How to Be “Heartless”: Expert Advice

Do not spend much of your time trying to fix a wrong perception of yourself. Instead, develop a new mind map yourself and then focus your actions on building the new mind map. Your emotions will fade away when nothing is a big deal or has meaning to you. These terms describe a range of diminished emotional expression; however, they aren’t always interchangeable. “It can also appear as a loss of interest in things you usually enjoy, feeling like you are just going through the motions, or feeling disconnected from other people. Others may also comment that you seem tired, unfazed, or uninterested,” she indicates.

People diagnosed with anxiety disorders may experience emotional numbness as a response to extremely high stress levels, fear, or excessive worry. High levels of anxiety are linked with the avoidance of both positive and negative emotions. While people often describe emotionlessness as feeling nothing (this is what the name suggests, after all), this isn’t what it’s like in practice.

In reality, remaining emotionless can be both devastating and damaging on a long-term basis. This is because turning emotions to the “off” position is fairly easy, but turning them back on again is a different story. Controlling your emotions allows you to determine when and how you process those emotions. When you suppress your emotions, however, they’re likely to explode out of you when you least expect it.

For example, someone who’s experienced emotional or physical rejection as a child may turn emotionally numb during childhood or later in life. Experiencing blunted affect can mean you feel an emotion intensely, but you’re unable to express it. Your facial expressions, tone, and eye movement may remain neutral, for example, even if you’re extremely distressed.

If it’s at all possible in your circumstances, therapy is 100% the best way forward. If you’re dealing with threatening weather like a forest fire, tornado, or snowstorm, determine what’s needed immediately to get everyone to safety, and do that. Make a list of vital supplies and delegate tasks to others so everything is packed quickly and efficiently. Gather people and animals together, ensure that all are accounted for, then move onto the next urgent thing that needs doing. Feel yourself drawing from that stillness and strength, as though you’re made of the same substance your feet are resting upon. No matter what’s going on around you, maintain that stillness and inner strength.

It’s also important to note that while some use drugs and alcohol to cope with stress, substances can contribute to greater stress levels. They may recommend you attend counseling or a support group for additional support. Staying physically active and engaging in exercises that you enjoy not only benefits your health, but it can also reduce the symptoms of depression and anxiety.

Controlling Non-Verbal Expressions

By venting your frustrations to another person and feeling empathy, the feelings might not feel as overwhelming to you anymore. Distraction is an excellent method to use to bring yourself back to homeostasis when you feel like your emotions have too great of a grip on you. This is probably because your brain and your body are bored or uninterested in the situation, and they’d rather spend time doing something more entertaining or engaging instead. If you’re thinking of all the things that could go wrong in a tense situation, this won’t help you at all! However, if you take the time to bring yourself back to reality and think of logical outcomes instead of illogical ones, you could end up saving yourself from a lot of worries. While human beings still encounter dangerous situations where their fight-or-flight instincts can save them from harm, they tend to be few and far between.

Why does someone become emotionally numb?

Let’s say you walk in on your small children setting a fire in their bedroom to keep their pet warm. Your immediate response would likely be very, very loud, but that would inevitably end in trauma and subsequent howling from all parties involved. If the fire is small enough that you can take a couple of deep breaths as you put it out and open a window, you’ll allow yourself enough time to set your whirlwind of emotions aside. You can combine this with the breathing exercise above to bring your attention back to the present moment and get your feelings under control.

Challenge your negative thoughts.

Release any tension around your mouth, and when you’re not speaking, keep your lips together gently. Try to keep how can ev/ebitda be used in conjunction with the price to earnings (p/e) ratio your lips closed without clenching your teeth at all, if possible. Doing the latter can make the muscles on the outsides of your jaws ripple, which will imply stress, tension, anger, or fear. When we deal with difficult situations, there’s a tendency to speak more quickly, and at a slightly higher pitch than usual.

It’s just about tempering that response with a rational response, as well. Let’s imagine that two people are talking, and one of them says something that offends the other. Nine times out of ten, the first person really didn’t intend to offend or hurt the other person. If we were to use our brains to think about the situation, we would quickly come to that conclusion.

According to Roest-Gyimah, this may happen in small ways, such as numbing emotions to make it through the work day. Emotional numbness may include blunted affect, but your expression of emotion tends to be diminished because of your lower capacity to experience that emotion. Try managing your schedule, being sure to make time for activities that you enjoy. Practice deep breathing, which can help provide almost immediate relaxation. When coping with death, a person may go through a period where they feel completely disconnected from their emotions.

Our logical minds tend to serve us much better in this day and age. Rational human beings are meant to feel pain, sorrow, and suffering. When you’re unable to feel things like that, you’re also unable to feel happiness, joy, and pleasure. Like there are two sides to every coin, each unpleasant feeling or emotion is the reason why the good can exist, and vice versa. It is very unlikely that you will be caught up emotionally when you focus on others.

1. It is very unlikely that you will be caught up emotionally when you focus on others.
2. Controlling your emotions can help you gain control of negotiations, avoid confrontations and even seem cool.
3. However, for some, emotional numbness becomes a strategy to protect themselves from further emotional or physical pain.
4. The ability to become emotionless when inside tense situations is valuable, and it can be an excellent method of de-escalation and conflict resolution.
5. If you’re not, the day will come when you’ll need advice, but you won’t have any friends available to give it.

In 2016, a study looking at emotional reactivity found that grief that progresses into complicated grief may contribute to inflexible emotional responses. While reaching out to others may seem difficult at first, seeking social support from friends and family that you trust may help provide a safe way to express your emotions. So, yeah, get yourself a therapist both to help you control your emotions and also to turn them back on after the event has passed and you no longer need to be so calm or measured. If those around you see you looking neutral – without fear or any other emotion taking you over – then that will reassure them that everything’s actually okay. They’ll be less likely to freak out or get hysterical if the person they’re looking to for guidance is calm and grounded. Relax the muscles in your brow so your eyebrows remain fairly still, and hood your eyelids slightly like when you’re reading or relaxing.