Emotional Exhaustion: 8 Questions for Diagnosis and 4 Tips for Healing

Author of the article: Naumenko Alexandra Igorevna Family psychologist, child psychologist. Practical work experience: 8 years.

Do you remember what it was like when you were a child? Emotions and feelings were turned on to the fullest, joy seemed off scale, grief seemed inconsolable. There were so many important things in life: the weather, a bicycle, a best friend, lizards in the grass, apples on a tree. Most people lived life most fully in childhood, felt emotions, and enjoyed every day.

Now let's look at the present moment. Apathy, fatigue, lack of sleep - unfortunately, these are constant companions of modern man. So the answer to the question of why a person stops experiencing emotions is stress. It can be either chronic, that is, accumulated, or eventful, one-time, when some large-scale shock occurs in a person’s life (death of a loved one, loss of a job, illness, etc.). But what to do if you don’t feel any emotions, now we’ll try to figure it out.

Loss of awareness of vital feelings

Loss of awareness of vital feelings affects the so-called lower emotions that accompany acts of elementary sensitivity and actual physiological needs (there is another, not entirely accurate name: the syndrome of alienation of vital feelings). Patients complain of unpleasant experiences of dullness and loss of sensations of various modalities, especially often skin sensitivity: “numbness of the cheek... the skin on the head does not feel anything... lips feel like wood... vision has dropped sharply, I have to strain to see... it feels like I won’t hear enough , I perceive sounds indistinctly, they seem to merge”, etc. Often patients report that they do not feel the need for sleep, that their drowsiness and urge to sleep have disappeared, so that they fall into a state of sleep from wakefulness very quickly, bypassing drowsy state. In the same way, they wake up unusually quickly - “as if on alarm.” These same patients often add that they cannot understand whether they are sleeping or not, or they claim that they do not sleep at all, that they do not experience a feeling of rest after sleep.

Some patients report that they do not feel as tired as before, even after hard physical or mental work, nor do they feel the pleasant feeling of muscle fatigue. Quite often there are complaints from depressed patients about a loss of feeling of cheerfulness, a feeling of constant powerlessness, and decreased physical strength. Sometimes they compare their condition with “decrepation”, “aging”, “senile infirmity”.

Thus, a young woman says that she feels “10 years” older. Another reports a depressing feeling that she has “grown very old.” “It seems to me,” she continues, “that I’ve been around for many years, probably over 70, and I’ve outlived my time.” The third says: “If I am in my normal state of elation, I feel young, much younger than my years. When I feel bad, it seems to me that I am fading away, growing old and I am about 80 years old, I am so weak. I have no strength, I hardly do anything around the house. I quit my job twice because of this powerlessness and sat at home crying.” She said that at the first conversation the doctor seemed to her “elderly, in years.” At the follow-up conversation, on the contrary, he was young.

“I even decided that there were two different doctors, I asked the women in the ward about this.” Another patient complains of “the feeling that I have lived for a long, long time, that I was young once so long ago that I seem to have forgotten about it.” A patient with depression reports: “I have such a hopeless feeling, as if inside I have become completely gray, I feel like a deep and rotten ramolik.” The second says: “Nothing interests me. It’s as if I’ve lived my whole life, seen everything, heard everything, nothing can surprise me anymore. And I no longer care what was, what is and what will be.” The third patient says: “I feel like an old man. There is no fun, constant lethargy, I don’t need anything, the joys of life are no longer for me, it seems it’s time for me to die.” Complaints of such patients about impotence can easily be mistaken for a manifestation of severe and persistent asthenia. We note that sometimes they are clearly mixed with a feeling of imaginary aging and impaired perception of time.

Sometimes it is possible to establish that patients lose the feeling of malaise during a somatic illness, the ability to feel a rise in temperature even to high levels: “I am sick differently than before. It used to be like this: if you get sick, you feel unwell, lethargic, in a bad mood, you feel hot. And when it passes, you are satisfied and rejoice. And now I know that I have a fever, but I don’t feel sick... The thermometer shows a high temperature, but I don’t feel either heat or chills, I’ve stopped understanding whether I’m sick or not.”

The feeling of pain is often lost, which is something that patients usually don’t particularly care about: “I used to feel the pain acutely and was very afraid when they pricked my finger for a blood test. And now they give me injections every day, even into a vein, and I almost don’t feel that I’m in pain... I don’t notice that I’m in pain. I cut my hand, it bleeds, but I don’t feel any pain... The pain has become somewhat dull, it is felt somewhere far away... I used to be terrified of injections, but now, when they inject me, I’m not. I feel like they are piercing the skin, but it doesn’t hurt.” Some patients notice that they do not feel heat or cold.

For example, in cold weather they go without a hat or gloves, in the steam room they lose their sense of proportion, overheat, and even get burns. The patient says that he no longer clearly senses temperature changes: “I used to go from cold to warm and felt that I was warming up. But now there is no such thing.” Some patients report that when they are depressed, they no longer feel an increase in blood pressure. Very often there are complaints about dulling of various types of sensitivity, sometimes simultaneously with deceptions of perception: “I feel like I smell like carrion, the smell comes from somewhere inside. But I don’t smell any real smells. Perfume is like water to me... My tastes have dulled... When I walk, it’s like I’m stepping on a cotton pillow... The sounds are indistinct, my body feels like it’s dying, I feel weaker.”

There are patients who note an exacerbation and (or) dulling of the feeling of hunger or satiety: “It happened that the feeling of hunger increased. I eat, for example, I feel that I’m full, I think I’ve had enough to eat, but my body continues to demand food. It was different too. I eat and I don’t feel full at all. Food seems to be falling through, and there is still a desire to eat, it feels like the stomach is empty... The feeling of hunger and satiety has become different, indistinct. It happens that I don’t feel hungry, I don’t seem to care about food.” Sometimes the loss of hunger becomes very persistent. The patient reports: “The head loves to eat tasty food. I myself haven’t wanted it for a long time, but I’m thinking in my head, let me eat. I don’t understand whether I want to eat or not.” In such cases, it can be difficult, if not impossible, to determine whether we are talking about loss of hunger, actual loss of appetite, or anhedonia. In the latter case, patients perhaps prefer the expression “appetite” to the word “hunger,” trying to emphasize the fact of the loss of the feeling of pleasure.

Another patient says that for 13 years “he has not felt an appetite, although before that,” he emphasizes, “I really loved to eat.” All these years he has been worried about a significant dulling of the feeling of hunger; numerous attempts to be treated by doctors, herbalists and charlatans have not changed anything. “Only in my dreams do I really want to eat, I often have dreams in which I eat a lot, eagerly and even greedily.” The mentioned patient speaks little about other manifestations of depression, in passing, without attaching importance to them. It is worth paying attention to the fact that with the loss of awareness of hunger and satiety, in contrast to true bulimia, patients generally eat enough and do not lose control over the amount of food they eat.

In some cases, a loss of perception of sexual need is revealed. In one observation, a 39-year-old woman reports that for a number of years she has been avoiding sexual contact with her husband under various pretexts. “I,” she explains, “have completely lost this desire. At first I thought that my husband was to blame for this; our relationship with him did not work out for a long time. I then entered into an affair on the side, but the man soon left me and said that I was frigid.” Since then, she further says, she has often had erotic dreams, several dreams a night. “I’m literally burning with desire in them. I grab the first man I come across, even one I would hate to stand next to during the day, and drag him to bed. With him, everything happens to me to the end and more than once with such acute sensations that I have never had in my life. This happens in my dreams, I do such things that it’s scary to even say, they’ll immediately think that I’m not right in my head.”

“With my husband, I don’t feel anything, there’s no need, no orgasm, I don’t even pretend to be anything, I just spread my legs and wait in disgust for everything to stop.” Asexuality in the waking state appears to be combined here with clearly nymphomaniac dreams. Meanwhile, in a conversation with the doctor, the patient constantly returns to the topic of sex, and her roommates even complained to the medical staff that she was “fixated” on sex and only talked about it. In the last four years, the patient developed a fear of having untidy feces.

She became “terribly afraid” of the sudden onset of the urge to defecate, especially where it was difficult to immediately find a toilet. “The first thing I do when I arrive somewhere is find out where the toilet is. I do not part with stool-fixing medications. Now I practically never go far from home, only at home I feel calm.” In this case, in addition to the loss of feelings of sexual desire over time, another disorder was apparently added, namely a decrease in the ability to recognize the urge to defecate in a timely manner. The patient has no complaints or other obvious manifestations that could indicate distinct anxiety or depression, with the possible exception of fear of involuntary defecation and agoraphobia.

Basically, she is rather animated, even somewhat exalted, open, sometimes to the point of nakedness, speaks a lot, quickly, and often laughs and actively gesticulates. All the years of her illness, she has been running her business quite successfully, she is proactive, enterprising, by the standards of her village she is very rich, and dominates the family. In this case, most likely, there is a persistent and shallow mixed mood disorder with a predominance of the phenomena of mental anesthesia.

Let us note this detail: patients with symptoms of mental anesthesia clearly indicate that their ability to perceive certain aspects of their Self is fully, and sometimes even abundantly, restored in dreams. For example, “apathy” gives way to intense emotional experiences; This, as is known, does not happen with apathy itself. We believe this circumstance is important to take into account primarily in cases where it is difficult to distinguish between deficit disorders and disturbances in the perception of some aspects of one’s own self.

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How to start feeling again?

To restore emotionality, sensuality and joy of life, it is necessary to understand what is difficult for a person to come to terms with and accept. What functions did the broken relationship serve for him? What internal cockroaches is he afraid to face now? Psychotherapy can be of great help with this.

Forum for free psychological help

But a series of nice, deep sobs can also help, in which all the pain and drama of the events that happened will be expressed. It is very important not to be afraid to face the pain that is happening inside. This is the only way to free yourself from it and clear the way for new emotions.

Do not deny yourself the pleasure and roar properly, regardless of whether you are a woman or a man stern in his brutality. You have to cry so that you are thoroughly shaken and shaken. Then something without which life cannot be complete will return to you again.

It is important to admit that you loved this person and you are now very sad, sad and hurt that the relationship is over. You need to let it all out of yourself, otherwise it will gnaw from the inside. And timely, sincere tears will be an invaluable assistant to you in this situation.

Author: Dmitry Malin - clinical psychologist

Don't suppress your emotions!

What happens to a person when he rejoices?
The pulse quickens, muscle work activates, a smile and laughter arise. We feel full of strength and energy. We notice the best in people, objects, situations. Why do such sensations come to us less and less over the years? Stress, problems, complexes weigh on us. Sadness, anger, fear, guilt and other emotions that we hide from ourselves and others increasingly constrain the body and form “muscle clamps.” A person begins to exist in a “muscular shell”. This is aggravated by the fact that some people (especially men) deliberately prohibit themselves from experiencing emotions.

Article on the topic TEST: How cheerful are you?

This problem, like most of our problems, comes from childhood. “Boys don’t cry,” “Take that stupid smile off your face,” our parents teach us. We grow up - and parental control develops into self-control. “I don’t have the right to cry and thereby demonstrate my weakness,” “It’s not nice to laugh like that in front of people,” “What a stupid smile I have,” we are already telling ourselves.

A person blocks both negative and positive emotions. And accordingly, he unlearns how to experience them. As a result, we stop feeling both sadness and joy equally and become “frozen.” And the world in our perception fades, life no longer shines with all its colors.

How to get your emotions back

So what to do if you stop feeling emotions? First you need to understand exactly what method of turning off emotions your psyche has chosen. The fact is that the human psyche is a complex and wise structure, therefore, if there is an excess of negative feelings, it can turn off unpleasant (and along with them pleasant) sensations in different ways, so that overload does not occur, and you can somehow function and survive, albeit bleakly.

There are two most common scenarios in which you stop feeling emotions:

1. Emotional burnout. This phrase is already familiar to many and means that for a long time your nervous system has been overloaded. Yes, yes, these are the consequences of that same chronic stress that slowly but surely leads to sluggish depression. “I don’t feel emotions,” says a person who is too tired of living and doing things. In this state, you usually have to do everything through “I can’t”, because with your mind you still understand why you need to go to work, play sports, meet with friends and improve in any activity, but your strength is becoming less and less.

2. State of affect after severe stress. Sometimes life can be cruel, none of us are ready for the loss of a loved one, bankruptcy, or the loss of something important. When something like this happens, the psyche urgently cuts off the ability to feel emotions and goes into energy-saving mode. In such cases, if the personality is not too hardened by difficulties, the person may not see the meaning of his existence. And if, with emotional burnout, you can float through life without desire, but still perform the necessary minimum of actions for survival, then here we can already talk about severe clinical depression. A person begins to lie in bed all day long, or play computer games, or even spend all his days drinking a bottle, not caring at all about his food, his health, or his loved ones.