Comfortably Numb

"When I was a child, I had a fever / My hands felt just like two balloons / Now I've got that feeling once again / I can't explain you would not understand / This is now how I am / I have become comfortably numb" - Pink Floyd

Dear Ones:

Yes, you read right - we’re bringing Pink Floyd to the party. As a musician, I often notice that the songs I’m drawn to have resonance in my life. These songs express something about my current circumstance that I can’t quite put into words on my own, but with the help of someone else’s melody/lyrics/harmonies I come to gain a new perspective on my own lived experience.?

In this instance, it’s true: I have indeed become comfortably numb. Haven’t you?

Perhaps before you even consider agreeing with me you need a little more context on what I mean. After all, who wants to admit that they’re numb - let alone comfortable with it? Psychologically speaking, numbness is all about a reduction in feeling. Oftentimes we seek out this relief when we’re emotionally “flooded” or overwhelmed by the sheer volume of emotion in our lives. And whether it’s on the macro (global instability) or the micro (career instability) scale, I don’t need to list the multitude of justifiable reasons we have to be overwhelmed with feeling in our world and our work right now.?

Sometimes numbness looks and feels like apathy. We just don’t care as much about things as we used to. That TV show that used to make us laugh, that exercise routine that used to get us exhilarated, that career accomplishment that used to create a sense of pride just….doesn’t anymore. Some psychologists call this “emotional blunting” - we still have the tools to move through our daily lives but they feel less sharp than they used to. It’s like we’ve put a blade guard on our kitchen knives but can’t quite seem to remember how to take them off.

Sometimes numbness looks and feels like aversion. We throw ourselves into other tasks or projects to avoid being present with our feelings. Your boss completely invalidates you at work? Take it to the gym. Lose a beloved family pet? Binge watch the latest streamer. It’s that sensation of emotional energy bubbling up in your brain and body and the experience of quickly redirecting it to a more “productive” place in your life. Who has time to feel those feelings? There’s so much to do!

Sometimes numbness looks and feels like acquisition. We consume in order to avoid feeling. Retail therapy, happy hour, TikTok doom scrolling, Amazon impulse buys, that cake your co-worker baked and set out in the break room. Need I go on?

Let me be clear: both minimizing the negative impact of emotion and choosing other pathways to deal with emotion can be healthy coping mechanisms to promote mental function. I’m not here to shame or judge you for choosing to bury yourself in a good book when the going gets tough. Enjoy a lovely glass of red wine after dinner to unwind? Good on you! But the research tells that intention matters here. What are you truly looking for when you engage in these activities? Is this an expression of your desire for well-being, making meaning and engaging positively with the relationships and emotions of your life? In other words, are you running towards something? If the answer is yes, then you’re amazing and have a lot to teach the rest of us. But if you’re like me and you take a moment and really ask yourself this question, I wonder if the answer might be that you’re running away from something. Perhaps you’re simply looking to feel less. Perhaps you’re simply looking to be comfortably numb.

And while feeling less honestly sounds lovely in these days of overwhelm and exhaustion, the trouble is that we can’t selectively numb. Brené Brown and other scholars have found that when we numb one emotion, we numb them all. Avoiding feeling pain quite literally diminishes our capacity to feel joy. Recent neuroscience research has found that emotional numbing can actually shift the way our amygdala processes pain, creating the potential for our brains and bodies to experience more hurt and trauma before we react. And we’re not talking about increased emotional resilience here - under experimental conditions, individuals who scored high on emotional numbing experienced the pain of physical injuries but their bodies did not respond in kind. You know that reflex reaction you have when you touch a hot stove? You pull your hand away, right? When we emotionally numb, we are essentially rewiring our neural pathways to keep our hands on the stove.

Buddhist scholars call this mindset moha or delusion. We deny the truth of our own emotional lives and live in a fantasy free of the burdens of feeling. Moha is not ignorance - we are aware of the reality of our lives but actively choose to ignore or subvert it in favor of feeling less. Buddhist scholar Sharon Salzberg teaches that moha can also be translated as “stupefy”, which means (just like in the Harry Potter universe) you’re stopped in your tracks unable to move. You cannot move past the pain. You cannot remove your hand from the stove. In a synergy nearly too neat to be coincidental, the act of numbing leaves you frozen.

So, what defrosts us? How do we move from this state of being comfortably numb back to thriving in feeling? Friends, I wish the answer were simple and conclusive. But the fact is many of the systems in our society thrive when we live our lives numb. We spend money when apathy, aversion, and acquisition take the reigns of our minds. We work harder and longer hours at our jobs when we feel less. We don’t think critically or ask questions about fairness, equity, or justice when we’re frozen. I don’t believe there is a global conspiracy to keep us from being present with our emotions. But I do know that systems thrive on homeostasis and as long as the output of the system - more money, more productivity, more power - keeps delivering, there is no incentive to change.

In my life, I’m just trying to get good with what’s here now. I’m trying to feel more, even (and maybe especially) when the feeling tone isn’t all that pleasant. Today I woke up sad, and I asked my sadness what it needed and wanted for me. Turns out it just needed some space to be and wanted me to take a break from crossing things off my to-do list relentlessly. So, I felt sad for a few hours, went for a walk, listened to some music, and when I checked back in with myself I noticed I wasn’t sad anymore. I didn’t push the feeling away, but rather gave it permission to be.?

Perhaps it’s time we get uncomfortable being numb and start feeling back into our lives.

What might that look like for you?