Summer is a season of cold drinks and hot fun – but for some, a brain freeze from a 7/11 Slushie drink is nothing compared to the perpetual chill felt in the soul even as one’s external disposition remains sunny and breezy. While it’s true that fair roads and good weather may be a great way to get along with others, this congeniality in some instances belies a deeper malaise that the psychology community labels functional freeze.
Basically, if you’re feeling numb and dead on the inside, while still managing to pull together some semblance of productive normality and some similitude of being well-adjusted, you might be suffering from functional freeze. At a personal level we tend to believe that the way we present ourselves, online or in person, is less vital than how we really feel on the inside. We want to feel some affinity with what we say when entering discourse with others, but we know that, at times, we have to put our best performative foot forward, the better to get along with others in the world. Functional freeze goes a step further, however, because under its rubric we feel such a deep internal malaise that our external facade of normalcy begins to winnow away our functionality like an ice cube on a sunny patio. A deep contradiction ensues, where we fall further down a rabbit hole of misery while we still manage to hold together our daily routine (and mix metaphors).
Accepting that our inner realm rarely is as satisfied as we’d like it to be can help but so can parsing out the fact that knowing an external audience extends to knowing the many variations within ourselves. We can’t be happy all the time, but we do need to come to terms with our alienation if it starts to be an ongoing theme. In the weeds of functional freeze we find a few common denominators, the better to assess our own reality. A sufferer can look and behave as though they’re “capable, fulfilling obligations, socializing, and maintaining a façade of normalcy” while their inner psychological realm is a landscape bereft of real feeling, functioning essentially on hypothalamus instincts and limbic self-preservation.
Appearing to be well-adjusted and sufficiently life adept while internally feeling dialed down to the level of a tree stump is certainly no way to live—no matter how well others may think we’re doing. “Externally, we may seem capable, fulfilling obligations, socializing, and maintaining a façade of normalcy. Yet internally, we’re merely going through the motions, driven solely by survival instincts.” Key to the array of symptoms is that such a diagnosis or self-diagnosis asks us to go back to our pre-adulting phase of development where we saw all-too clearly how much of an act being a regular adult was; teenage critiques of adulthood ring true when we find that functional freeze imparts a degree of discontent with the contrived and dubious was of acting normal in this life.
Appearing to be “high functioning” often leads others to not ask deeper questions about a person’s inner state; faced as we are with reams of moping fusspots in our lives we might glide right past candidates for the functional freeze diagnosis – including ourselves. So it’s worth asking, as we toil laboriously with noble vigour in your life and schoolwork, if we’ve “learned to disconnect from ourselves and disengage with the stress” such that our inner “‘shutdown’ freeze response becomes our main operating default when stress hits a certain level.”
To The Lab Results We Shall Go
Neuroscience for its part gives a pat clinical description of the whole functional freeze phenomenon: Dorsal Vagal Shutdown: “During a freeze response, the dorsal vagal complex reduces metabolic activity, heart rate, and blood pressure. This physiological state is characterized by immobility, disengagement, and a sense of detachment from the environment. While this response can be adaptive in situations of extreme danger, such as facing a predator, it becomes problematic when individuals remain stuck in this state for prolonged periods.”
Happily, besides ignoring any dubious moralizing where victims of mental health difficulties are blamed for their maladies, solutions are to be found. Knowing and accepting that “the freeze reaction to stress is an unconscious survival mechanism, and not a result of a lack of strength, discipline or resilience” should help unearth some fixable causes to one’s condition. Life is more than a fight or flight response. All too often the answer is freeze. And, going straight to the heart, or nerve, of the matter, the literal physical vagus nerve can be tweaked and tuned to achieve a better harmony: “Humming activates the vagus nerve, promoting relaxation”.
So next time you’re feeling a bit dead on the inside while seeming normal on the outside, like an ice cream sandwich filled with frozen prune juice, try and hum a little song! And most of all, remember to have empathy for those in society who really do feel awfully bereft of meaning while still, for months, years or a lifetime, faking it till they make it.
References
Agence France-Presse. (2024). ‘Quiet, Lonely’- The Trump Shooter’. RawStory. Retrieved from https://www.rawstory.com/thomas-matthew-crooks-trump-shooter/
Khiron Clinics. (2023). ‘Unwrapping the numbing grip of functional freeze’. Retrieved from https://nypost.com/lifestyle/what-is-functional-freeze/
Steinberg, B. (2024). ‘What is ‘functional freeze’? New York Post. Retrieved from https://nypost.com/lifestyle/what-is-functional-freeze/
Yasmin, S. & Rohlich, J. (2024). ‘What we know about Thomas Matthew Crooks’. MSN.com. Retrieved from https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/world/what-we-know-about-gunman-thomas-matthew-crooks-who-shot-at-trump-at-his-pennsylvania-rally/ar-BB1pWXli
