The Long Thaw: What Happens When You Stop Numbing Out With Screens
I hear it more and more these days: I’m numb. I can’t feel anything anymore. I don’t feel present. I don’t feel joy. I hear this in session all the time, and my next question is almost always, “How many hours of screen time are you getting each day?” The answer is always far more than I anticipated—and somehow, still not enough to cause my clients to bat an eye.
A couple of weeks ago, it snuck up on me. I was standing on a beach in Puerto Rico, which is about as beautiful a place as you can find. The sand was soft and warm, the waves a quilt of green and blue, each one cresting with a white edge like embroidery. I could tell that the scene was lovely. I knew it was lovely. But I didn’t feel as moved as I wanted to feel. There was a disconnect, a sort of static between my mind and my body.
I turned to my friend and said, “I think I’m used to seeing scenes like this set to music, enhanced by a filter. Real life is a lot less poignant than videos on Instagram.” The truth is that Instagram and TikTok evoke feelings within us—they plant them in us. The music swells, the color deepens, and suddenly we feel something that isn’t organically ours. But in the real world, we have to do some hard work to feel. We have to participate. We have to interpret. We have to have a way of making meaning out of what we behold. And without a meaning-making system (which so many of us lack), we risk standing on a beach and feeling... nothing.
When Screens Rewrite the Reward System
What I felt that day wasn’t depression exactly—it was anhedonia. The clinical term for the inability to feel pleasure, even in the presence of something beautiful. It’s what happens when your brain’s reward system gets hijacked by constant stimulation. The dopamine that used to rise slowly in response to genuine joy starts spiking in quick, artificial bursts: a like, a scroll, a new video, a fresh notification.
Eventually, real life feels too quiet to register. Sunsets, laughter, the sound of waves—they don’t produce enough chemical reward to feel satisfying anymore. The system is overloaded, but starving. You can’t feel the beauty, even when you know it’s there.
The Withdrawal: Mistaking Calm for Emptiness
When you begin to step away—to delete an app, to silence notifications, to resist the endless reach for your phone—what follows isn’t peace. It’s withdrawal.
You’ll likely feel gray, detached, restless. You’ll sit in stillness and wonder if something’s wrong with you. You’ll start to doubt your own aliveness.
But this is what recalibration feels like. You’ve been living at a higher-than-human dopamine frequency for years, and your body doesn’t know what to do with normalcy. Calm feels like emptiness. Quiet feels like danger.
The first few weeks can be brutal. You’ll want to reach back for the stimulation that makes you feel something—anything. But what you’re actually feeling is your nervous system trying to relearn what “enough” feels like.
The Pain of Reawakening
The thaw hurts. Ask anyone who’s warmed frostbitten hands—it’s not gentle. It burns.
Emotional thawing is no different. After years of anhedonia, feeling starts as ache. At first, all you can sense is absence: loneliness, fatigue, self-disgust. But those sensations are proof that you’re coming back.
And if you stay—if you refuse to escape again—you begin to notice the smallest resurrections. The weight of your hair on your neck. The warmth of the mug in your palms. The way your child’s laughter hits something deep in your chest instead of skimming over the surface.
You start to recognize your own texture again.
The Long Game: Reclaiming Pleasure and Presence
Recovery from anhedonia is slow. It’s not about chasing new highs—it’s about restoring the sensitivity to ordinary ones.
Neuroscientists say it can take months for dopamine receptors to normalize after overstimulation. In real life, that means months before the small things start to feel good again. The process is tedious. You sit in the quiet, doing “boring” things that used to nourish you: walking, cooking, listening to wind. You do them without the instant gratification, without the fireworks.
But slowly—so slowly—you begin to feel flickers again. A moment of awe. A burst of laughter that surprises you. A tear that comes uninvited.
That’s your nervous system thawing. That’s your aliveness returning.
The Return to the Real
And when it finally arrives, it won’t be cinematic. It won’t be a rush of joy or clarity. It will come in fragments: a sunset that stirs you for no reason, the quiet relief of being unobserved, the texture of gratitude that lives beneath the noise.
You’ll find yourself less hungry for performance and more willing to dwell in the unfiltered, uncurated, ordinary miracle of being alive.
Because the truth is, when you go numb, it takes a long time to thaw. And that’s the sobering part—you can’t rush your way back to feeling. But the sooner you start therapy, slow down, and step away from the noise, the sooner you’ll remember what it’s like to truly be here.
