A friend rang me a while back to tell me his father had died. I said the right things. I offered to get on a plane. Then I hung up, made a coffee, and went back to my inbox.

Nothing. No lump in the throat, no delayed ambush in the shower an hour later. Just a flat, well-lit blank, like a room with the furniture taken out.

My first theory was that I had quietly turned into a cold person and somehow missed the memo.

Wrong theory. It usually is.

Going flat is a setting, not a personality

There’s a clinical name for this, and it’s an ugly one: emotional blunting. It means the volume knob on your entire emotional range gets turned down, the good stuff along with the bad. Researchers at Cambridge estimate that between 40 and 60 per cent of people taking SSRI antidepressants experience some version of it.

Here’s the part that surprised me. When researchers surveyed more than 750 people with depression about where their blunting came from, 56 per cent put it down to the depression itself rather than their medication. So it isn’t only a side effect of the cure. It travels with the condition.

Which points somewhere uncomfortable. If the flatness comes bundled with the thing itself, then it’s downstream of something, and that something is usually a long stretch of feeling far too much.

The people who go numb are usually the ones who felt the most

Bruce McEwen, a neuroscientist at Rockefeller University, spent much of his career on an idea called allostatic load. Plain English version: your stress system is built for sprints, and it handles them beautifully. Run it flat out for months and you get wear and tear instead of adaptation.

A body under that kind of load has no graceful way to say “I need a minute”. What it has is a dimmer switch.

You can see the same shape in how the World Health Organisation describes burnout. One of its three official markers is increased mental distance from your job, or rising cynicism about it. That’s distance, not sadness. Nobody burns out from indifference.

Why “just let yourself feel it” is useless advice

Every well-meaning person I raised this with offered a version of the same line. Sit with it. Open up. Let it come.

Try that while you’re properly flat, and it’s like revving an engine with an empty tank. That instruction assumes the fuel is sitting there, and you’re stubbornly refusing to use it. Most of the time it isn’t there, which is the actual problem.

What helped me was going the other way and reducing the load rather than demanding more output from a system that had none left.

So I cancelled things. I stopped agreeing to plans I was already dreading. Living in Bangkok, that mostly meant accepting that the relentless social calendar of an expat city is entirely optional. The rule I landed on was crude but workable. If an obligation existed only because I had said yes to it once, months ago, out it went.

Somewhere in the third week of doing very little, small things started landing again. A dog riding pillion on a motorbike. Rain hitting hot concrete.

Name it badly, then name it better

There’s a trick here with real evidence behind it. A team at UCLA led by Matthew Lieberman found that putting a feeling into words reduced activity in the amygdala, the brain’s threat alarm, while increasing activity in a region tied to deliberate control. They called it affect labelling. Everyone else calls it saying what’s going on.

The catch is that “fine” and “tired” and “just going through it” don’t count. Those are words you deploy so nobody asks a follow-up question.

Start clumsy instead. “I feel like I’m watching my own life on a two-second delay.” That’s a real label. Ugly, specific, honest. It gives your brain something to grip. Say it out loud in the car if writing it down feels like homework.

Move first and let the feeling catch up

When you’re numb, the instinct is to wait for motivation to return before doing anything. That order almost never works.

Behavioural activation, a long-established therapy for depression, reverses it. You schedule the meaningful activity first and let mood arrive late. A study published this year in PLOS Computational Biology followed people through NHS treatment and found the approach measurably improved anhedonia, the clinical term for losing your appetite for things you used to enjoy.

Small and specific beats ambitious every time. Walk the same route at the same hour. Ring one person a week. Cook something that takes an hour and can’t be rushed. Then do it again the following week whether or not it did a thing for you.

Feeling doesn’t announce itself when it comes back. It arrives sideways, in the middle of something completely ordinary, and you notice you were already laughing before you decided to.

One caveat worth taking seriously. A few flat weeks after a hard stretch is a system doing its job. Months of it with no movement is worth raising with a doctor or a therapist. That’s just sensible triage, not a failure of nerve.

Whatever else it is, the flatness is rarely proof that you’re cold. More often it’s the bill for a long run of caring very hard, and bills do eventually get paid off.