Why Do I Feel Restless and Numb at the Same Time in Midlife?

It is a strange combination, and a common one. On one hand a restlessness, a low agitation, a sense that you should be doing something different, going somewhere, changing something before it is too late. On the other hand a numbness, a flatness where feeling should be, a difficulty caring about the things you are supposedly meant to care about. The two seem to contradict each other, and living inside both at once is exhausting. They are not a contradiction. They are two ends of a single structure.

The numbness usually came first. Over years of setting yourself aside, meeting demands, keeping the peace, you learned to turn down your own responses, because feeling them fully would have made the accommodations unbearable. You cannot spend a decade suppressing what you want without also suppressing the capacity to feel, because they run on the same wiring. So the numbness is not emptiness. It is a lid, held down over a good deal of unfelt life, keeping it manageable.

The restlessness is what leaks out around the edges of the lid. It is the suppressed vitality, the unlived wanting, pushing against the suppression. It cannot come through as clear desire, because you long ago lost fluent access to what you want, so it comes through as agitation, a formless sense that something must change without any clarity about what. That is why the restlessness rarely tells you what to do. It knows only that the current arrangement is not it, because the current arrangement is what the lid was built to protect.

The cost of managing this instead of understanding it is a long stalemate, medicating the restlessness with distraction and the numbness with more suppression, never letting either speak. What the pairing is actually asking for is to lift the lid, carefully, in a setting that can hold it, and to let the suppressed life underneath be felt and heard. The numbness eases when the feeling is allowed. The restlessness clarifies into real desire when the wanting is allowed. They resolve together, because they were always the same thing, held down and leaking out.

If you want to begin understanding what the lid is holding, the free book Before Approaching the Threshold was written to help you look underneath it honestly.