What Are You Actually Avoiding When You Numb It Instead of Naming It?

Picture yourself walking through the door after a twelve hour shift, keys still in your hand, and reaching for your phone before you have even taken off your shoes. You know you are exhausted, and you know the actual need underneath that exhaustion is rest, but scrolling works faster than resting would. You open the app, and within a few minutes you feel the tension in your shoulders loosen, so you tell yourself the day is finally handled. But the tension in your shoulders was never actually resolved by the scrolling, since the scrolling only quieted what you were feeling instead of answering what your body was asking for, and that difference between quieting a feeling and answering a feeling is the exact difference most people never learn to see, because both actions can feel identical while you are living through them.

Why Does Numbing a Feeling Feel Like Relief?

Your body cannot tell the difference between numbing a feeling and resolving a feeling, so your body treats both actions as relief the moment either one happens. Scrolling interrupts the tension in your shoulders directly, since your attention can only fully hold one thing at a time, and the interruption happens fast enough that you experience the interruption as the problem being solved. But interrupting a feeling and resolving the need that produced the feeling are two different events inside your body, even though your body responds to both events with the same sense of ease. You can numb that same tension every night for years and still feel exhausted every time you walk through the door, because the scrolling never touches the actual need producing your exhaustion.

What Is the Real Difference Between Numbing a Feeling and Resolving a Feeling?

Numbing a feeling means you interrupt the sensation of a feeling without ever engaging the need that feeling was pointing to, the way scrolling interrupted your tension without ever asking why your body produced that tension in the first place. Resolving a feeling means you identify the specific need a feeling was pointing to and then take the action that need actually requires, the way eating a real meal or sleeping for a full night would have addressed the exhaustion driving that same tension. Both numbing and resolving can start from the identical sensation, tightness in your chest, heaviness in your limbs, a craving for anything that dulls the moment, but only numbing keeps producing that same sensation again and again, since the need underneath it never actually gets met.

The friction is that numbing and resolving feel identical in the exact moment you are choosing between them, so you cannot tell which one you are doing by the sensation alone. You only find out which one you chose later, when the same feeling returns the next night asking for the same relief, and you realize the scrolling answered the feeling every time without ever answering the need.

What Do You Actually Do Instead of Numbing a Feeling?

The switch is catching the urge for relief and asking what specific need is producing the feeling before you choose how to respond to it.

• In Thought, the old response might be telling yourself the feeling will pass if you just get through the next few minutes. The substitution is asking yourself what specific need is sitting underneath the feeling before you reach for anything.
• In Feeling, the old response might be treating the relief of numbing as proof the problem is handled. The substitution is noticing that same relief and staying curious about what the relief is actually covering, instead of trusting the relief as resolution.
• In Action, the old response might be reaching for your phone, the TV, or whatever dulls the sensation fastest. The substitution is naming the specific need out loud before you decide how to respond to it, even if you still choose to rest for five minutes first.

You never reached for your phone because you were weak. You reached for your phone because no one ever taught you that resolving a feeling is a different skill than surviving one.