When Muted Emotions Give Relief

It might sound a little bizarre at first, how can dampened emotions provide any kind of relief? Why would you welcome that "nothing zone" from depression where all you do is function? There’s no sparkle, no raison d’être; you retreat within your walls and go through the motions waiting for feeling and enjoyment to return. You wait to live instead of exist, so how could this also be a tonic?

Because sometimes it’s hell on earth to feel things fully, to feel every single up and down coursing through your chest or crushing you with disappointment as your mind tries to make sense of the mess of emotions surging at your senses all at once.

Buried Emotions

When you’ve grown up with a brain that has learned that the safest way to survive is by going into emotional lockdown, releasing and experiencing normal emotions can be overwhelming. They can feel foreign, unexpected, confusing and you might mistake one feeling for another.

Sometimes you get a little hint that emotions are coming back, colours look vivid, something strikes you as truly beautiful. At others everything returns at once; suddenly you’re laughing louder than you have in a long time at the silliest little joke, you feel the energy and buzz of excitement about plans you’ve made or you find yourself smiling and pleased to connect with strangers by making small talk.

It isn’t always a positive experience. One minute you live in the grey nothingness of relative calm only to find yourself thrown without warning into a world where rage and anger can be felt in full terrifying force. It can be hard to channel such strong emotions as they seem to be using your body as a conduit, leaving it exhausted and aching all over once the wave of feeling crests.

You never know how long emotions are going to stay, so sometimes even feeling the negative ones is a blessing; at least you feel something. But that moment can come when it all feels too much, when you ask yourself, how do people feel so deeply all the time?

Cycling Emotions

When your emotions have been buried for a long time but start to resurface, you can become locked into a cycle of flooding and retreating emotions. They mount in intensity from the moment they return until, without warning, they disappear and you’re left with a feeling of hollow absence in their place; until the next deluge, and so the cycle continues.

When depression alone is the cause, that feeling of absence can be desolate and unforgiving but when anxiety rears its head as well the result is more complicated.

When Depression and Anxiety Go into Battle

The ferocity of feeling in the emotions brought about by anxiety can take you to breaking point. Your body becomes hyper-aware of every little detail and as your evermore exhausted body tries to process every single stimulus and asses its possible threat-level, your untrained emotional senses, not long emerged from lockdown, ride a roller-coaster of sensation.

Your brain eventually hits overload and the walls slide back in place effortlessly. Depression takes the foreground, dumbing your world down. No longer able to rely on emotions for guidance, your brain gives over to logical, reasoned thought and comparative clarity.

Why are muted emotions relieving?

For once, briefly, feeling numb is not pain. It is the absence of the wound. It is the absence of conflicting emotions. It is the absence of worry racing to a crescendo that never reaches its peak. It is the absence of surging panic convincing you that the worst is yet to come. It is the absence of anger and fear throbbing in your limbs and threatening to combine forces to act on whatever threat your brain is sure to find. It is solace from a writhing mind.