doing, this lives more in the area of burn out. Functional freeze is less of ‘procrastination’ or avoidance, & instead looks a lot like being stuck in the loop. So what’s the loop?
I know for me & a few others that I’ve talked to the functional freeze loop is manifesting itself as doom scrolling. We are stuck glued to our phones constantly looking at the news, constantly scrolling through & refreshing to see if anything has happened since the last couple of minutes that we have looked. If some new disastrous happenstance has occurred in the seconds since we last learned of the other travesties, crimes against humanity or the environment, &/or any other egregious heinous daily bull shit that has come down the pipe at us. We have become addicted to the disaster because it feels validating, we get to know we were right about all of this being as bad as the people in our lives brushed aside. We also get to avoid the guilt of not staying informed, of turning our eyes away from the suffering of the world in favor of our own privilege that is existing without the knowledge or fear of physical, emotional, psychological harm. We, unfortunately, then end up with the guilt that we have been stuck in the cycle & are now unable to accomplish the things we need to accomplish because we are frozen.
It’s exhausting, it really is. It’s just this ever maddening spiral of grief, frustration, anger, & heartache that’s surprisingly addicting. Like sinking to the bottom of the ocean, at some point the pressure overtakes the pull & buoyancy from the surface & you start to be pulled down further & further, faster & faster.
It doesn’t help when you feel like, for whatever reason, you have to be the torch barer of the news for those around you, especially those you know aren’t paying any attention to what is going on even though they had a hand in making all of these things happen.
My functional freeze looks like a few things. The doom scrolling is definitely there, even going as far as to wake up in the middle of the night just to check the news, awaiting further catastrophe. Additionally I have fallen into cycles of distraction. I will do anything I can to not sit & scroll. Of course none of the things that occupy that time are productive or helpful for the state of my nervous system. I’m also chasing cheap dopamine hits like none other. We’re talking junk food, lots of sugar, quick snacks, caffeine, whatever helps me to make it through the days that I find grueling as all get out. It’s really not a fun way to live & I now some of my friends are in very similar boats to what I just described.
So where’s the ray of hope, where’s the silver lining? We’re working on that part. It’s not that it is a work in progress, it definitely is. I’m just having to really take it one day at a time. Some days are worse & I find myself unintentionally wasting the day on my phone, others I journal, object write, scream into the void or find ways to lock myself away from my phone or the internet. It’s definitely a daily practice that I am on the losing side of currently, but am working on gaining footage for. I am really hoping that the time I spend abroad in the next couple of weeks coming up will help me to separate out from this addiction & reset because yeesh, it’s rough out there.
I don’t mean for this blog to be a downer or some sort of call for help. I just write about the through lines of my life, most of the time, & I know a lot of those near & dear to me are also riding this wave of functional freeze & then slipping into depression because of the guilt, the poor habits, & the strain of it all. It’s a blog of solidarity & of me being honest to help those of you dealing with this see that you’re not alone, & those out there with no idea that is is happening, maybe recognize that this is happening to the folks in their lives.
At any rate, I wish you all a wonderful week ahead full of hope, organic productivity, & levity.
As always, much love to you all,
-C