Dealing with the Overwhelm: Chronic Freeze and Depression
It’s all about the nervous system
Depression can feel like a rock sitting on our chest, suffocating the life out of us. We feel sluggish with no energy. Even the smallest activity can feel overwhelming. We just want to lay in bed all the time with the shades closed. Life becomes too much to handle. Our nervous system is in a state of collapse.
Our nervous system has three states. Two of these states are more familiar to most people: parasympathetic and sympathetic. Parasympathetic is our relaxed, social state, the state where we should ideally be most of the time. The sympathetic state is our alert state. We are most often familiar with the sympathetic state by its response to danger, otherwise known as the fight or flight response. This is when our body goes on high alert, flooding us with adrenaline and priming us to deal with the situation either by fighting or running away. While we often experience fear in this state, this is also the state where we feel most alive. But all that adrenaline can take its toll, leaving us feeling depleted afterward. If we are consistently in a state of fight or flight, it will eventually drain all our energy reserves and send us into a state of collapse. This is called the Chronic Freeze state, the last state of the nervous system, where our body is operating at…
