Areas › Low mood and hard feelings › When you go numb
Ask what is happening in the body right now, in the moment it happens, rather than asking afterwards what the feeling was.
A shutdown is quickest to catch while it is switching on. The question that works is small and physical: what is happening in your chest, your throat, your stomach, right now. Asked ten minutes later, the same question gets an explanation instead of an experience, because by then the mind has tidied the whole thing into a story about who was unreasonable. This is also usable alone. When you notice yourself going flat, stop and check the body before you start accounting for it.
Qur’an and Sunnah
It is God who brought you out of your mothers' wombs knowing nothing, and gave you hearing and sight and minds (Quran 16:78). The senses are named as given equipment, which is the way back in when feeling is not available.
وَٱللَّهُ أَخۡرَجَكُم مِّنۢ بُطُونِ أُمَّهَٰتِكُمۡ لَا تَعۡلَمُونَ شَيۡـࣰٔ ا وَجَعَلَ لَكُمُ ٱلسَّمۡعَ وَٱلۡأَبۡصَٰرَ وَٱلۡأَفۡـِٔدَةَ لَعَلَّكُمۡ تَشۡكُرُونَ
It is God who brought you out of your mothers’ wombs knowing nothing, and gave you hearing and sight and minds, so that you might be thankful
Qur’an 16:78read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
How well people think they read their bodies is not the same as how well they do. Across 66 samples, difficulty naming emotions was strongly related to how attuned people believed they were to their bodies, but only weakly related to how accurate they actually were. That is a reason to ask about this moment, concretely, rather than asking someone to summarise how in touch they generally are.
Trevisan DA, Altschuler MR, Bagdasarov A, Carlos C, Duan S, Hamo E, Kala S, McNair ML, Parker T, Stahl D, Winkelman T, Zhou M, McPartland JC. (2019). A meta-analysis on the relationship between interoceptive awareness and alexithymia: Distinguishing interoceptive accuracy and sensibility.. Journal of abnormal psychology doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
The body registers a shutdown before the mind has had time to explain it away.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
The same sentence lands completely differently depending on who says it. If nothing stirs when it is described second hand, let the person it belongs to say it to you directly.
Going still and needing nothing is usually something a person worked out young, somewhere it was the sensible answer.
Rather than arguing with someone who says they feel nothing, say plainly what would ordinarily hurt about it. Hearing that the person you love is disappointed in you is a hard thing to hear.