This psychologist's perspective reveals the hidden cost of 'not feeling anything.'
3 Signs You May Be Emotionally Numb
When emotions go quiet, it can feel like stability, but numbness often signals disconnection rather than resilience.
By Mark Travers, Ph.D. | Last Updated:
In pop psychology as well as everyday conversation, people often toss around phrases like, "I just want to feel safe" or "Being numb helps me cope." But as research and clinical observation show, emotional safety and emotional numbness are distinct psychological states, and confusing the two can slow your growth, isolate you from support and leave you stuck in patterns that feel safe but aren't.
Before we dive into the signs of confusion, we must define both terms so we can distinguish them ourselves:
- Emotional safety is a state in which you feel secure expressing your whole range of feelings, rooted in the belief that supportive connections, trust and acceptance are possible in your relationships and environment.
- Emotional numbness refers to a reduced capacity to feel emotions, often as a coping response to overwhelming stress, trauma or internal conflict.
Ironically, numbness can feel safe because it reduces emotional pain. But that feeling of "nothing matters" isn't the same as genuine safety, it's more of a psychological shutdown. And research backs that up.
(Take my fun and science-inspired Guardian Animal Test to know if you're an emotional burrower or an open book pack animal.)
Why Do We Need Emotional Safety?
A growing body of work highlights how emotional numbness shows up in clinical contexts. For example, a 2024 study published in JAMA Network Open found that trauma-exposed individuals, particularly those with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), exhibit rapid swings between emotional states.
Emotional numbing symptoms, in particular, are known to intensify this pattern of reacting sharply to negative stimuli and then shutting down emotionally. So, while it feel as though numbing is helping them in the moment, it isn't difficult to see how it isn't a balanced state of safety, either. In reality, it's a survival adaptation.
Meanwhile, a 2023 article in The Lancet Psychiatry argues that emotional safety is foundational for overall well-being, especially in clinical environments where reducing emotional distress without undermining emotional expression is itself a therapeutic goal. This article clarifies to us, without a doubt, that emotional safety is supposed to enable connection and self-regulation, not emotional detachment.
With this backdrop, let's unpack the three key signs that might tell you that what you're experiencing isn't emotional safety, but rather emotional numbness.
1. You Prefer Feeling No Emotions Over Feeling Uncomfortable
Emotional safety is a state of calm vulnerability, where you can feel your emotions without fear of judgment or threat. It doesn't mean you're never uncomfortable, but you can tolerate discomfort with support and without shutting down emotionally.
Emotional numbness, in contrast, is characterized by emotional blunting or flat affect. You might describe your experience as not feeling anything, good or bad. That absence might feel like a hard-won "immunity" from emotional hurt, but it's really a defense mechanism. Emotional numbing (especially in trauma and stress contexts) shows that this numbness corresponds to reduced emotional reactivity, which isn't the same as regulated, safe emotional experience.
If you notice this tendency in your behavior, you may need to ask yourself the following questions:
- Do I notice subtle emotional shifts (joy, irritation, sadness, etc.), or do I feel blank most of the time?
- When something meaningful happens, do I feel it, even a little, or do I shrug it off?
If you picked the latter alternative in both scenarios, you may have confused your tendency for emotional numbing with emotional safety.
2. You Avoid Or Suppress Emotions Instead Of Integrating Them
Emotional safety allows for the presence of all feelings, even difficult ones, without overwhelming panic, withdrawal or self-attack. A person who feels emotionally safe understands, even at the nervous system level, that this safety is begotten by regulating emotion, not erasing it.
On the other hand, emotional numbness shows up as avoidance, suppression or shutdown. You might notice the following patterns in an emotionally numb individual:
- Changing the subject when emotions come up
- Feeling disconnected from loved ones
- Using busyness or distraction to avoid feelings
These patterns are not a sign of mastery; they're methods of avoidance. And it's almost common knowledge now that avoidance and suppression are maladaptive coping responses, ones that maintain distress over time, rather than true safety or regulation. Here's a quick distinction for anyone confused about their own emotional state:
- Emotional safety acknowledges feelings, creates discomfort and builds relational trust.
- Emotional numbness, on the other hand, blocks out feelings, avoids discomfort and undermines connection.
If your emotional life feels "flat," or if you're not aware of what you're feeling most of the time, that's a classic sign of emotional numbness.
3. You Only Feel Emotionally 'Safe' When You're Disconnected
This is an important symptom of emotional numbness, and often one that confuses most people. Individuals who might be emotionally numbed out can come to believe that they are emotionally safe because they don't register hurt at all. In other words, they interpret, or rather misinterpret, their numbness as protection.
But here's the catch: true emotional safety doesn't isolate you from experience; it is supposed to ground you within it. And while emotional numbness may feel like safety precisely because it removes the emotional risk, that safety remains illusory.
In trauma psychology, emotional numbing is often seen as part of a survival response rather than an adaptive emotional state. In abovementioned 2024 JAMA Network Open study, 1,440 trauma-exposed individuals reported numbness as well as strong negative reactions. In other words, their systems oscillated between states of threat and shutdown, not a balanced state of safe emotional regulation.
In contrast, emotional safety is a stable platform that enables you to have access to feelings without being overwhelmed by them.
If you're curious to know if your emotional stability is held up by numbness or safety, ask yourself this question: Do you feel safe only when you don't feel anything? Or can you experience range and recovery, both the highs and lows, in a way that doesn't ruin you?
If your calm comes from detachment, it may be a clear sign that you're relying on a maladaptive coping mechanism to escape your emotions.
Why This Distinction Between Emotional Numbness And Safety Matters
Confusing numbness with safety can have real psychological costs. Here are a few that you might be paying already:
- Reduced empathy and connection in relationships
- Masking underlying anxiety, depression or trauma responses
- Risk of misdiagnosis or mismanagement in therapy
- Lack of growth, resilience and emotional regulation
The only antidote to this numbness is building your emotional regulation capacity for your long-term mental health. Adaptive regulation involves noticing your emotions, tolerating them and integrating them into a coherent sense of self. Genuine emotional safety supports this process, but numbness undermines it.
One of the most consistent findings in psychology is that experiencing emotion is resilience. Building a wall that blocks out all emotion makes your emotional constitution weaker and more brittle. Sitting with your feelings and letting them affect you is what makes it stronger.
If you've read so far and thought, "That sounds like me," here are practical steps to shift from numbness toward emotional safety:
- Build emotional vocabulary. Naming what you do feel (even if small) strengthens awareness.
- Practice curiosity over avoidance. Notice what feelings arise in your body, along with the thoughts and impulses that bubble up as reactions.
- Seek trust-building connections. Emotional safety thrives in supportive relationships. There are parts of you that a loved one might be able to access better than you can.
- Therapeutic support can help. Therapies like ACT, CBT or trauma-informed work focus on feeling through, and not bypassing emotion.
Emotional safety is the ability to feel, recover and be present with support. Emotional numbness may feel protective, but ultimately, it's a sign of disconnection. Recognizing the difference is a real step toward deeper connection, resilience and mental well-being.
Take my fun and science-inspired Modern Stoic Personality Test to know if your emotional stability is solid or fragile.
Take the research-informed Emotional Quotient Inventory to know if your calm exterior also represents a regulated inner world.