Between a quarter and three quarters of people have had a spell of feeling cut off from their own feelings or from the world around them. That is the range a systematic review found across surveys, and the low end is already more than most of us would guess (Hunter, Sierra and David, 2004). So if you are asking why you feel nothing anymore, you are not asking something rare.
If you are thinking about harming yourself, call or text 988 (the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline) at any hour. In an emergency, call 911.
Feeling nothing is frightening in an odd way. There is no pain to point at, so there is nothing to fix, and you start to wonder whether something in you has broken. You may have tried the walks, the early nights, the supplements and the meditation app already. When none of it brought the feeling back, that said nothing about your effort.
This article gives four ideas, and each one changes what the question means. The first is that numbness is usually something your mind does, not something you lack.
Why have I gone numb, and is something wrong with me?
Numbness is far more often a response than a defect. Your mind has a way of turning the feeling down when it has too much to carry, and for many people it switches on without being asked. Spells of feeling unreal or detached are common in the general population, between 26% and 74% over a lifetime in the surveys reviewed (Hunter, Sierra and David, 2004).
The same review found that between 31% and 66% of people had these experiences at the time of a traumatic event. Think of a fuse box. When too much current runs through the house, a fuse trips so the wiring does not burn. The house goes dark, and that is the fuse doing its job.
That is the first reframe. "Why is there nothing in me?" becomes "What did my mind decide it could not carry right now?" The second question has an answer, and it usually points at something real, such as a loss, a long stretch of pressure or a stretch of holding yourself together.
Is it dissociation?
Possibly, and the word is less alarming than it sounds. Dissociation is the name for feeling detached from yourself or from your surroundings. Two versions are depersonalisation, which feels like watching your own life from outside, and derealisation, which feels like the world has gone flat or dreamlike.
The numbers are reassuring. The brief episodes are common, as the review found, but the long-lasting kind that gets a diagnosis is rarer. In large community surveys that used standard diagnostic interviews, clinically significant cases came to about 1% to 2% of people (Hunter, Sierra and David, 2004). The review also warns that estimates vary because researchers define these experiences in different ways.
If it is constant, if it frightens you, or if it has come with a trauma, a doctor or a mental health professional is the right person to sort out which version it is. This site cannot do that, and I am not a clinician. I studied clinical psychology, and what I can do is explain what the research shows.
Can stress or holding it together make you numb?
Yes, and here is the strange part. The dial that dulls the bad feelings is the same dial that dulls the good ones. Gross and Levenson (1997) asked 180 women to watch sad, neutral and funny films. Half were told to hide any sign of what they felt, and half simply watched. Hiding it reduced how much amusement the women reported, in both the sad and the funny films, and it raised the body's fight-or-flight arousal in the heart and blood vessels.
A set of five studies by Gross and John found a matching pattern in daily life. People who habitually hide their feelings reported less positive emotion and more negative emotion, and they reported worse relationships (Gross and John, 2003). These studies show a link and not a cause, so they do not prove that hiding feelings makes people numb. They do fit what many people describe.
Here is the idea worth keeping, and I will call it the one volume dial. Most of us treat feelings as separate channels, with pain on one and joy on another, and we hope to turn down only the pain. These studies hint that the dial is closer to one master control than to separate channels. After months of "I'm fine" and keeping it together at work, the volume of everything goes down together.
This changes what the numbness is for. You did not lose the ability to feel. A part of you turned down the volume to get you through something, and it forgot to give the good feelings a separate switch.
Is feeling numb a sign of depression?
It can be, and it does not have to look like sadness. Many people expect depression to feel like crying, and for a lot of them it feels like nothing. In a lab study, Rottenberg, Gross and Gotlib (2005) showed happy, sad and neutral material to people who were currently depressed, people who had been depressed before and people who never had been. The currently depressed group reported less sadness reactivity and less happiness across the conditions than the other groups did.
The authors describe this as partial support for what they call emotion context insensitivity, meaning that emotions respond less to what is happening. That may be why depression can leave some people unable to cry at a sad film or laugh at a funny one. The sorrow is not missing. The whole response is quieter.
Numbness can also come with trauma, where the picture is more surprising. One research model argues that people with post-traumatic stress are not truly numb at all. They stay highly alert to threat, and they may need stronger positive experiences to reach the same pleasant feeling (Litz and Gray, 2002). That is one proposed explanation with some research behind it, and it is not settled. It still offers a different picture of a "dead" feeling, as an alarm that has not been switched off.
If this has been most days for two weeks or more, book a visit with your doctor. That is a check, not a diagnosis, and it rules in or out causes that a person cannot see from the inside. The check-in on this site can help you notice how long it has lasted and what else has changed. When the loss is mainly of pleasure and interest, nothing feels fun anymore goes deep on how liking and wanting come apart, so I will not repeat it here.
Can antidepressants make you feel nothing?
For some people, yes. This side of treatment gets too little attention. In an internet survey of 669 depressed people taking antidepressants, 46% reported emotional blunting, a general flattening of feeling (Goodwin and colleagues, 2017). The rate did not differ much by type of drug, though it seemed lower with bupropion.
Treat that number with care. The survey relied on self-report, and depression itself blunts feeling, so the survey could not fully separate what the drug did from what the illness did. People with higher depression scores had more blunting. Even the patients with low depression scores reported more blunting than the recovered people in the comparison group.
If you take an antidepressant and feel flat, tell the person who prescribes it. There are choices to discuss, such as a different dose or a different medicine. Stopping suddenly on your own can cause its own problems, so any change should go through them. In a handful of states a psychologist with prescribing training can manage medication too. Feeling nothing is a legitimate thing to report. It is not a complaint that you are being ungrateful for a medicine that works.
How long does emotional numbness last?
No study gives one honest number, because numbness has too many causes. It can last a few hours after a shock, and it can drag on for months under long stress or depression. The brief episodes in the surveys above are common and pass, and the long-lasting, diagnosable kind is rare (Hunter, Sierra and David, 2004).
So the useful question is not "how long?" but "which way is it heading, and what is it connected to?" A week of numbness after a loss is one story. Numbness most days for two weeks or more, or numbness that is getting deeper, is a reason to talk to a doctor. If you are in the middle of something that has an end, a death, a move, an exhausting season at work, the numbness often has the same shape.
What helps feeling come back?
Start with the cause, because a dial turned down for a reason will not turn up by force. You have probably been told to push through it, and pushing can feel like one more way of holding yourself together. These steps work with the dial and not against it.
1. Name what happened before the numbness began. Look back a few weeks or months. A loss, a diagnosis, a break-up, a stretch of being strong for everyone else. You are not hunting for blame. You are finding out what the dial was protecting you from.
2. Let in a little at a time. Turning the volume up all at once can feel like being flooded, which is why the dial went down. Pick a small, safe dose, such as one song, ten minutes outside or a call with someone who does not need you to be fine. The aim is to notice any feeling at all, however faint, and to let it count.
3. Stop grading yourself on the feeling. Asking "Do I feel better yet?" six times a day keeps the alarm on. Check once a week, with a score from 0 to 10, and see the direction over time instead of the mood of the hour.
4. Get the checks done. Talk to your doctor about the numbness, and about any medicine you take, as covered above. Ask which checks make sense for you, such as blood tests. They can find causes that no amount of thinking will.
5. Bring in a professional if it is tied to something that happened. Numbness after trauma, or numbness with flashbacks, is a good reason to see a mental health professional who works with trauma. Finding one is easier with a local guide, such as Texas, California or New York, and the same pages list low-cost options. When nothing seems worth doing and the numbness has a heavy, hopeless edge, what to do when life feels pointless offers a plan for an ordinary day. For the gap between knowing the plan and acting on it, see why knowing what to do is not enough.
How far to trust all this
Most of these studies are lab or survey studies, and several show a link and not a cause. The trauma model is a theory with some support and not a settled fact. None of this can tell you which of the causes is yours. Only a person who knows you, and a doctor who can check your body, can do that.
If you are thinking about harming yourself, call or text 988 at any hour. In an emergency, call 911.
You did not lose the ability to feel. A part of you turned the volume down to get you through something, and the same part can turn it up again once it is safe enough to try.
Sources6
- Goodwin, G. M., Price, J., De Bodinat, C., & Laredo, J. (2017). Emotional blunting with antidepressant treatments. A survey among depressed patients. Journal of Affective Disorders, 221, 31-35. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2017.05.048
- Gross, J. J., & John, O. P. (2003). Individual differences in two emotion regulation processes. Implications for affect, relationships, and well-being. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85(2), 348-362. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.85.2.348
- Gross, J. J., & Levenson, R. W. (1997). Hiding feelings. The acute effects of inhibiting negative and positive emotion. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 106(1), 95-103. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-843X.106.1.95
- Hunter, E. C. M., Sierra, M., & David, A. S. (2004). The epidemiology of depersonalisation and derealisation. A systematic review. Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology, 39(1), 9-18. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00127-004-0701-4
- Litz, B. T., & Gray, M. J. (2002). Emotional numbing in posttraumatic stress disorder. Current and future research directions. Australian & New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, 36(2), 198-204. https://doi.org/10.1046/j.1440-1614.2002.01002.x
- Rottenberg, J., Gross, J. J., & Gotlib, I. H. (2005). Emotion context insensitivity in major depressive disorder. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 114(4), 627-639. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-843X.114.4.627