Feeling Numb? How Depression Affects Your Emotions and What to Do About It

Emotional numbness can leave you feeling flat and empty. Here’s what’s behind this troublesome symptom and how to get help.

If you feel dulled, empty, or detached from your feelings and the people around you, you could be dealing with emotional numbness.

Emotional numbness is a very common symptom of mental health conditions, including depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). It can also be a side effect of certain antidepressant medications.

Let’s talk about the signs, why you may be feeling it, and what you can do to get help.

Join the free Depression community!

Connect with thousands of members and find support through daily live chats, curated resources, and one-to-one messaging.

Sign up

What is emotional numbness?

Emotional numbness (also called emotional blunting) is the reduced ability — or even inability — to feel your emotions. It can manifest as emotional detachment and a lower emotional response.

A broad range of emotions are numbed when this happens. Feelings of fear, anger, and sadness may be reduced alongside feelings of happiness, pleasure, and affection.

In other words, when you feel emotionally numb, everything is dulled — both the bad and the good.

What are signs of emotional numbness?

You can experience emotional numbness in many different ways, but there are certain core signs.

Common signs of emotional numbness include:

• indifference
• lower emotional sensitivity
• lower emotional responsiveness to all emotions, whether positive or negative
• detachment
• decreased intensity of emotions
• experiencing emotions less frequently

If you’re dealing with emotional numbness, you may also experience:

• loss of motivation
• loss of interest in activities that used to be fun or pleasurable
• changes in personality
• difficulty with self-reflection
• difficulty interacting with others or processing social interactions
• difficulty feeling empathy or sympathy for others
• strain in relationships with loved ones

Emotional numbness can also make it hard, or even impossible, for you to effectively communicate verbally and nonverbally by:

• decreasing vocal inflection, making your voice sound flat and detached
• lowering your use of facial expressions or expressive body language

Some people with emotional numbness may experience emotions more as thoughts, making them more cognitive and less feeling-based. In more extreme cases, emotional numbness can result in not experiencing emotions entirely.

The ways this numbness can manifest varies from person to person.

You may feel entirely numb to the emotions or circumstances of people around you. Or, you may feel a slight something, a dulled version of what you felt before the numbness, but that emotion may not register in your facial expressions, body language, or reactions.

Why do I feel numb?

You can develop emotional numbness for many different reasons.

In some instances, emotional numbness may be a symptom of an underlying mental health condition. Other times, emotional numbness may be a side effect of medication, occurring for the first time or becoming more severe as a result of treatment.

Is emotional numbness a symptom of depression?

It’s well established that emotional blunting can be a symptom of depression — and a common one, at that.

According to this 2021 review of research, people with major depressive disorder (MDD) frequently report experiencing emotional blunting. Those who have more severe depressive symptoms may also have higher rates of feeling numb.

Emotional numbness is also a trauma response, and people with PTSD often have it. Like with depression (which is commonly diagnosed alongside PTSD), emotional numbness in PTSD frequently impacts both positive and negative emotions.

Periods of high stress, high anxiety, emotional exhaustion, and burnout may also lead to emotional numbness. 

Is emotional numbness a side effect of depression treatment?

Emotional numbness isn’t just a symptom of depression and other mental health conditions, it’s also a common side effect of antidepressant medication.

Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), a type of antidepressant, are thought as most likely to cause this side effect. But some research suggests that any antidepressants that affect serotonin levels may numb emotions to some extent, including SNRIs and TCAs .

Studies estimate that between 40% and 60% of people with depression experience some degree of emotional numbness while taking antidepressants. 

Scientists are still working on understanding why this happens. One common theory is that certain antidepressants lower reactions to both negative and positive stimuli. As these medications help ease emotional pain from depression, they may also dull feelings and emotions overall.

What can I do about emotional numbness?

Emotional numbness can be confusing, distressing, and frustrating, but it’s not permanent.

If you’re feeling numb, empty, and detached, help is available to you. Here are just some treatments for managing emotional numbness and reconnecting with your emotions.

Seek help from mental health professionals

Treating your overall depression can help you manage and ease any symptoms that come with it, including numbness. To that end, therapy is both a crucial tool in your depression care kit and a source of support for emotional numbness.

Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), commonly used for depression and PTSD, can help you manage emotional numbness by identifying and changing thought patterns and behaviors that may be contributing to emotion suppression.

Acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) may also help manage emotional numbness by building strategies for confronting and adapting to emotions rather than repressing them.

Therapies that employ mindfulness interventions may offer other useful treatment options for overcoming emotional detachment.

For example, mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) and mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) may help:

• address and rewire emotional responses and behaviors
• foster acceptance of thoughts and feelings
• strengthen the connection between mind and body
• reduce avoidance
• lower stress
• ease anxiety

Talk with a doctor about medication

Medication doesn’t treat emotional numbness in and of itself, but it may help treat underlying causes of numbness.

If emotional numbness stems from depression, your doctor may prescribe antidepressants to help you manage both the condition and your symptoms, including emptiness and emotional blunting.

On the flip side, antidepressants can sometimes cause or worsen emotional numbness.

If you suspect this may be the case for you, share your concerns with your care team. Reducing your dosage or switching to a different class of antidepressants may offer relief from emotional numbness, allowing you to reconnect with your feelings.

Be sure to consult a healthcare professional for any medication changes, as adjusting dosage or stopping your antidepressant without medical supervision isn’t safe.

Embrace your support network

When you feel numb, it can be hard to keep yourself from drifting away from relationships, ghosting friends and family, and becoming isolated.

Maintaining connections with loved ones, however, can offer you important support and care in your day-to-day life.

If you feel comfortable doing so, talk to the people you love and trust about what you’re experiencing. Reach out for company to help you continue doing activities that usually bring you joy.

Online or in-person support groups are also great spaces for sharing and leaning on community.

Open communication can help you maintain bonds and closeness, even if, at the moment, you don’t feel the joy that comes with your relationships. It can also help your loved ones understand any outward changes they may notice in you.

The takeaway

Emotional numbness is both a symptom of depression and a potential side effect of antidepressant treatment.

When you experience emotional numbness, you may feel flat, detached, and empty. You may feel indifferent to situations you used to react to, and you may have a hard time connecting with people around you.

However, this numbness isn’t permanent. With the help of your depression care team, you can develop strategies to manage emotional numbness and reconnect with your feelings.