Why So Many People Feel Numb (And What Your Nervous System Is Doing)

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Have you ever thought, “I don’t feel like myself anymore”?
Maybe you feel foggy. Disconnected. Like you’re just going through the motions.

In this episode of Healing Beyond the Symptoms, Dr. Leah Hahn D.C., explains why emotional numbness is not a personal failure — it’s a protective nervous system response.

Drawing on polyvagal theory, Dr. Leah Hahn D.C., walks through the three major nervous system states:

• Ventral Vagal (Safety + Connection)
• Sympathetic (Fight-or-Flight Stress Mode)
• Dorsal Vagal (Shutdown + Numbness)

You’ll learn why chronic stress, trauma, burnout, high-achiever performance culture, and long-term caretaking can push the nervous system into a dorsal vagal state — where numbness becomes a survival strategy.

In This Episode, You’ll Learn:

• Why numbness is not depression — it’s nervous system conservation
• How chronic stress shifts the body from mobilization to shutdown
• The “ladder of the nervous system” explained simply
• Why numbness feels like fog, emptiness, or emotional flatness
• How unresolved trauma keeps stress physiology active
• What ventral vagal regulation actually looks like in the body
• Why the spine is the interface for nervous system states
• How Network Spinal supports nervous system reorganization

If you’ve felt disconnected from joy, relationships, or even your own emotions — this episode will help you understand what’s happening physiologically.

And more importantly:
It will give you hope.

You are not broken.
You are patterned.
And patterns can change.

Timestamps:

00:00 Feeling Numb Again

00:38 Why Numbness Happens

01:49 Signs of Shutdown

02:53 Stress Trauma Burnout

04:26 Pushing Through Costs

06:16 Numbness in Healing

07:06 Polyvagal Ladder Explained

07:45 Ventral Vagal Safety

12:07 Sponsor Break

12:47 Sympathetic Fight Flight

15:48 Dorsal Vagal Numbness

18:00 Coming Out of Numbness

18:40 Wrap Up and Invitation

Transcript

0:00

Have you ever thought, I don't feel like myself anymore. Maybe you feel numb or checked out, or like you're just going through the Motions. Network spinal analysis is designed to help you come alive again in a safe and cared for way. Welcome to Healing Beyond the Symptoms, the podcast that helps people discover the root causes of their health struggles, and take back control with science strategy and self-awareness. I'm Dr. Leah Hahn, a chiropractor and functional wellness doctor who believes that true healing starts beneath the surface. So let's dive in. Today I wanna explore why so many people in our country and maybe throughout the world as well, feel numb. We're gonna take a deep dive on this, but I wanna give you just a few of the characteristics or some of the reasons why we see so much numbness in our culture. The first one that we're gonna look at is chronic stress. We wanna look at how chronic stress creates a state of numbness within your physiology, in your brain, in your emotions. But then we also wanna look at how trauma can really create that feeling of numbness, especially trauma that's never been resolved, and being in survival mode and how those things can really shut down emotions. In both of those situations, the body adapts by creating numbness because feeling can seem unsafe or too overwhelming. An example is patients will tell me that they can hold it together for work or they can hold it together for their family, but they don't actually feel present. They feel like they're going through the emotions. So if I look at numbness, I wanna think of it as that numbness is not a failure, it's a nervous system strategy for survival. And what does this really look like? Well, emotions can feel very muted or off. Like you're not truly able to experience what's happening in the moment. You might not feel happy or sad. There's maybe just a feeling of nothing. It might feel like you're just going through them. The motions. It even can feel like you have difficulty accessing joy or even excitement for an upcoming trip or excitement about what's happening in your world. Or it can be that you can't even access grief that you maybe need to process. It can feel like being checked out or foggy or like you're on copilot. It can also look like physical sensations are actually dulled. They're muted. There can be a sense of disconnection from yourself or others, and we've talked about this in prior podcasts. We talked about how important connection with others is for feeling balanced and to help the nervous system regulate itself. Again, they feel disconnected maybe from their own thoughts and feelings as well as from others. If we take a deeper dive into why this happens, it's important to understand that numbness is, again, a protective response from the nervous system. When emotions or stress or experiences feel too intense to actually be able to process the system may shift into a state of shutdown or conservation. So your body is actually conserving energy at that time rather than feeling everything. It's like the body's telling you, this is too much. I'm gonna turn the volume down. Remember that your body maintains the same physiology with unresolved trauma as it does with chronic stress or being in a sense of overwhelm. So also if we just look at it, chronic stress or actually going into a state of burnout. Can cause that numb sensation traumas, if they're big, small, maybe they're recent, maybe they're old, but trauma that hasn't reached completion, it's still alive in the body. The physiology is still creating that physiology of trauma, and it hasn't been resolved. It hasn't been healed. It's keeping that trauma alive and well in the body and brain. There can be prolonged emotional overwhelm that leads to numbness. Depression or anxiety. Often people who have been long-term caretakers who have had to maybe deny their own needs in order to take care of someone else or in a situation where they've maybe been forced into long-term care taking and those types of situations, that can also lead to a sense of burnout and emotional numbness as well. The other situations when I see so much numbness in people's lives is when they've pushed through. I can identify with this so incredibly. So if you continue to push through and you don't give yourself support or you don't give yourself rest. This will often look like people who are in that mindset of being like a high achiever and they learn to override their body signals in order to perform or to get through. It can look like those who are in chronic performance mode. Maybe they have really intense goals, but in order to. Reach those goals or to be able to move towards them. They're having to train in ways that are pushing past their limits. It's very easy in that, in that kind of a scenario, to reach that state of numbness where they can't feel their own emotions or feel their own joy or actually where they're even at on a daily basis. It can also look like the mindset of, I'll deal with this later. I have too much to do. I don't have time to deal with this. Now, I don't have time to process the emotion or to really acknowledge how I feel in the moment. In a way, I think of it as the nervous system can only handle so much. The body can adapt to push through or take care of someone else's needs or keep moving forward, but eventually the cost is numbness. Being in this numb state is a sign that your nervous system has been trying to keep you safe by disconnecting and in a way staying functional instead of feeling what needs to be felt or dealt with. Numbness is common in our world, but it doesn't mean that it's our goal or it's a good thing, but it demonstrates how many people are living with chronic stress and overwhelm and unresolved trauma. And it's definitely a coping mechanism, but it's not a failure. It's important to realize that numbness actually will show up during your healing process, not instead of it, and that's the point that we wanna explore more. There's a difference between numbness that happens in a short-term kind of a way as a short-term response and the healing process. And numbness being a prolonged state of being. We wanna talk about the difference, but in terms of the healing process, we wanna realize that we're gonna go through the same type of healing process no matter how long it's actually been going on. As someone who's practiced network spinal for over 20 years and worked with thousands of people, I can often see numbness as the nervous system is starting to reorganize. That's a really key point. It's starting to reorganize sometimes after years of stress and protective patterning. I wanna talk about numbness in terms of the polyvagal theory, and I'm gonna talk about this in terms of the ladder of the nervous system, which I think is fascinating. You wanna think of the ladder as different states of being that the nervous system can be in, and each state has a physiology that's associated with it. You may move in and out of states of regulation and this can occur multiple times a day. Or the nervous system can have extensive time periods in which it gets stuck in one state or another. Realize that the spine is the interface for all of this. So we wanna go into the first stage of the ladder, which you wanna think of as the highest stage of the ladder, and that is being in a ventral vagal state. So what that means when you're in a ventral vagal state, your system is very safe. It's very connected to yourself, your emotions, and those around you. So how that would actually feel is that emotions are very accessible and fluid. Does this mean that you are happy all the time? No. It could mean that you experience sadness or you experience 20 minutes of grief and then you move into a more balanced state, and then maybe you feel a little bit of excitement or joy, but you're experiencing emotions in a very fluid way throughout your day. It can feel like joy, sadness, or maybe even curiosity. You can sense an emotion and you can ask yourself questions, what am I feeling? What am I noticing? How does that make my body feel? You feel like yourself when you're in eventual vagal state, you feel connected to yourself and what your own needs are. Connection actually feels nourishing. You wanna be with your friends, you wanna be with your loved ones, but it's okay to be by yourself as well. So you have that sense of connection with others. And again, with yourself. Your body feels regulated. You feel like you can take a deep breath. You feel like you could smile and actually mean it. You feel like there's a sense of maybe some relaxation or some peace that you can access within your body. So when I work with someone's spine and their body and their nervous system, um, when they're in a ventral vagal state, or someone who has the ability to easily access a ventral vagal state, I may see in their adjustment a very fluid spinal wave, meaning their body has this ability to move and stretch on the table as they can connect to the needs of what's happening within their nervous system. But. What I also may see is a full breath wave moving through their spine. So when they take a deep breath, which they are often doing when they're in that ventral vagal state, their spine moves with the breath. I can see it like almost, if you think of a newborn breathing and you can see their whole spine rise when they breathe, someone in a ventral vagal state will have access to that. They have emotional access. So what that means is that they might laugh or they might cry. They may have tears during their adjustment. They might feel a major release in their body. Um, they might actually feel angry for a period of time, and then that moves through their system. These are all ways that a ventral vagal state is expressed within the body. Nothing is really stuck. If you're interested in exploring what that actually looks like, visit our Instagram page. We have all kinds of visuals, videos where you can actually see what those types of movements in the spine look like when the spine is functioning well and has strategies for creating that ventral vagal state, that really healthy, connected state within the spine. But the rest of it too is they have that emotional access that we talked about, but it also, they can feel and express what they need to, and their body, again, can move into a balanced state. They have presence in the body and body awareness, so that mind body connection is very strong. They also have a connection to what they're able to notice within their body. Maybe they notice their digestion needs a little support, or they feel maybe a little bit more fatigued than they would like to. So they are in touch with the need for extra rest. But again, they're able to listen to their own body's needs. This really looks like greater awareness within life without a lot of effort, awareness of patterning, awareness of behavior, awareness of their greater purpose and their being. They have great connection to that, and this is really key. The ventral vagal system is where the nervous system can integrate experience rather than store it. It's important to realize that feeling is possible here, even the difficult emotions, because the nervous system feels safe enough to experience them. And we're gonna take a quick break. This episode of Healing Beyond the Symptoms is sponsored by Body and Balance Wellness Center in Golden, Colorado. They know that real healing isn't about chasing symptoms. It's about uncovering the root cause of stress, tension, and imbalance. Their gentle nervous system based care helps people release stored stress, reconnect to their bodies, and build resilience that lasts. If you've tried everything and still feel like something's missing, they may be the missing link. Learn more and book your consultation at body and balance chiropractic.com. All right, and let's get back to the show. So then we're gonna look at what the next rung of the ladder looks like. So if ventral vagal is up here, the next layer is the sympathetic part of the nervous system. This is, again, the middle of the ladder and it's the state where there's like a mobilization of energy. There's survival energy that's present within the nervous system. It's a high energy stress state. How does that feel? So that can feel like anxiety. It can feel like restlessness. It can feel like urgency, or maybe there's racing thoughts happening. It can also look like maybe there's anger or there's irritability. Everything just feels more irritated maybe in the body as well as the emotional state. It can look like overthinking. Hyper vigilance. So being in maybe more of a protected, more of a guarded state, kind of waiting for what could happen or stressed about what could happen in the future. Restlessness or tension, the feeling like I have to do something. There can be fatigue, there can be shallow breath with this. So instead of that nice full breath that we saw in the ventral vagal system, in the sympathetic system, we're seeing more shallow and more guarded breath. And the other thing we'll often see is very tight rigidity, like tight muscles and rigidity in the system. So what I may find in someone's body when I'm evaluating someone that's in more of a sympathetic state, I'm gonna see more rigidity to their spine. I'm gonna see that things are more tight and more guarded. Typically, when we see that increase of guarding, um, in the system, or we see an increase of muscle tension within the system, we're also seeing an increased emotional state that goes right along with that. Again, I'm gonna see, I'm gonna actually be able to visualize that there's very shallow breathing, that they're holding tension within their body, that it may be emotional or may be related to thought patterns, but they're actually holding tension within the nervous system and their physiology is stuck in that tension pattern. They may be in a state of doing and striving and coping. So the things that they say to me actually reflect that as well. Maybe they've coped through a very stressful week, or they've been working really diligently on a project without breaks, so their body and their mind are in that sympathetic state. Being in a sympathetic state isn't pathology. Again, it's an intelligent survival mechanism that the body is using in order to cope with whatever the life circumstances are, but hopefully it's a short term experience that's really key. The problem is that many people live in that sympathetic state for years, and they call it normal. It's their normal, they're managing life through intense efforts, and adrenaline is usually coursing through their body on a daily basis. If that state persists without resolution or there's not support for it, the system can become absolutely exhausted. and that the lowest level, the system will drop down the ladder. And that's gonna look like the bottom of the ladder is the dorsal vagal system is being activated. That is where numbness lives. So how does that feel? It looks like emotional flatness or emptiness. The emotions go offline. They feel far away because there's this overwhelming disconnection. There's disconnection from the body, from the emotions. The body is living in conservation more in terms of energy. So sensation is actually dampened what they're aware of and what they can feel is actually dampened. There's low energy, there's a heaviness to the nervous system. There's even a sense of emptiness. Motivation is typically very low. Can look like brain fog, things feeling distorted. And it can also look like withdrawing from people, withdrawing from kind of meaning that's happening within their life. And that can be from social connection, that can be very difficult. And there can almost be a feeling of like, what's the point? But not really being panicked about what's the point? It's just there's no energy behind it. What's the point? When the system goes here, this is not depression. This is not a situation in which someone is actually depressed that's causing the numbness. It's the nervous system saying that it is going into a protective mode by creating disconnection. And that isn't an emotional weakness that's happening either. It's a sign that the nervous system has been stuck in stress physiology. Maybe has been stuck in that sympathetic fight or flight mode for so long, and it's creating this survival kind of physiology at that point. And how it's going to function is by moving into numbness and the physiology of numbness. It's like the nervous system is deciding, well, I tried to mobilize for such a long period of time and I wasn't capable of maintaining that for any longer. So in order to survive, I'm going to conserve and I'm going, going to disconnect. There's so much to unpack, not only about how numbness looks in our bodies and our emotional lives, but how we're going to come out of it, what that process will look like, and so many people are afraid that when they come out of that state of numbness, especially if they've been there for a long time, that it will be scary. That it will be overwhelming, but it doesn't have to be. There's so many supports that can be used to help your body safely come out of a state of numbness. We're gonna explore that in next week's episode, so please make sure that you're paying attention to the next episode coming out, because I really want you to have that valuable information. Please make sure you're subscribed to the podcast and share this episode with a friend. There's so many people in our culture that are dealing with numbness. This is a really important topic that could help someone that you care about. Make sure to leave us a review. We know we're impacting people through the comments that we're receiving with our community, but we wanna make sure that we can really help as many people as possible. And your reviews help us do that. Thanks so much for joining me on Healing Beyond the Symptoms. If one or more of these signs that we talked about today feels familiar, it's an invitation. We wanna create healing within your body, so keep tuning in for more information. You can book your first consultation with us at. Body and balance chiropractic.com and begin this journey today. And for daily encouragement, follow me on Instagram at Body and Balance Wellness Center. Until next time, breathe deep, listen in and trust the signs that your body is giving you. Thanks again for joining me today on Healing Beyond the symptoms. If you've been curious about network spinal or if you've tried everything else and still feel stuck, I want you to know this. Your body is not broken. It's patterned, and those patterns can change. If you're ready to experience how gentle care can lead to profound transformation. I'd love to invite you to book a wellness consultation at body and balance chiropractic.com. Together we'll look at what your body needs to finally release, reset, and thrive. Until next time, breathe deep. Trust your body and remember. Gentle can be powerful.