Are you Lazy or is this "Functional Freeze"?

0:00 This is Crappy to Happy and I am your host, Cass Dunn. I'm a clinical and coaching psychologist, a mindfulness meditation teacher and of course author of the Crappy to Happy Books. In this show, I bring you conversations with interesting, inspiring, intelligent people who are experts in their field and who have something of value to share that will help you feel less crappy and more happy. Are you really lazy or is it functional freeze?

0:41 This is the kind of headline, catchy, title that you might have seen on articles or social media posts and you may have wondered yourself, or what is this, what is functional free? Maybe this is the explanation for what I'm experiencing. So I decided to devote an episode to this to help you to understand what exactly people are referring to when they talk about this state of functional freeze, like what does that mean? So to begin with what it describes in terms of the behaviour or the experience that you might be having, it describes a state of basically going through the motions, doing the things that you need to do, showing up to work, etc.

1:25 But being emotionally disconnected, feeling numb, detached, maybe a little bit foggy, really flat in terms of your affect, not really experiencing your emotions fully, just really flat, detached, disconnected, low energy, low mood, but still doing the things that need to be done. So it's much more of an inner experience. But this is the challenge that people have with it is because on the outside you may look like you're doing fine, but on the inside you're having this very detached, disconnected experience where you're there, but you're not really there. So it can impact your relationships because you're not really present.

2:06 It can impact you socially because you withdraw from activities you don't really want to participate in things. It may look like you go to work, you do the things that you have to do, but then you get home and you just lie flat on the couch and you have nothing left. You are completely spent and so then you just spend the rest of the night scrolling mindlessly through TikTok videos or streaming shows on Netflix or doing something that numbs you out, just eating the food, drinking the alcohol and really not having the capacity to just take care of your basic needs. So it's kind of being able to show up when you need to, but that's all you've got.

2:47 That's kind of what it looks and feels like. So what is actually going on here? To understand that we have to talk about the nervous system and how it operates. So we've talked about that on this show before, but you probably have not heard anybody talk about functional freeze because it's not really a term that you will find in textbooks. It really is something that I think has been created on the internet. I certainly have a lot of books written by people who are very prominent in the field of somatic therapies and nervous system regulation and healing. And I have never seen somebody out there can tell me where it does exist in somebody's textbook or some official publication, but I certainly have never seen it written in that format.

3:35 I don't know who came up with a term, but it has been picked up because it describes very well what people's experience is. And you will see it used by counsellors and therapists and various practitioners because it is a neat way of describing to somebody what is going on, what they're experiencing. But essentially what is happening? Quick recap of how the nervous system works. Your threat response, when it gets activated, you have the fight flight response, fight or flight, either fight or run. Fawn is one, which is only recently been added. So it's fight flight freeze, fawn and fawn is when you are appeasing your attacker, like going out of your way to accommodate the person who is the source of threat as a self-protective defense strategy.

4:24 Freeze is that deer in the headlights. So it's when you are activated, all of your senses are activated. It is lying in bed at night and hearing a noise like somebody's in the house. A state of being very alert but kind of frozen in mobile. Heart rate might be racing, body not moving. Sensors engage, listening, tuned into every possible sound or movement, but body frozen. So that's the freeze response, fight flight freeze fawn. Now take that threat response and to keep this very simple, if you want to bring in newer research about how a nervous system operates. And all we understood in the day, when I was learning this stuff in psychology, was that we had two branches of our nervous system, sympathetic, parasympathetic.

5:12 Sympathetic is the arousal state, activated, engaged state, parasympathetic was the calm, relaxed state. So if you're feeling anxious, if you're in the fight or flight, that sympathetic arousal, and if you were feeling calm and relaxed, that was parasympathetic. And we would just move between these two. And if you're feeling very stressed, for example, very anxious, then you would try to do things to bring online your parasympathetic nervous system, that calming response, calming things down, slow deep breathing, talking to a friend, listening to some calming music, all of the things to bring your energy and your arousal down. And it was just this dual kind of system. Sympathetic, parasympathetic. Basically, what we know now with newer information is that the parasympathetic nervous system actually has two branches.

5:57 There is the rest digest, that rest, relaxation, connection, etc. And there is what is called dorsal vagal, be nice if there's a less clinical term for that, but it's basically the collapse or shutdown response. Now if you imagine this as a three branches instead of just the two, not just sympathetic, parasympathetic. So in this case, sympathetic would refer to being engaged and arousal response in your nervous system. It's active, it's engaged, it can be fight or flight, but also your sympathetic nervous system is also engaged when you're at a party, when you're having fun, when you're energized, when you're playing sport. So it's the combination of the branch of your nervous system that is activated combined with your perception of safety or danger.

6:46 So the sympathetic nervous system, when there is a sense of threat, that is when you go into anxiety stress, what we call hyper arousal, overly activated stress response because you're perceiving threat in whatever shape or form that might take, physical threat, social threat, just too much on your plate overwhelmed. That's the threat response activated. So then when we think about the parasympathetic branch, we are either relaxed, connected, socially connected, feeling engaged with our surroundings, feeling calm, emotionally regulated, perception, quiet open, can consider possibilities, can think, access our prefrontal cortex, can think clearly, etc. When we have experienced a trauma or when we have experienced too much stress for too long without a break, without any reprieve, without completing that stress cycle, having the opportunity to rest and restore and regulate back, again, so it could be chronic toxic stress at work, relationship, financial stress, all sorts of situations in life that can cause to a chronic unrelenting stress with no reprieve, which could also be particularly exacerbated if you have had early trauma and therefore your tolerance for stress is lower, you've got a narrower window of tolerance.

7:59 Then what can happen is that you get completely overwhelmed and you end up in the collapse or shutdown response. Now this collapse or shutdown response is different from freeze. So freeze is during the headlights. I'm alert, what's going on, where's the threat? What do I need to do next? It's kind of pause before an action. I'm hyper alert, but my body's frozen. Now compared to a collapse response, which is I am depleted. The energy has drained from me. I've got nothing left. I'm completely burnt out. I am emotionally disconnected. NUM, brain fog, low energy, low interest, low motivation. I'm describing that in an extreme scenario, right?

8:41 The truth of the matter is we all go in the course of our day to day to day. We go up and down through these different states, I guess, throughout our day. I can be sitting in a meeting and somebody says, I'm going to get you to deliver that report that we talked about and I suddenly have the thought I haven't done the report. They're going to ask me if I can go into a freeze response. I can be sitting in a social scenario and I'm happy and engaged. Then I hear somebody talking about a party or an event that I wasn't invited to and I go into, oh my God, I've been excluded, rejected. What does this mean? I can go into a withdrawal into a disconnected or must have dissociated state momentarily and then come back again.

9:27 These aren't always extreme situations. I come chronically up there in that hyper-rousal state. I'm chronically just lying on the couch and I can't move for a week. We are cycling in and out of these different phases all the time. I think that's really important to understand. You can momentarily just blank out because your nervous system just does that. That's its response and then you can come back. What you're aiming for, what we're all aiming for is not to never go outside of a window of tolerance, not to never go into fight or flight or collapse or shutdown. It's how we recover, how quickly and effectively do we get back to regulated? That's all we're aiming for in terms of our growth and our healing and our working on resetting our nervous system if we know that we are a bit dysregulated because of our past experiences, past dramas, early upbringing, genetics, etc.

10:24 All we're looking to be able to do is to have more awareness of what's happening with our nervous system and to have some strategies to come back more quickly to know what's happening to identify and to have tools that we can get regulated more quickly. It's not to never get dysregulated again. I just described freeze and I described collapse, which as I said, are two different things. You go on the internet and read stuff and people will blend these things together. I think it's also really important to understand. I've done some training with some people who are really well studied in this field and there is still debate among them about, is it freeze? Is it collapse?

11:04 I was first trained, fight, flight, freeze or appease. That's an appease, your attacker. Then I started hearing everybody say fight, flight, freeze, fawn. I thought I was just using that word because it's an F and that's neat. Their discussion about is faunting different from appeasing. Are these two different things? There's all of this development and research going on about all of these states and terms that we use and what's actually happening in our body during each of them. None of that is actually rock solid set in stone. It's unfolding, right? I share that just to say I can't claim to be the expert. That is my best understanding of the distinction between freeze and collapse and if you read something different somewhere else on the internet.

11:48 Well, different people have got different information and some of it is still being figured out. Therefore, let's get back to the topic, which is functional freeze. So again, my best understanding is what this is describing is not a freeze during the headlight, it's kind of a freeze, but the collapse kind of freeze. The shutdown, it's the shutdown withdrawal, it's the emotional disconnection, disconnection between your mind and your body, like feeling numb, not really feeling what's happening in your body, being kind of numb to your own emotional experience, very flat. Like I said, brain fog, not really able to concentrate, feeling kind of on the outside looking in at your life.

12:28 But you can show up when you can do the things because that's what's expected of you, and internally there's this different thing going on, this disconnect. So I really think that this is a variation, a version of a collapse response, which happens after extended chronic stress, without any break or retrieve or opportunity to heal and regulate and get grounded again and get back into that window when there's, we're not designed. For that, our bodies and brains are not designed to be exposed to chronic unrelenting stress. Our whole threat response system is designed to get us out of danger, it's designed to be in a cute mechanism, get us out of danger, and then we can relax again.

13:13 Animals in the world don't have PTSD, you know why? Because they get out of danger, they shake it off, they complete the stress cycle and they move on. We humans don't really have that in our modern world, where we are exposed to not just physical stresses, like I said, but all of these social threats, just the endless demands of work and bombardment with information and demands and people wanting us 24/7, just all of that, right? It creates this scenario where we never get a break from it. And then I should add, then you add when the alarm is coming from inside the house, when your stress is caused by your thoughts, your expectations, your negative self talk, your assuming what people are saying about you, what people are thinking about you, your assuming that you're going to get fired and that people hate you, etc.

14:01 So remember that there's a whole lot of self talk, self evaluation, self judgment, self censoring, that is also contributing to your stress response. It's not just out there, it's not just the external demands and stress or some of it we create in our own mind. Again, for various reasons, that's not meant to be a judgment or a criticism because for various reasons we have internalized these narratives in this critical self talk as a survival strategy again. That's a whole different topic and a whole different path to healing. But it's relevant in this scenario because often when you have things to do and you know you have things to do, maybe you've gone to work all week, but then you can't get food on the table for your kids or you've done the things that you absolutely have to do because they're urgent but everything that's not is ignored and building up so you're getting behind and you're struggling or you get to the weekend and you say you're going to clean the house and see some friends but you haven't got it in you so you lie on the couch all weekend and just completely isolate.

15:08 Then the most likely thing to happen is that you start beating yourself up. You start chastising yourself for not doing the things that you said that you were going to do. You start calling yourself hopeless and lazy and a bad mother and a bad this and all of the rest of it. When you're in that state, low in your mood and your sense of self worth and maybe you're not taking the best care of yourself and you're tired and you're fatigued, then those feelings also create thoughts. So your emotional state influences the way you perceive events. Remember I've told you a hundred times that when you're stressed, you perceive neutral facial expressions as hostile.

15:49 That's such a great example because what it says is your state, the state that you're in influences how you perceive what is happening around you. You are not seeing the world as it is. You are seeing the world how you are. So it creates this awful cycle. You're feeling down on yourself. You're feeling badly about yourself. You're feeling negative. So whatever is happening in your outside world, you're probably perceiving it as being much worse than it actually is. Much more catastrophic than it actually is. You are attributing motivations to people's behaviour that probably isn't there, but then that also causes you to feel worse again. So it's really, once you get stuck in this state, it can be very difficult to get out of it. But what I want to say about this in terms of if you're there and if this feels familiar or if you recognise this in somebody else is that I just spent a whole lot of time talking about thoughts and feelings.

16:38 But in actual fact, thoughts and feelings are very top down. When we talk about therapy and therapeutic responses and strategies and tools, looking at thoughts and feelings is very top down kind of approach. When you're in this kind of collapsed, disconnected, disengaged state, this requires bottom up strategies, not trying to think your way out of it, not trying to definitely not talking yourself, chastising yourself, judging yourself, telling yourself what an awful person you are. That is absolutely not going to help. This is a physiological response. This is a nervous system response. Your physiology doesn't respond to language, your physiology responds to physiology. So you change your physiology. You directly work with your body. So in this free state, when you are disconnected from your body, you're feeling like you're not yourself.

17:23 You're emotionally, mentally, and you're just feeling this numb, disengagement. Then you've got to get back in your body. You've got to find some ways to get some activation happening. If you imagine collapse state is at the bottom of the ladder, you've got to start moving up the ladder, which means you have to actually get up into more of a sympathetic state. You actually have to activate some energy, but in a way that is soothing, in a way that is healing, not in a way that is pushing yourself, forcing yourself to do the things that you need to do, just because you feel threatened that if you don't do them something bad, it's going to happen. You've got to show up to your work, you're going to lose your job. You've got to pay that bill because it's going to cut the electricity off. That's pushing to do things. I'm talking about activating your physiology, but in a way that is safe and soothing and connected.

18:09 Connecting with people is great. But going in nature, walking across, getting your feet on the ground, things like tapping your body, tapping, you can't see me, but crossing your hands across your chest and then just tapping your arms, tapping, tapping your thighs, tapping, tapping from the top of your head all the way down to your feet, activating some energy in your body, listening to music that changes your state, feeling how that feels in your body, putting your hands into play-doh, needing bread, you know, things that are kinesthetic, things that activate your senses, sniffing essential oils. Think about anything that stimulates your senses and gets you back in your body, gets you connected again with yourself.

18:56 Your physiological self, because what's happened is you've disconnected. It's like the shutdown has disconnected your mind and your body, you know, so you can't feel detached from yourself. And what you want to do is get those things back together again. Mindfulness, obviously yoga, soothing yoga, things like that, you move your body in a way that feels safe and comfortable, but it's about feeling it, you know, like re-engaging your senses. But having said all of that, it's also about listening to your body. If your body is crying out for rest and telling you that it needs rest, then give it rest. Listening to your body connecting back with yourself involves trusting that your body's telling you what it needs.

19:41 So it might be dimming the lights, lying under a weighted blanket, allowing your body to rest. And the thing that happens is we get so down on ourselves because we're so stuck in this kind of thinking that you've got to be doing something being productive or you're a waste of space, like everything's a waste of time if you're not being productive. We don't allow ourselves, we don't give ourselves permission to rest. That's what got you here in the first place, remember? Chronic unrelenting stress, never giving yourself the time to recover. So sometimes it is about being accepting of the fact that you might need to spend more time than usual just resting, allowing your body to heal, recover, repair. And what might happen is that you rest for long enough, you give yourself permission to rest for long enough and then you will naturally start to seek out some movement.

20:26 You want to go outside, you want to get some sunshine, you want to nice cup of coffee or tea, you know, you listen to your body's cues if you have the capacity to do that. So it could be that you rest when you need to rest, instead of filling down on yourself like you're being lazy and unproductive, that actually you just accept that this is what your body needs as part of your healing. Truth is I can't give personal advice in a podcast episode like this, that's not the point. It is really just about helping you to understand what might be happening with your nervous system because when you have an understanding and when you recognize that what is happening is actually your whole body, your whole nervous system is just trying to protect you and keep you safe.

21:06 And that these are physiological responses, this is not a personal failing or a weakness. This is a character flaw. And then you can reset your relationship with your body and your nervous system. What you want ultimately is to befriend your nervous system, to work with it, to listen to its cues, to get back to understanding what your nervous system is telling you. And usually if you're in this collapse response or you've been in a stress response, chronic stress for a long time, you've been ignoring all of your body's cues. You've become completely disconnected from what your body's been trying to tell you. But it's going to take some time to get there. I think the key thing is that this is not a quick fix. And I think the issue with the social media post and the TikTok videos and here's how to get out of a functional freeze, you know, some hack to wake up your senses or to activate you to do something is that that might help you in the moment.

21:58 But that is not going to be a long term solution in terms of healing your nervous system and getting to the root cause of why this happened in the first place. And then building structures and routines in a life and a lifestyle that supports your nervous system and your health and your wellbeing ongoing. So it's not just about getting yourself through this day and through this week and through this, whatever's happening, it's about what are you doing to get to the root of the issue, why did this happen in the first place, what are the emotional issues, the old wounds, the old stories, understanding that, healing that. A lot of work to be done, much more than I can talk about this podcast episode.

22:39 And then really in the long term, having that healthier life and lifestyle and relationship with yourself and getting back into being really connected with yourself and being able to trust yourself and to respond to your body's cues. I hope that is helpful. If you've heard the term functional freeze and you want to, sure, then I hope that helps you to have some understanding. And if you know somebody who might be experiencing something similar, then I hope that helps you to maybe be able to help them understand as well. Obviously, if you think this would be of interest to somebody that you know, please do share it. Love you to share the show with a friend because it does break my word of mouth. Get in touch with me. If there is anything else, if you have questions on this topic, meanwhile, I can't wait to catch you next week for another fabulous episode of Crab It A Happy.

23:24 [Music] (upbeat music)