Gemma Spake

It doesn't care if you are in touch with your emotions.

It just cares that you are alive.

And if that means shutting down the emotional centers of the brain, so be it.

Even if that means we don't process things fully or we never process them at all and they linger.

I think a lesser explored explanation as well is that

We can also become emotionally numb and have this part of our brain shut off due to vicarious suffering and vicarious exposure to stressful and harmful things.

Yes, we may be enduring hard things in our lives.

Our relationship isn't working the way we want it to.

Our parents are getting older.

Our jobs suck.

We don't make enough money.

But at the same time as all of that personal stuff is going on, we're also being exposed to so much just like everyday suffering in the world beyond ourselves and so much daily stress about the future of the world.

that our individual issues become less of a priority and we're not able to focus on them because we have been emotionally desensitized.

Think of it this way.

If you lived in an isolated island and you had been for the last 10 years and you suddenly came back to life right now and reality right now and society right now, you would freak out.

You would think, oh my gosh, the world has gone to shit.

It is an awful place to be.

Being somewhat desensitized to that is our brain's way of trying to keep us calm in the face of just like an onslaught of negative information that would otherwise emotionally paralyze us and maybe cause us to do irrational things.

And that then bleeds into our personal lives.

There is this really fascinating study they did, I think like over a decade ago now in Canada, Canada, the US, I can't remember, where they exposed 60 men and women to read either negative news stories or neutral news stories.