It’s not laziness; it’s a functional freeze response
For years I thought I was lazy and unable to handle life. It turns out there was a valid reason why everyday tasks felt so overwhelming.
Today is the first day of my ‘100 Days Back To Me’ challenge. It’s enough time to make a dent in my 150lbs weight loss goal but not so long that it feels impossible. I just need to commit, be consistent, keep my focus and do what I need to do each day.
As expected, I’ve spent a lot of today thinking about what I’ll look and feel like in one hundred days’ time. What I didn’t expect was to spend so much of today thinking about how I can’t put my washing away.
The washing is in a pile on the bed. It would take less than ten minutes to put it away. Yet I’ve sat here staring at it for hours, unable to fathom how to tackle it. It’s as if my brain is damaged and I cannot function, no matter how hard I try.
If you’ve never experienced the freeze response, it’s very easy to assume this is just laziness, disorganisation or procrastination. I used to think exactly the same thing – I genuinely believed I was one of those adults who’ll never quite get the hang of life. Everyone else is capable and grown up, yet I feel like a toddler who’s flummoxed by even the simplest of tasks.
Today I’ve been particularly frozen, so I’ve done a bit of research into why I’m sometimes so incapable of getting stuff done. I now understand that trauma changes the way your brain works – not in the sense that you’ve got literal brain damage but in the sense that your brain has adapted to survive.
When you’ve spent years living in situations where you never quite felt safe (whether emotionally or physically) you’ve existed in what’s called the fight-or-flight response. Your nervous system doesn’t suddenly decide everything’s fine just because the danger has gone away.; it carries on behaving as though it needs to conserve energy, watch for threats and prepare for the next crisis.
That might have been useful once. It’s considerably less useful when the biggest challenge you’re facing is putting your knickers away.
People often talk about the fight-or-flight response but the freeze response doesn’t get nearly as much attention, probably because it looks so ordinary from the outside. Someone who’s frozen doesn’t necessarily look distressed, traumatised or anxious. They just look like they’re just wasting time. They’re sitting on the sofa staring into space, wandering aimlessly around the house, or reorganising the spice cupboard instead of tackling the one job they actually need – and want – to do. It looks like they’re choosing to do nothing, so therefore they must be lazy.
Inside, though, it doesn’t feel like choosing to do nothing – it feels beyond frustrating not to have the choice at all! It feels like there’s a complete disconnect between wanting to do something and being able to get it done.
You’re fully aware that the washing needs putting away. You’re aware that it won’t take long. You know that if you were to just spend a few minutes getting on with it, it would be done and you’d feel so much better afterwards. None of that seems to matter, though, because your brain simply refuses to engage.
It’s difficult to explain without sounding ridiculous. How do you tell someone you spent six hours thinking about putting a pile of washing away, or the entire morning clearing your kitchen counter bit by bit? How do you explain that your biggest achievement for the day was clipping one of your dog’s toenails or thinking about washing up? On paper it sounds absurd but when you’re living it it’s exhausting and demoralising.
The more I learn about trauma, the more I recognise myself in what researchers have found. Chronic stress can affect the parts of the brain involved in planning, attention and decision-making. It can leave your nervous system primed for survival rather than everyday living. It’s nothing to do with not trying hard enough and everything to do with your brain trying to protect you. It turns out that it’s not a setting you can switch off just because you’d quite like to get on with something today.
As I start the journey (yet again) to lose weight, I’m hoping that understanding this might make all the this time. If I can show up consistently for the next 100 days, even if some days are messy and imperfect, I’ll have overcome one of the most difficult parts of my overall recovery: the freeze response.
I grew up believing – and am still treated by family as if – my worth is directly tied to how I look. Losing weight feels like a test of whether or not I’m good enough. That’s a huge amount of pressure to put on myself and it’s enough to trigger this freeze response, because my brain isn’t seeing a diet, or a journey to health and wellness … it’s seeing the possibility of failure, judgement and shame all over again.
So today has been Day 1. It hasn’t been spectacular. I haven’t done anything much other than put a pile of washing away and tidy my kitchen counter. And tell myself off for being so utterly useless and lazy.
But it turns out I wasn’t being lazy at all; I was going through an ongoing response to trauma that I now understand enough to be motivated to come back fighting on Day 2.
