Attachment and Affect, Part 2: The Emotional Tolls: Anxious Exhaustion & the Avoidant Flatline

What if your emotions aren’t “too much” or “too little,” but a volume knob stuck in the wrong position? We dig into how anxious and avoidant attachment patterns act like broken dials—either blaring sirens at every hint of disconnection or muting signals until life feels flat. Drawing on affect theory and rich, real-world case stories, we map what mild, moderate, and severe patterns look like in daily routines, relationships, and health, so you can finally see your experience with clarity and compassion.

We unpack anxious amplification: why delayed texts can feel like danger, how constant activation robs sleep and focus, and the way false alarms erode trust in your own signals. Then we shift to avoidant suppression: the competent, “I’m fine” exterior that hides a body carrying stress, the subtle emptiness that crowds out joy and intimacy, and the decisions made with missing emotional data. Along the way, we connect the dots to physical consequences—elevated stress hormones, inflammation, IBS, blood pressure shifts, and non-restorative sleep—showing how the nervous system writes what the mind can’t read.

Most importantly, we offer a path forward. For anxious patterns, we outline right-sizing practices to recalibrate the emergency meter and conserve energy. For avoidant patterns, we share signal-rebuilding steps that grow emotional tolerance and depth. Across both, the goal is flexible control, not perfection: treating emotions as data that inform choice, rather than orders you must obey or noise you must silence. If you’ve ever wondered why you’re exhausted by “nothing” or untouched by “everything,” this conversation will give you language, insight, and next steps.

If this resonates, subscribe, share with someone who needs it, and leave a review—your support helps more people find practical, compassionate tools for emotional health.

Transcript

Recap Of Core Feelings

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Hi, I'm Dr. Scott Concrate. Welcome to the Meaningful Happiness Podcast. In our previous episode, we explored the foundational ways we learn to handle our emotions from the earliest stages of life. Here's a quick recap to bring everyone up to date. I began by discussing Sylvan Tompkins' groundbreaking discovery of the nine core biologically hardwired, bio-wired feelings we're all born with interest, enjoyment, surprise, distress, anger, fear, shame, disgust, and dismelt. These are automatic bodily responses that happen before thought, telling us what matters in our world and motivating us to act. The central challenge is that these powerful feelings can be overwhelming, especially to infants and children, toddlers, and also adults. To survive them, we develop core feeling management strategies, patterns we learn from our caregivers to turn feelings up or down, to show them or to hide them. And these strategies become the emotional foundation for our entire lives. I made a crucial distinction. Core feelings are the raw biological material. Emotions are the more complex experiences we build from those feelings through learning and culture. The episode focused on how these management strategies develop differently depending on our early relationships, forming the basis of our attachment style. Secure attachment develops when caregivers consistently help a child regulate. This builds a flexible volume control, where felt intensity and displayed intensity generally match and can be adjusted to fit the situation. Anxious attachment develops when care is inconsistent. Here, the volume control amplifies attachment-related feelings. Both internal experience and outward expression can become disproportionately intense. From mild worry to crisis-level panic and feel uncontrollable. Avoidant attachment develops when emotional needs aren't met. Here the strategy is suppression. There's often a split. The body may show high stress, as in like elevated heart rate, but conscious awareness and outward display of vulnerability, vulnerable feelings like sadness or need, are dramatically dampened or shut off. The key takeaway is that both anxious and avoidant patterns represent a loss of flexible control. They are automatic, self-protective adaptations to early environments, not character flaws. Understanding whether we tend to amplify, suppress, or have flexible access to our feelings is the first step towards greater emotional awareness and greater health overall. In the upcoming episodes, I'll explore how these foundational patterns shape our adult relationships and ways to build more secure, flexible emotional skills. When you can't adjust feelings appropriately, it creates problems that cascade through your entire adult life. But these problems show up differently based on how severe your pattern is and what's happening in your life. They're not uniform experiences, but patterns that get worse under stress and create specific, identifiable limitations in life. Understanding these consequences requires us to move beyond simple descriptions like emotional exhaustion or emotional flatness. We need to examine how broken volume control actually shapes daily experience, how it shapes daily relationships, how it how it works out in the how it works out in the workforce, physical health, and sense of self. The consequences aren't just about feeling too much or too little, they're about how the volume control problem creates cycles that feed themselves, limit life's choices, strain relationships, and prevents you from adapting flexibly to different situations that need different emotional responses. The constantly amplified feelings of anxious attachment don't just create momentary distress, they generate cumulative exhaustion that affects every area of life. Because attachment feelings activate at crisis levels repeatedly throughout each day, your nervous system, or the nervous system of somebody who's anxiously attached, never fully returns to the baseline. They wake up already slightly activated, wondering, for instance, if their partner still loves them, checking for messages, planning the day around relationship maintenance. They experience multiple escalations during the day. Each text delay, each unclear interaction, each moment alone triggering intensity spikes. They go to bed still activated through replaying interactions, worrying about tomorrow, needing reassurance to sleep. This constant activation is physically draining in ways that accumulate over time. Now, in mild anxious, it can be manageable but draining. For some with mild anxious attachment, the exhaustion is real, but doesn't completely stop them from functioning. They notice they're more tired than others seem to be, more emotionally drained at the end of the day, more in need of recovery time after social interactions or relationship stress. I'm talking about attachment in this case, and I'm not forgetting that there are other factors out there as well that can make people tired and influence relationships and so forth. I'm just trying to give you some examples and show you how they work in a detachment way and with the feelings, the core feelings. For those with mild anxious attachment, can work effectively, they can maintain friendships, they can function in most areas of life, but there's a constant low-level drain on their resources. That's really the point I'm trying to make. Alex, who's mildly anxious, works as a teacher, has several close friends, and is in a relationship. On a typical day, she wakes up and immediately checks if her boyfriend texted. He did, we leave. But she needed to check. At work, she's effective and present, but during lunch, she's wondering how he's feeling about them today and texts just to check in. When he doesn't respond for an hour, oh lordy, she feels a flutter of anxiety but manages to redirect her attention back to work. She's fairly healthy. After school, she's noticeably more tired than her colleagues, not from the teaching itself, but from all the background noise, all the background processing of management relationship anxiety all day long. When her boyfriend suggests that evening that they do their own thing that that night, she feels a spike like immediately. Does he not want to be me? Does he not want to see me? But she talks herself through it, makes plans with a friend, and has an enjoyable evening, though she checks her phone more than she'd like. By bedtime, she's exhausted in a way that's hard for her to explain to herself. She didn't do anything particularly difficult, but the cumulative effect of multiple feeling escalations throughout the day has depleted her. She sleeps well enough but doesn't wake up fully refreshed. The cascade effect at this level is that over weeks and months Alex notices she's less able to handle stress than she used to be. Small setbacks at work feel harder to handle. She gets sick more often. Her immune system is affected by constant low-level stress. She sometimes feels resentful about how much energy her relationship requires, even though objectively her boyfriend is kind and available. She has less energy for hobbies or self-development because so much mental space is used for relationship monitoring and anxiety. The exhaustion is manageable but limits her capacity to fully engage with life. Now with moderate anxious with moderate anxious, they're clearly more significantly more significantly impaired. At the moderate level, the exha at the moderate level, the exha fucking crying out loud. At the moderate level, the exhaustion becomes a defining feature of the daily experience. They're aware, they're constantly drained, that their emotional energy is always running low, that they're operating from a depleted baseline. The amplified feelings don't just create momentary spikes, they create states of expanded upset that can last for hours or days during which they're functionally impaired. For example, Jordan works in customer service and is struggling. When his partner left for a work trip this morning with a slightly hurried goodbye, he was running late, Jordan's anxiety spike to 10 out of 10. At least how that's how we felt it. He's at work but can barely focus. He's texted his partner three times already in an increasingly anxious tone. He's checked his phone 40 times at least. He's made two small mistakes with customers because he's mentally elsewhere. By lunchtime, he's texted, are you upset with me? and is waiting for the response. Unable to eat because his stomach is tight with anxiety. When his partner finally responds, hey sorry, busy day, love you, talk tonight. He feels relief for about maybe 20 minutes before a new worry emerges. He said I he said, love you, not I love you. Does that mean something? By the end of his workday, Jordan is completely exhausted. Not from the job, but from the eight hours of intensive anxiety management that he had to do. He goes home, is too depleted to do anything productive, orders food because cooking feels overwhelming, and spends the evening in a fog of exhaustion, punctuated by continued phone checking. This isn't an unusual day for him. This is like most days. The pattern repeats when his partner returns. Jordan needs extensive reconnection, tells him about his anxious state, seeking reassurance, needs physical closeness and verbal affirmation to finally regulate somewhat. The cascade effect at this level is that Jordan has written, has been. When he does see his friends, he often talks extensively about relationship anxiety in ways that honestly just drain his friends. He's gained weight because he's doing a lot of stress eating, he has no energy for exercise. And has stress-related health issues, his digestive problems, headaches, sleep disruption, and so forth. He's considered therapy, but feels too exhausted by the idea of adding another thing to manage. His relationship, despite his partner being relatively secure, is strained. His partner feels responsible for Jordan's emotional state, exhausted by the constant need for reassurance, and guilty for wanting space. Jordan is aware that something is wrong, but feels trapped in the pattern, unable to access the energy needed to change it because he's so depleted. Severe anxious, this is not very common. At this severe level, the exhaustion is so extreme it becomes disabling. This person cannot maintain employment, cannot sustain relationships, and cannot manage basic self-care consistently. They're operating in permanent crisis mode with no recovery periods. The amplified feelings have taken over their entire life. She's in a relationship that's become her entire world because she cannot regulate. She's in a relationship that's become her entire world because she cannot regulate without her partner's presence. When her partner goes to work each morning, Maria's anxiety is immediately at a nine out of ten. She feels she texts constantly throughout the day. If there's a delay more than 15 minutes in response time, she escalates to calling, sometimes ten or more times. She cannot do anything productive while alone. She's tried online courses, hobbies, job searching, and so forth, but her anxiety is so high and constant that concentration is impossible. She spends most of the day in a state of high distress, waiting for a partner to come home. Sometimes crying for hours, sometimes in such a state of panic, she considers going to the emergency room where she's gone before several times, and been told that her anxiety is in her head. That it's not it's a it's not a real panic attack, it's not a heart attack. It's a panic attack, that is, it's not a heart attack. When her partner is home, she needs constant physical contact and reassurance. She can't tolerate him being in the other room. She wakes him up multiple times per night to check if he's still there. She's exhausted to the point of being non-functional. Too exhausted to shower regularly, to maintain friendships, she has none left, to do basic household tasks. Her partner is equally exhausted considering ending the relationship, but afraid of what Maria will do. Maria knows this is not normal, but cannot access the capacity to change it. The exhaustion isn't just tiredness, it's a complete depletion of all mental and physical resources. Maria is completely isolated, no friends, strained family relationships, no work connections. She's developed serious health problems, constant fatigue, autoimmune issues, potentially triggered by constant stress. She's on multiple medications for anxiety and depression, but they only take the edge off. Her sense of self has collapsed into the anxious one or the needy one. She has no identity outside her relationship anxiety. Her partner is constantly leaving, which as I mentioned, her partner is considering leaving, which would create a complete life crisis as she has no resources, emotional, social, financial, practical, to survive alone. Exhaustion has become total life impairment. Across all levels of anxiety Across all levels of anxious attachment, particular across all levels of anxious attachment, a particular problem emerges. You can't tell the difference between actual emergencies and minor problems because everything activates the same crisis level intensity. When your nervous system treats a delayed text message with the same intensity it treats a genuine threat, like a medical emergency or actual relationship ending, real danger, you lose the useful value of the emergency response system. The secure person has different intensity levels for different situations. Minor inconvenience, a two out of ten, significant problem, five out of ten, serious crisis, eight out of ten, life-threatening emergency, ten out of ten. The anxious person system is essentially anything involving potential disconnection is an eight out of ten or more, regardless of the actual severity. This creates real danger in the body. When emergency, when everything is an emergency, nothing is. You stop trusting your own emotional signals. Is this relationship actually problematic or is it just my anxiety? Is my partner actually pulling away? Or do I just feel that way? Am I actually in danger or is it another false alarm? The constant false alarms wear away one's ability to accurately assess reality. You become dependent on external validation. Am I overreacting? Becomes a constant question. Meanwhile, others become less likely to take your distress seriously. When your partner starts to discount your expressed intensity because it's been wrong so many times before. Elevated stress hormones over extended periods cause immune system suppression, which can lead to frequent illness and slow healing, metabolism problems, weight gain, insulin issues, difficulty regulating blood sugar, heart and blood vessel strain, high blood pressure, increased heart attacks, stomach and intestine problems, IBS, chronic stomach issues, accelerated cellular aging, I mean literally aging faster at a cellular level, sleep disruption, as a falling difficulty falling asleep, frequent waking, sleep that doesn't restore even when you get enough hours. These aren't just potential long-term risks, they're often already present in the people with moderate to severe anxious attachment. You feel exhausted partly because you are physically exhausted. Your body is continually running a stress response, which is energy intensive. This creates a vicious cycle. The anxiety creates physical depletion. The physical the anxiety creates physical depletion. The physical depletion makes it harder to manage anxiety. And the inability to manage anxiety creates more physical depletion. We're now going to talk about avoidant attachment styles around this issue. The suppressed feeling experience of avoidant attachment creates a different kind of suffering, one that's often invisible to both the person experiencing it and those around them. Where anxious attachment creates obvious distress, they know their suffering, and others can see it, avoidant attachment creates a muted, flattened experience that doesn't register as suffering consciously, but it shows up as a vague sense of disconnection, meaninglessness, or going through the motions. They often don't identify as distressed. They're fine in their words, you know, they're good. But upon closer examination, they're missing significant aspects of human experience. Now with mild avoidant, there's subtle emotional restriction. The flatness is noticeable mainly in close relationships. They function while at work very well sometimes, have friends, though relationships stay somewhat surface level. They pursue interests and hobbies, but they lack emotional depth or vulnerability. They can access some vulnerable feelings, but find themselves truly uncomfortable around it and they limit them. For instance, David is a successful architect, has a circle of friends he sees regularly, is in a long-term relationship as well. To outside observers, he seems healthy and well adjusted. His partner, though, experiences something very different. David is reliable, he's kind, thoughtful, in practical ways, like he remembers birthdays, helps with tasks, plans, dates, and things like that. But he's emotionally distant. When she shares something deeply personal, David listens but responds with practical suggestions or general statements rather than emotional connection. Hmm, something like, you know, hmm, that sounds hard. What are you gonna do about it? When she asks him how he feels about their relationship, he says, Good, I think we work well together, but cannot express emotional depth or vulnerability. When his father has a heart scare, David is busy arranging medical care, researching doctors, handling logistics, but when asked about how he's feeling about the possibility of losing his dad, he says, you know, I'm managing. And genuinely seems to believe that. And thinks that it's an adequate answer as well. He can say, I love you, but it comes up more like a statement of fact than an expression of feeling. The flatness isn't total, however. He laughs with friends, gets excited about projects at work, expresses frustration when things go wrong. But he can only go so deep, particularly around vulnerable or intimate feelings. The cascade effect at this level is that David's relationship is stable but not deeply satisfying to either partner. His partner feels lonely in the relationship and unsure if he really loves her, questions whether he loves her deeply or if she's just convenient. David is vaguely aware of something missing, but doesn't have the words for it. Sometimes he wonders to himself, is this all there is to relationships? If other people really feel as much as they seem to feel, if there's something wrong with him, or if others are just dramatic. He doesn't feel unhappy exactly, but he also doesn't feel the richness of connection he sees others describe. The flatness creates a kind of low-grade emptiness that he manages by staying busy, often just focusing on his work and achievements, and avoiding deep emotional engagement. And with the moderate avoidant, there's more significant emotional disconnection. At the moderate level, the flatness becomes more widespread, more clearly problematic. They live in their head rather than in their body. They experience life as something they observe rather than fully participate in. They have difficulty accessing emotional meaning or depth in most areas of life. For instance, Rachel. She is a lawyer and successful by external markers, like most everybody would say she's successful, good income, nice apartment, respected in her field. She has colleagues that she's friendly with, but not really close friends. She doesn't really have those. Her friendships always have state surface level, and she doesn't maintain them well. I mean, she goes months without reaching out. And she declines emotional conversations. I mean, she'll sneak out of them as best she can. She doesn't share much about herself. She's been single for years by preference. Dating feels exhausting and pointless. When her brother gets married, she attends, smiles in the photos, but doesn't feel much beyond it being a nice event. When her mother cries during the ceremony, Rachel feels pretty uncomfortable actually, but but mostly detached. When her sister later asks, wasn't this beautiful? Weren't you moved? Rachel genuinely doesn't understand the question. It was a nice ceremony, the flowers were pretty, and the food was good. But moved? She doesn't know what that means experientially. At work, Rachel is competent, but her colleagues describe her as robotic, hard to read. She doesn't celebrate wins or get visibly upset about losses. When a major case she worked on for two years settles in her client's favor, her colleague says, You must be so excited. Rachel responds, Yes, it's a good outcome. With no visible excitement or satisfaction beyond sort of like intellectual acknowledgement. When asked how she feels about anything, she typically responds with what she thinks about it, often relying on what she imagines other people should feel or think about it. She goes to therapy because her sister suggested it, but makes little progress because she has such limited access to emotional content. The therapist asks how she feels about something, and Rachel genuinely draws a blank. The cascade effect at this level is that Rachel's loneliness doesn't get consciously recognized as loneliness. She experiences it as vague dissatisfaction, like a sense of something's off, or some physical symptom. She has a chronic tension, headaches, digestive issues, takes medication for high blood pressure, despite being relatively young. Now keep keep again clear, I'm not saying there can't be real medical issues and real other issues that are going on in this. This is for example's sake to illustrate avoidant. So just take it for what it is. By the way, none of these none of these characters are real. I'm inventing them. She doesn't connect these physical symptoms to emotional suppression. Most importantly, here, and this is the difference between anxious and avoidant, is that an anxious person would have some recognition of how the body symptoms would be worth looking into as possibly psychological, assuming they're psychologically minded. The avoidant will likely not ask those questions. They are physical symptoms divorced from their inner world. The beautiful life that looks great from the outside is empty on the inside. I mean, it's empty, like fine, but somehow not enough. I mean, at some point she's going to start wondering what's the point of all these achievements? And she's going to start feeling nothing really matters because she doesn't experience the emotional payoff that would come with success, connection, or meaningful experiences. She's functionally depressed, as in flat feelings, inability to feel pleasure, and disconnection. But she wouldn't identify as depressed because she's never felt markedly different than what she feels. Severe avoidance, and again, this is not very common, but I'll put it out there. At the severe level, the suppression is so complete that they seem disconnected from their own emotional life completely. They go through life like an observer of their own experience, completely disconnected from felt sense, unable to access emotional meaning, living entirely in thinking in practical domain. My example is Robert, who's in his 50s, divorced. His wife left him after years of feeling like she was married to a stranger, and has no close relationships. His adult children call him dutifully but keep conversations brief and practical. He works in IT, lives alone, and has a highly routinized life. When his mother dies, he handles all the logistics, the funeral arrangements, the estate matters, all that sort of stuff. He does it efficiently and calmly. At the funeral, he delivers a well-written eulogy that sounds like he's reading a Wikipedia entry. Facts about her life, no emotional contact, no sense of personal loss. When his brother breaks down crying afterwards, Robert pats his shoulder and says, She's had a good life and she's in a better place, but feels genuinely confused by the intensity of his brother's grief. Intellectually, he understands his mother is dead and his brother is sad, but he doesn't access his own grief at all. Robert's daily life is functional but mechanical. He wakes, exercises for health reasons, works, eats, it's very nutrition focused, no real pleasure in food, watches documentaries, it's informational, not emotional content, and then goes to bed. Doesn't really have any hobbies that bring joy. Activities are chosen for their practical value or intellectual interest. He doesn't listen to music because he doesn't see the point. Doesn't watch movies because that seems indulgent. I mean he doesn't really have the need for it. He has no creative pursuits. When he had to see a therapist, which was required by his workplace after he seemed too calm following a traumatic workplace event, somebody that noted like there's something wrong with it. They asked him, the therapist asked him what brought him joy. And he says, I'm content with my life, but cannot name anything that gave him pleasure, excitement, meaning, or connection. By the way, he's not suicidal. He doesn't feel bad enough to not want to exist. But he's also not really living in any full sense. He's maintaining a body going through required motions. He's maintaining a body going through required motions, but experiencing virtually no emotional richness. The cascade effect at this level is that Robert has no buffer against life's inevitable difficulties because he has zero emotional resources next to zero. No close relationships to lean on, no internal sense of meaning or purpose, no capacity to self-soothe through emotional connection or process. If he were to face a serious life crisis right now, like a health issue or job loss, he would have no resilience because resilience requires emotional resources he doesn't have. His physical health is deteriorating because of stress-related illnesses, that he doesn't connect to his emotional suppression at all. He takes multiple medications. But Robert insists he's fine. The flatness has become so complete that he's essentially emotionally dead while still physically alive. Functioning but not flourishing, existing but not experiencing. The signal value loss is what I want to talk about next. Across all levels of avoidant attachment, a critical problem emerges. Feelings lose their useful function as signals because they're suppressed before they can provide information. Emotions exist to tell us things. Fear says there's some danger. Fight, flight, or freeze. Sadness, which is a form of shame, says something important is lost. Anger says, among other things, a boundary was violated or there's too much of something and it's got to stop. Loneliness says I need connection. Joy says, this is good, I want more of this. I can relax. When feelings are suppressed or dampened, these signals can't do their job. You might be in a relationship that's deeply unsatisfying, but not consciously feel the dissatisfaction. Because it's suppressed. So you stay for years or decades, missing the signal that would tell you to make a change. You might be burned out at work, but not feel the exhaustion. It's suppressed. So you push through until you have a health crisis. You might have just experienced a significant loss, but not feel the grief. It's suppressed. So you don't give yourself time to heal, and the grief becomes and the grief comes out sideways at some point. The suppression that protects against overwhelming feeling also eliminates guidance systems that systems that feeling systems provide for navigating life. This is particularly dangerous because they often believe they're making rational, considered, thoughtful decisions when actually they are making decisions without important emotional data, information. May be true at a conscious level, but completely ignoring the suppressed loneliness, resentment, or disconnection that would tell them that the relationship isn't working. I don't need help might feel true on a conscious level, even as it ignores the suppressed distress that would benefit from support. They're significantly navigating life with faulty instruments. Their emotional guidance system is either offline or providing so little input that it's not useful. And the physical price, like anxious attachment, has physical health consequences. They're often invisible to them because they're not making the connection between emotional suppression and physical symptoms. Here's what the research shows. Elevated stress hormones and heart rate despite reported report despite reports of calm. The body can be stressed even when the mind doesn't know it. There's increased inflammation linked to suppressed emotions. Heart disease risk. The defended arousal takes a toll. Immune problems, such as chronic pain conditions, there can be immune system issues, there can be chronic pain conditions. The suppressed feelings often show up as physical pain. For example, someone with moderate to severe avoidant attachment might have chronic back pain, frequent migraines, digestive issues, or unexplained fatigue. They see doctors, get tests, the tests often show nothing's physically wrong, and nonetheless are given medications or demand to be on medications, but they don't make the connection that their body is carrying the emotional content, their mind is shutting out from awareness. When a doctor suggests that the stress might be a factor, they respond without what's up? I'm not, I'm not, I don't experience stress, I'm not stressed. And they genuinely believe this because their conscious awareness is disconnected from their physical reality. The body becomes the storage place for suppressed feelings, showing them as physical symptoms because they can't be experienced consciously as emotions. Thank you for being part of the Meaningful Happiness Podcast. To explore more of this work on affect relational theory, theory that I've been working on for many, many years now, please subscribe to the Meaningful Happiness newsletter, the Aaron Substack. You can find all the links that you need for all that at ScottConcrete.com. Until next time.