A Man's Guide To STOP Numbing Out

All right, team, welcome back to the Mantalk show. Connor Beaton here. And today we are going to dive deep into how you stop numbing out. And we're going to talk about what it is, what actually is numbing out. We're going to talk about why does it happen. And then I'm going to end this series, this little episode with how do you actually stop? How do you actually move through it? So there's a couple pieces that we're going to start with. Number one is, is just the biggest misconception around numbing out, the biggest misconception that most men have and most of us go through when it comes to numbing out is the notion that when you are numb, you are not feeling anything. And that couldn't be further from the truth. When you are numb, it's not because you're empty and it's not because you're not feeling anything. It's because you have been feeling too much and your system has needed to shut down. So it's not that you're empty, it's that you're full. Full, right? You are emotionally full, you're psychologically full. Your body is peaked out, it's capped out. Your nervous system's capped out. And so your brain has had to sort of sever the connection or disconnect from it in some way, shape or form, either by using an external substance like booze, weed, porn, food, etc, tv, social media, or by literally just disconnecting from what you are feeling in your body. And this allows you to go back into the safety net of your brain where you can just go back into your mind and go back into your thoughts and not have to deal with what's happening in your body. So numbness first and foremost is an emotional and physical state. It's actually an experience where you disconnect from the sensations in the body and the emotions that are happening in your body. Now, oftentimes it is a response from the mind, from the brain to disconnect from the nervous system and from your body, from what's actually happening in there. So think of it this way, all right? Your body is feeling a lot. It's feeling stressed, it's feeling anxious, maybe there's a lot of anger, maybe there's anxiety or loneliness or you're just bored out of your mind. And your brain identifies this and has coded this over time as a problem. And so it deploys one of two solutions. Number one is an external coping mechanism to help you numb out what you're feeling, right? If you're sad and have a lot of grief because of some breakup or a divorce or, you know, your company collapsed or you got laid off, your brain can deploy a coping mechanism that says, oh, that's a problem. I need to deal with it. And rather than feeling whatever it is that you're feeling in that moment, it looks for us an external solution, like weed, like booze, like social media, like OnlyFans or jerking off, watching porn. Or it simply shuts down the sensation and the intensity that you are experiencing emotionally or physically. And remember, emotions are just an energetic and physical experience. They are an energetic and physical form of information, right? Some people, you've probably heard the term emotions are energy in motion, right? So emotions are an energetic experience, but they also have a physical part of them, right? So when you feel angry or sad or anxious, there's a very specific experience that you will have in your body, right? When you feel something, you don't just feel this analogous energy in your body. You actually feel it from a sensation standpoint somewhere in your body. Now, the trick here is that for a lot of men, the other thing that I want you to know is that for a lot of guys, you're not numbed out, you've just numb. Never been taught how to feel your feelings. And that's going to be a separate video, a separate conversation, but you've never been taught how to actually just feel. Or you grew up in an environment where you were told, do not do that, right? You shouldn't be angry or it's not okay for you to be sad, or, you know, it's not okay for you to display your different emotions, especially the quote unquote bad ones, right? The sad ones, the angry ones. So that's what numbing out is. When people say, oh, I feel numb again, it's not because they aren't feeling anything. They might not be able to identify anything in that moment, right? So when you think about when you're numb or when you want to numb out, it's generally when you've been experiencing some type of peak within an emotion that is distressful, right? Maybe you feel anxious, maybe you feel angry, maybe you feel lonely, maybe you're incredibly sad, or you've got a lot of grief, whatever it is. And that emotion has hit a kind of peak where you're like, I don't know how to deal with this anymore. And your body overwhelms the mind with all of that information and all of that data of like, I'm super angry or I'm super sad and the brain's like, I don't know what to do. And so it severs the connection to what you're experiencing in the body. And what happens is numbness, which is still an experience in and of itself. So with all of that said, that's what numbness is. I hope that out of this you can start to stop seeing numbness as a villain. Numbness isn't a bad thing, as we're going to talk about. Numbness is a protective strategy, okay? It's a protective strategy. It's meant to protect you from feeling too much, from being inundated and overrun by the volume of emotional information that's coming up from your body and into your brain, okay? So numbness is a protective strategy aimed to protect you from the volume of information coming from the emotional and physical body of up into your brain. Now, there are some caveats to numbness that I want you to know about, okay? Because there are some drugs that are out there. Drugs are bad, okay? But there are some drugs that are out there. That's a South park reference, in case you didn't know that one. But it also wasn't a very good impression, so that's okay. But there are some drugs that are out there that are going to numb emotional pain, all right? And, well, let me just tell you what they are, okay? So antidepressants. There are some antidepressants and SSRIs that, if you are prescribed those, they can have the result of. Imagine that your normal emotional range is like this, right? You've got your high highs of joy and excitement and happiness, and you've got your lows of grief and sorrow. What some antidepressants and SSRIs do is they compress the spectrum or the volume at which you will feel those emotions. So your level of joy, your level of sorrow will kind of get compressed and you live in this much smaller range of emotional feelings. So SSRIs, antidepressants are one of them. SNRIs, or serotonin norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors. There we go. That's a mouthful. SNRIS can also have the same impact. Benzos, benzodiazepines. If you're prescribed those, they can also have the similar impact. And then more common ones are marijuana and alcohol. So weed and alcohol are actually forms of emotional suppressants and also physical pain suppressants. So if you are feeling emotionally hurt or you're feeling physically hurt, weed and alcohol will help to dull that pain, Right? That's why, you know, before we had.

What is it called? Morphine. And those types of drugs, you know, they would give soldiers that needed some type of surgery, just stitching up, they'd give them, like, you know, alcohol, right? They'd give them whiskey or whatever it was that they would have around them and basically liquor them up a little bit so it would dull the pain. So. And notice we're going to talk about what you normally use to numb out. It's things like weed and alcohol. Now, one last thing that I want to talk about here, because I know some of you are going to be familiar with this and put this out. Alexithymia. Alexithymia is a specific condition where you will have an inability to feel your emotions. Now, this is generally very rare. It's not likely that it's something that you are dealing with, but it's. It's rare, but it's real. And some people have a very real inability to feel the depth of their emotions in their body. Generally speaking, those people have some other type of condition or have experienced a very intense acute trauma that shut them off from feeling what they were actually feeling. If you really believe that you struggle with alexithymia, my recommendation is that you go work with a coach, therapist, psychologist that specializes in somatic work that can help you get back into your body and understand what's actually going on beneath the surface. So with all that said, what causes us to numb? Well, hopefully you're beginning to get a bit of a picture that we numb out because we're feeling too much. All right? So when you reach for the porn, when you reach for the weed, when you reach for the booze, and it's not just you like going out to have fun and whatever. You're reaching for it and you're by yourself and you're, you know, you're bored or you're lonely, you're doing that because you're feeling something that is unpleasant. You're feeling an emotion that your brain has coded as bad or wrong or unwanted in some way. You're in a little bit of distress, or you're really stressed out, and you're looking for something to basically blunt or dull your emotional experience. Okay? So that's one of the main reasons why it happens. But I want to talk about a broader picture of why do we numb out? So, first and foremost is this can be a learned response to intense emotions from caregivers. So you may have actually seen your dad, you know, when he was stressed out or he was feeling anxious or he was. Whatever, he was upset. Go and use alcohol, right? Or smoke weed or, you know, disconnect and watch hours of news or, you know, some shitty programming, right? Maybe he was like, in a mash or something like that or Law and Order, and he would just sit there and watch Law and Order for four fricking hours straight. I don't know. I'm just, you know, making stuff up. But it may be learned from a caregiver that you witnessed that caregiver when they were emotionally full, when they were sort of tapped out and overwhelmed emotionally or stressed out, that they turned to some type of external substance or behavior to help them deal with that internal duress. All right? And so that may be a learned behavior that you then took on. And. And when you were stressed as a kid, because no one clearly was showing you how to regulate your emotional stress, you took on that same behavior. So when you were stressed out as a kid, maybe you would go and play video games for eight hours straight. Or when you were stressed out or feeling disconnected or anxious, you would start to overeat. You know, you just plow in junk food. Coca cola and chocolate chips. I'm speaking from personal experience here. Popcorn or whatever, hot dogs. And you would numb out what you were feeling in internally, physically, and emotionally in your body. Next, what causes us to numb is, again, it's a protective strategy. So it's a protective strategy that you learned at some point in your childhood that kept you safe. So again, maybe you grew up in a household where your parents told you, you know, like, big boys don't cry, or real men don't cry, or there were certain emotions that you weren't allowed to express. Your mom constantly told you not to be angry or you shouldn't feel like that, or good men don't get angry. And so whenever you feel that emotion starting to come up, you immediately start to tamp it down. And when it gets too big, when it becomes too overwhelming, you need something to help you cut down the intensity and the volume of it, and that's where the numbing out comes from. Or your brain has just adapted the strategy that it'll just disconnect from that feeling altogether so that you don't even have to recognize and validate or verify that it's even there. And this is quite common for a lot of guys where they grew up in households where they were told not to be sad or they were told not to be angry. It's very common for some men to be kind of disassociated. We'll use that word. We'll use that word loosely. Cause you're not disassociated in that sense, but you're disconnected from it to such a degree that you, you're not really able to identify when it is that you are actually sad or actually stressed out or actually angry. Next is chronic stress and burnout. So you can numb out or seek numbing out behaviors because of chronic stress. And again, this is a very common case for a lot of men. They wake up in the morning, they don't have a good morning routine, they go straight to their emails or straight onto their computer and you know, they're drinking coffee immediately and they're putting their body into a sort of stressed out state immediately. And then they just stay in that place throughout the day. More coffee, more emails, more stress, come home, dealing with the kids, yada yada yada, and they're just constantly in this state of stress throughout the day. And their body doesn't have a chance to what's called down regulate to find and regain a state of homeostasis where they're more chill, where they're more relaxed, where they're more grounded. Burnout does the same thing where you're sort of at this peak for a very long time. Numbing out also happens, like I said before, because of certain medications which you can look into if you are on any of the meds that I talked about before. And then because of trauma, if you experience trauma, it's very common that for some people that have experienced certain types of trauma that they, their response to when that traumatic feeling starts to come up is that they just numb out. And again, that can be numbing out with a substance or just your brain shutting down what you're feeling in your body altogether because it's too much and it feels too overwhelming. So with all that said, what do you do? How do you stop numbing out? How do you stop numbing out? Well, the first thing that I want you to know is that just because you numb out or because you feel numb sometimes doesn't mean that there's something foundationally or fundamentally wrong with you. One of the most common things that I see with men that come into work with me or come to the men's weekends or do join the the alliance is guys consistently saying, there's something wrong with me, I numb out all the time or there's something wrong with me. And you know, I just, I can't feel my feelings. You, I just feel numb all the time. It doesn't mean you're broken, right? Doesn't mean that you are broken. It simply means that you learned a maladaptive, AKA an unhelpful or ineffective way of dealing with distressful and intense emotions. That's all that it means. And you are likely not even responsible for that. It's probably the circumstances that you grew up in or the circumstances that you experienced that have caused some of that. Now you are responsible for shifting the behavior, right? You are responsible for moving yourself out of the numbing and starting to what I call d thaw, which I'm going to talk about right now. Every man that numbs out consistently has to go through what I call a is a dethawing period or a letting, letting go of like taking an emotional laxative, right? You have to go through a period of stop being so emotionally constipated because that's in some way, that's what numbness is. It's not that you don't have feelings, it's that they're stuck inside of you. And again, I don't say that to shame you or make you wrong. I'm saying it to be kind of comical in some ways because I think emotionally constipated is kind of a funny term when you just think about it. But that emotional constipation and that freezing up internally, emotionally, in your body is going to require a dethawing phase where you are going to have to, over time, allow yourself to let some of these emotions out slowly, okay? And allow yourself to build a more robust connection to what is physically and emotionally happening in your body. And I'm going to give you a structure to do this, okay? I'm going to give you a structure to start to feel your feelings, to dethaw and to stop numbing out. So the first step you need to take is, number one, you need to identify what behaviors and what substances you are using to numb out. Right? Are you watching porn? Are you smoking weed? Are you drinking too much booze? Are you overeating? Are you overeating late at night when maybe you're feeling a lot? Are you medicating with certain medications? Are you, you know, trying to cope with using only fans or jerking off all the time? Like, what substance are you using? So you need to identify first and foremost, what are you using to help you stay numb? Or what are you using to help you numb out? And there are likely more than one or two things with a lot of the men that I've worked with over the years, there are usually multiple things that they use, depending on what they are experiencing, that you might have A preference. You know, you might go to weed more than booze or more than porn, but for most guys, they have a couple things that they turn to when it comes to numbing out. So that's the first one. Identify the substances and the behaviors that you are using to numb out. Second, create a plan to reduce the volume of the usage of those substances or those behaviors. Okay? Create a plan to systematically reduce the volume and the usage of those substances and that behavior. What is not going to help most of the time for most men? And this is just a. Just from what I've seen in the work that I've done, what's not going to help is trying to go cold turkey on the weed or the booze or the porn or whatever it is that you're using to numb out the only fans and the sexting and the Instagram thirst traps or the, you know, constant video games or the whatever it is, right? Whatever it is that you're using. If you try and go cold turkey for most guys, what's going to happen is you will. You'll have a couple days where maybe you're good. And what will start to happen is you'll start to dethaw and you will start to feel a lot, and you will start to feel a lot all at once. And so what will generally happen for most guys that take that route is they will feel an intense amount of stress or overwhelm and all of their emotions will start to flood back in at once after a couple days, after like two to five days. And immediately they'll need to go back to their substance, need to go back to whatever they use to numb out. And they'll. And it, you know, usually is much worse, right? It's usually like if weed's your thing and you try and go cold turkey on it two to five days in, you're straight back on it. And it's heavier than before, right? Because you need something to take the edge off. Because again, you. You are dethawing. And if you are somebody that's been repressing or numbing out your emotions a lot for a long period of time, then you've suppressed a lot. And it's gonna be hard for you to identify and work with the volume of emotions that start to come up, right? And so if you start to dethaw and all of a sudden there's joy and happiness and sorrow and grief and anxiety and anger and like, it all starts to come back in the stress about what's happening at your work and your finances and did you Buy enough bitcoin or, you know, like, whatever the hell it is that you're grappling with, all of that will start to rush back in and it will overwhelm your system. And that will cause you to want to go back to your numbing agent and your numbing behaviors even more than before. So those are the first two things. Identify what you use and reduce them over time. Right? So if you smoke weed every single day, start by for the first 30 days, reducing weed to like every other day, and then every three days and then every five days and then once a week. And just reduce that over time so that you have an adjustment period where you can start to deal with the volume of emotions and feelings that are likely going to start to show up. All right, now, again, the caveat I wanna say here is that if you have had trauma and if you are very disconnected from your body, you still might not feel very much as you start to dethaw outside of extreme agitation. You might just notice, because for some men, what ends up happening inevitably is that they've become so systematically good at cutting themselves off from their emotions that everything is coded in their programming as anger and frustration. And so anytime they feel anything, it's just anger and frustration. Anger and frustration. Anger and frustration. So you might notice for you, just depending on your upbringing and what your childhood looked like and what was acceptable and not acceptable, that as you start to go through this dethawing process, you might notice that you just have a much higher level of agitation. And that's okay. What I want you to know and what I want you to try and do is see if you can use some discernment to start to identify am I actually angry? Am I actually agitated? Or am I feeling something else behind that or underneath that? In psychology, it's very common that anger is looked at as a secondary emotion, meaning that something came before it. Fear, anxiousness, disappointment, feeling disrespected, feeling embarrassed, feeling sad, feeling lonely, feeling bored. That you felt something before, you felt the anger and then you got angry about it. So if you start to dethaw and you notice that you are just super agitated and aggro and angry, ask yourself that question. Give yourself the, the, the grace to go through it. But ask yourself the question, what was I feeling before that? Or what am I feeling underneath the anger? What am I feeling behind the anger? One of those questions will help you to identify it. Okay, next, realize that numbness is an actual feeling and experience in and of itself. Kind of paradoxical when you think about it. But it is. Numbness is a feeling. It is an experience that you have. It's something that you feel and you can identify it. And what I would like you to do, number three, is I would like you to try and write out in as much depth and detail as possible what numbness feels like physically. Okay. What are the sensations attached to it? Does it feel hollow? Does it feel vacant? Does it feel like there's a lot of space in your chest? Do your hands feel numb? Do your, you know, do your legs feel stiff? Like, what does your version of numbness actually feel like? Because every man that I've worked with, it's not that their body just disappears and they have no connection to their body whatsoever. It's actually that they have a very specific sensation of numbness. You know, for some men, it's like as soon as I get into my chest, it's kind of like it feels empty or it feels like really cold in my chest, or it feels super heavy. It feels like somebody's dropped an anvil on my chest and it feels hard to breathe. Right? So for some people, those are the descriptions that they've given me. When I say, what does your numbness feel like? You know, what's actually happening in your body when you say that you are numb? Because what you're saying to me is you feel numb. So describe that, and that will help you to start to understand the process of how to feel the rest of your emotions as you dethaw, as you stop going to the booze and the porn and whatever it else is that you are using. Number four, as you go through this process, you are going to want to use the breath to reconnect to the body. So as you start to reduce the volume and the amount of using these coping mechanisms to help you numb out. And as you start to dethawn, these emotions start to come up in your body, you are going to want to use your breath to connect to the physical sensations and the emotions that you are experiencing. Now, here is why. I'm going to say two things that are very important. Number one, the reason why a lot of guys numb out is because they don't have the language to describe and differentiate between the emotions that they are experiencing in their body. It's not that they aren't feeling a lot. It's that they don't have the language and the skill to identify what's actually happening inside of them. So everything, again, kind of gets coded as anger and sadness, and they oscillate between those two things. Or like Anger, sad, okay. And happy. And they oscillate between those four things. When there's a whole robust sort of dictionary of language that you can start to use and sensations that you can start to tune into in your body to understand what it is that you are actually experiencing. That's number one. Number two, the breath is the conduit to the sensation in your body. And I'm going to try and condense this down to a little bit of a brief thing, but there's something called the autonomic nervous system. And the autonomic nervous system has two parts, the sympathetic and the parasympathetic. The sympathetic is responsible for stress and, you know, fight, flight, or freeze, getting things done. The parasympathetic is rest and digest. So you can think about like go and slow and those two are connected. So you can kind of think of it like a teeter totter, right, with sympathetic or stress on the one side, fight, flight or freeze on the one side. On the other side you've got rest, digest, sleep, relaxation, and you oscillate between the two. They go back and forth. And you can be in a sympathetic dominant state, a stressed dominant state, or you can be in a parasympathetic dominant state or a relaxed dominant state. Right when you're sleeping, you're in a relaxed dominant state. When you've had three cups of coffee and you're in a board meeting and you're having to present in front of your boss and you're stressed out about it and you under prepared, you're in a very highly sympathetic dominant state. Now the key to this, and the reason why this is important is that the more you are in your sympathetic dominant state, the more heavily you're in that state, a couple things happen. Number one, your breath rate per minute goes up. Number two, your heart rate per minute goes up. Number three, it becomes harder to feel anything outside of stress or anxiety. And this is where a lot of people live throughout the day. As you reduce your breath per minute, as you start to take deeper breaths into the body, you start to take slower breaths, deeper breath on the inhale, extending the exhale, you are forcing your heart rate and your breath rate down. As you do that, you balance your nervous system out over time. It takes a little bit of practice and work, but you start to balance it out and create more of a homeostasis and where you can start to feel more of what's happening within your emotional body. So your breath is key to feeling. Your breath is key to dethawing and not numbing out for a lot of men when you are in. Not for a lot of men, for people in general, for humans in general. When you get into too heavy of a stressed out state, a couple of things can happen. One, you might be a man that actually holds, holds his breath. So you might catch yourself holding your breath on the exhale or on the inhale, where you're just sitting there and you're like, have I been breathing at all? And your, your breath is very constrained, it's labored, it's super tight. You can't feel like you can get a very deep breath in. That's a sign that you are in a sympathetic dominant state. You're in a very stressed out state. Hard to feel your feelings from that place. Okay, if you're a breath holder, the next one is you are a fast breather. If you are breathing very quickly and you're taking, you know, 15, 20 breaths a minute, 25 breaths a minute, that is naturally going to push you into a more stressed out state. It's going to increase your heart rate and it's going to cause your brain to deploy certain stress chemicals like cortisol and adrenaline. So by decreasing the amount that you are breathing, consciously tuning into your breath, slowing your breath down, slowing the exhale down, you are going to allow your body to relax and you are going to allow yourself to feel. So you've got the breath holder, you've got the rapid breather, and then you got the mouth breather. If you are breathing through the mouth consistently and you're sitting at your desk and your mouth is open, it has been proven you can go read James Nestor, his book Breath. You can see some of the research that's out there. If you breathe through your mouth consistently, just sitting at your desk, you are generally going to breathe more shallow and you are generally going to put your body into more, again, more of a stress response. So as often as you can, taking a nice deep breath in through the nose and out through the mouth. And that is going to allow you to again have a better access point to your body. All right, number five, look for sensation, look for physical sensation. Now this is the key to letting go of numbing out is you actually get to start to feel everything that's happening in your body, actually get to start to feel your feelings. So you can start to identify where is their tension, where is there heat, where is their contraction, where is there cold, where is there energy moving around, where do I feel like there's tightness, where do I feel like there's weight and heaviness. And you can start to use some of these descriptors to pinpoint where there's sensation in your body. Because where your, where your emotions are, there is not only an energetic experience, but there is specifically a sensation, physical based experience. So every emotion has a very physical sensation based descriptor attached to it, right? So for anger, a lot of guys feel power in the chest, an expansiveness, heat. They can feel tension in the shoulders, tightness in the jaw and in the hands. Their feet might want to move. So there's a very specific sensation based experience that every man will have based on the emotion that he's feeling. Right? You might feel sadness. You know, the muscles in your, in your neck might feel super tight, like you're trying to hold in the grief and the tears from coming out. You might feel shame in the pit of your stomach and it can feel super heavy. Embarrassment can feel like this contraction. So you start to look for the sensations in your body and you start to use your own language. It doesn't, you don't need to use my language, you don't need to use anybody else's language, but you start to look for your own language to describe the sensation that's connected to that emotion. Now admittedly this takes a little bit of practice, but if you are working with a coach or a therapist or a psychologist, it can be super helpful. Another thing that you can do is use a journal, right? Today I got angry. What I felt was, or the sensations that I experienced were, right, I got angry. The sensations I experienced were. Then that's going to give you a little bit more information, ability to communicate, ability to express when you are feeling those things. So when somebody says, hey, how are you feeling? It's not just oh, I feel fine, I feel okay. It's like, no, I am feeling like some tightness in my chest and I can feel that I'm angry. And you'll be able to start to identify the emotions, the last piece, and this can be helpful to take it one extra step further. Once you started to dethaw, you started to breathe into the body, you started to connect to some of the sensations that are attached to the different emotions. Then, then you can let those sensations have a bit of a voice, right? So if you feel tension in the shoulders or in the jaw, if you feel heat in the chest, what would that tension say? What would that sensation say? If it could speak, what would it say? And you can just journal about it, right? It's like, well, if my tension in the tension in my chest could speak, it would say X, Y and Z. Or, you know, if the heat in my face could speak, it would say X, Y and Z. And that's gonna give you a deeper understanding of what that emotion in you is trying to communicate. And this is incredibly helpful for ending the numbing out process because what you will have done through using this system is reduce the volume and the amount of using that substance that's numbing you out, allowing yourself a space to actually dethaw realize that your numbness is an. Is a feeling in itself. Using the breath to connect to the sensations in the body, having a deeper understanding of what you're actually feeling and then being able to give those emotions a bit of a voice so that they can inform what's actually going on inside of you. Right? So as an example, if you connect to some sensations in the chest, it's tight, there's a lot of energy around and you're like, oh, that's anger. Like, I'm definitely angry about this thing that's happened in my relationship or I'm angry about this thing that's happening at work. What does that tension wants to say? It wants to say, like, fucking hate that this is happening right now, or I feel out of control with this or whatever it is. And that will give you information about what's actually happening, what you're agitated about, and you'll be able to communicate. Maybe you don't say exactly what that tension is saying or exactly what. What that anger is saying, but you'll be able to communicate more effectively because you will know and understand what it is that you're actually feeling. So this is a man's guide to stop numbing out. Thank you so much for tuning in. Please do me one solid thing. Please man it forward. This show has grown over the years, not because we've marketed it, not because I've seen spent tons of money on advertising it, but because you share it. And so please share this episode or any episode that you have found to be helpful for you. Man it forward to somebody in your life that you think will enjoy it, share it on social media. All of it goes a long, long way to spreading the message. So until next week, this is Connor Beaton signing off. See you next time.