Why Do I Feel Emotionally Numb? What Former Athletes Need to Understand About Emotions

Have you ever watched a really emotional scene in a movie or TV show and felt uncomfortable when the people around you started crying? Maybe you felt awkward watching someone express emotion so openly or wondered why they were reacting so strongly. Or maybe you’ve gone through something genuinely painful or overwhelming, and you know that crying would make sense. There’s even a part of you that wants to cry, but nothing comes. You can recognize that something is happening, but you can’t seem to access the emotion itself.

Maybe you’ve been out of sport for a decade, but you still notice these patterns. You find yourself feeling blank or disconnected when you think you should feel something, or you’re constantly feeling things but have no idea what to do with them. You might swing between feeling overwhelmed, irritated, anxious, or completely numb, and wonder why you can’t seem to figure out what’s happening inside of you. At some point, you might even start asking yourself, “Is there something wrong with me?”

As a somatic therapist who works with former college athletes across Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, and Virginia, “Why do I feel emotionally numb?” is one of the most common questions I hear. But in my experience, the answer isn't always that someone is numb. Sometimes, they’re feeling a lot and simply don't know what to do with it. These experiences raise some important questions about our relationship with emotions and what happens when we spend years learning to push through rather than feel.

Key Takeaways from a Former College Athlete and Therapist 

Emotional numbness doesn’t always mean you aren’t feeling anything. Many former athletes experience physical sensations and emotional responses without knowing how to identify or make sense of them. Family relationships and sport culture shape how we learn to experience and respond to emotions, often teaching us to suppress, avoid, or push through feelings rather than understand them. Working out and staying busy can become ways of moving away from uncomfortable emotions, even when they look like productive or healthy habits. Reconnecting with emotions starts with curiosity, learning to recognize what is happening in your body, and building the capacity to stay with feelings in small, tolerable amounts rather than immediately trying to change, avoid, or explain them.

Why Do I Feel Emotionally Numb? 

“What do you feel?” is a pretty common question in therapy. When we talk about mental health and emotional well-being, there's often an emphasis on how we feel. I find that for many of the former athletes and athletes I work with, the answer is often a mix of “I don’t know," “I don’t feel anything” or “I’m not sure what I feel”.  

Emotional numbness exists on a spectrum from more emotional blunting or just not being sure what you feel, to full blown dissociation. It can be thought of as a form of protection. More often than not, it’s a disconnection from what’s happening in the body, nervous system, and emotional experience. 

Using the Window of Tolerance, developed by Dr. Dan Siegel, we can see the experience of emotional numbness as a possible hypoarousal or “shut down” response. Sometimes there’s simply too much happening internally, or something feels too painful or overwhelming, so the system disconnects or shuts down to protect us. 

Some experiences that often coincide with emotional numbness are apathy, low mood, low energy or motivation, or feeling detached or hollow. In my own experience, it can feel like walking around the world with a pair of fuzzy glasses on. Everything is muted. You’re still moving through your day and doing what you need to do, but there’s a hollowness inside that can be difficult to explain.

Why Are Emotions So Hard for Former Athletes?

What’s interesting is that I actually find many former athletes aren’t numb. Quite the opposite. I find many are actually experiencing a lot of emotion but have no idea what to do with it. “I don’t know what I’m feeling” or “I don’t feel anything” is often way easier than trying to figure it all out, particularly if you’ve spent most of your life not feeling.

How we “do” emotions is influenced and impacted by a variety of factors. Much of this starts in the family, because that’s where we first learn what emotions are, how to express them, how to respond to them, and whether they are safe and welcomed or discouraged. We also learn how to regulate emotions through our relationships with caregivers. Before we can consistently regulate emotions on our own, we rely on co-regulation from the people around us to help us feel safe, make sense of what we’re experiencing, and move through difficult emotions. Much of the work I do with former college athletes is that attachment piece, looking at how they learned to do emotions early on and whether anyone wanted to hear about them.

As we go through life, our emotion regulation landscape is further influenced by the world, society, and the environments we spend our time in. For athletes, that’s sport. 

Sport culture can play a huge role. Sport sends both implicit and explicit messages about what it means to be resilient and mentally tough, and it usually doesn't include emotions or feelings. Emotions are often labeled as weakness, distractions, or things that get in the way of success. Sport often sets up a war between logic and emotion and emphasizes that logic and “staying rational” should always be the winner, as if any hint of an emotion makes you completely irrational. Even as sport has become more mental health-aware, the message is still very much that you can have feelings, but they can’t impact or affect you in any way. Over time, athletes learn that emotions aren’t welcome. So they suppress, stuff, avoid, and distract, and the goal becomes getting away from the emotion rather than understanding it.

It makes sense that many former athletes might struggle with emotions because emotion regulation is just like any other skill we learn in life. If you spent years being taught to suppress, stuff, avoid, or push through your emotions instead of learning how to understand and regulate them, no wonder it feels hard.

What Happens When You Spend Years Avoiding Your Emotions?

Suppressing, stuffing, avoiding, distracting, and pushing through your emotions doesn’t just make it harder to know what you feel. Tyra et al. (2024) found that long-term emotional suppression is essentially a chronic stressor on the body because emotions start as a physiological process (i.e., in the body).  

When we continually suppress or disconnect from what we’re experiencing, the body is still responding, even if we aren’t consciously aware of it. Think about what happens when stress keeps piling up without enough opportunity for recovery. Each experience adds to the load, and over time, that ongoing stress can take a toll on the body. 

Chronic emotional suppression often works in a similar way. Over time, this can have a profound impact on the mind and body, including chronic anxiety, never-ending stress, relational difficulties, a loud inner critic, and even emotional volatility. Emotional suppression has also been linked to increased risk of all-cause and cardiovascular mortality (Chapman et al., 2013). 

The emotional avoidance that once helped you navigate or make it through high-performance culture can eventually start making life harder.

Is Working Out a Way of Avoiding My Emotions?

Working out, breaking a sweat, or training so hard you can barely walk out of your fitness class is a very common way former athletes avoid emotions. Movement, physical exertion, and using the body in the name of performance have been a huge part of a former athlete's life. 

Many former college athletes will tell you that when something feels stressful or overwhelming, or they don’t know what’s happening inside of them, they go work out. It makes sense that when our internal experience feels painful, vulnerable, or unbearable and we don’t know what to do with it, we lean towards movement as a way to cope. I know this pattern from the inside, because I spent most of my twenties keeping my schedule packed and my body moving rather than slowing down enough to feel anything, and I still catch myself doing it. 

I want to be clear that movement is a fantastic and healthy way to create space for, process, and navigate emotions. Going for a walk, run, or workout is also an excellent way to metabolize the stress response. But too often I find former athletes are using it as a way to disconnect and distract their attention away from their internal experience, rather than be with it. 

So part of the work is getting curious about the distinction. Intentionality is key. Is this intentional movement that helps you stay with what is there, or is this movement being used to get away from it before it has a chance to become anything? The same question applies to work and staying busy in general, since for many former athletes the grind feels safer than stillness. Curiosity is the tool here rather than judgment, because most of these patterns started as protection and respond much better to being understood than to being scolded. I wrote more about that pattern in my post on What Burnout Feels Like For Former Athletes.

How do former athletes reconnect with their feelings?

So how do you actually learn to feel your emotions again after spending years avoiding them? This is complex and multifaceted. There won’t be any one thing that supports us but I want to explain three main things that come to mind for me: curiosity, learning how to notice and name what is happening, and pacing.

First, we have to get curious about our relationship with emotions. A huge part of this work is unpacking what we’ve learned about emotions and where those beliefs came from. If you spent years being told, directly or indirectly, that emotions are wrong or bad, you probably judge yourself when any hint of emotion shows up. What we know is that this added judgment makes it even harder to process and navigate emotions. 

So rather than judging yourself for having emotions, the work is getting curious about them. What might this emotion be telling me? What is happening here? What happens when I stay with this for a moment? Emotions are information. They’re signals about what matters, what might be unresolved, and what our body is experiencing. The goal isn't to make every emotion right or to act on everything we feel. It's about learning how to be with emotions instead of immediately needing to get rid of them.

The second piece is learning how to notice and name what’s happening. 

Lieberman and colleagues (2007) found that putting feelings into words reduced activity in the amygdala, which helps explain why naming an emotion often helps it become more manageable. Emotions start as a physiological process within the body, so sometimes we need to start with the body before we can put words to the experience. This can be as simple as noticing,  “I feel a heaviness in my chest,” or “Oh, my cheeks feel really hot right now,” or connecting with the pit in your stomach. Many former athletes are surprised by how disconnected they are from these internal signals because they spent so many years overriding the body in the name of performance. Part of the work is reconnecting the body and the emotional experience and slowly building the vocabulary to say, “Oh, this is sadness,” or “This is irritation,” or “This is anxiety.” Ultimately we need to understand that thinking about a feeling and sensing a feeling are different things.

The third piece is pacing. If you spend years shutting emotions down, suddenly trying to “feel all your feelings” can overwhelm your system. This is why I don't think “just feel your feelings” is particularly helpful or nuanced enough for former athletes. We have to build the capacity to feel in small, tolerable amounts. This might mean learning how to stay with an emotion for a few seconds or minutes, using movement, breath, mindfulness, journaling, body mapping, or other forms of expression to help you stay connected to the experience. It can also mean doing this with another person like a therapist,  or even a pet who feels safe, because co-regulation is often part of learning how to regulate ourselves. 

The goal is to become more connected to what is already happening inside of you and build enough capacity to stay with it instead of immediately suppressing, avoiding, distracting, or intellectualizing it. 

If you’re walking away from this blog thinking, “Yep, this is me,” I want you to know that there is nothing wrong with you for struggling to connect with your emotions.  I wrote more about how the body holds what the mind cannot name in my post on Somatic Therapy for Former Athletes. These patterns make sense, especially if you’ve spent years being taught to suppress, push through, or move away from what you feel. Therapy can be a great place to start unpacking some of this. 

In my work with former athletes, at Perrin Wellness and Performance,  I take a very curiosity- and unshaming-based approach to this process. We get curious about what’s happening, where these patterns came from, and slowly build the capacity to be with what you’re experiencing rather than immediately needing to avoid it. 

If any of this sounds like you, you can book a free 15-minute consultation, which is a conversation to figure out whether this feels like a fit rather than a sales call. If it helps to know who you would be talking to first, you can read more about my background.

I offer telehealth therapy for former athletes in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why do I feel emotionally numb?

Feeling emotionally numb doesn’t always mean you aren’t experiencing emotions. Many former athletes feel a lot but struggle to identify, understand, or make sense of what they’re feeling. You might notice physical sensations like a tight chest, hot cheeks, or a pit in your stomach without being able to connect them to an emotion. Family relationships, sport culture, and years of suppressing or avoiding emotions can all shape how connected you feel to your internal experience.

What are the signs of emotional numbness in athletes?

Emotional numbness can look like feeling blank or disconnected, struggling to identify emotions, or knowing something is affecting you without being able to access or express what you feel. You might find yourself analyzing an experience instead of feeling it, staying busy when something uncomfortable comes up, or turning to exercise to distract yourself. Some former athletes experience emotional overwhelm at times and numbness at others.

How can sport culture contribute to emotional numbness?

Sport culture often teaches athletes to prioritize logic, performance, and pushing through discomfort while treating emotions as weakness or distraction. Over time, suppressing, avoiding, or intellectualizing emotions can become automatic responses. These patterns may continue long after sport ends, making it difficult to recognize what you feel or know what to do with those feelings. Reconnecting with emotions starts with getting curious about these patterns rather than judging yourself for having them.

Is it possible to reconnect with emotions after years of suppressing them?

Yes. Reconnecting with emotions is possible, even after years of suppressing, avoiding, or pushing through them. The process involves learning to notice physical sensations, identify emotions, and build the capacity to stay with uncomfortable feelings in small, tolerable amounts. Movement, mindfulness, journaling, and support from a therapist or trusted person can help. The goal isn’t to feel everything all at once or act on every emotion, but to become more connected to what is happening inside you without immediately needing to avoid, change, or explain it.

About the Author

Emily Perrin, LCSW, is a licensed clinical social worker, former Division I soccer player, and former Division I coach. She works with current and former athletes who are dealing with anxiety, burnout, perfectionism, and the emotional weight that can come with years in competitive sports.

Having spent nearly 15 years in athletics, Emily understands the pressure athletes often feel to keep going, stay disciplined, and look like they have it handled, even when they are struggling. Her work combines clinical training with lived experience in sport.

Emily's approach is trauma-informed and body-centered. She helps clients make sense of patterns like emotional shutdown, overthinking, people-pleasing, chronic stress, and harsh self-criticism. Her goal is to help athletes feel more grounded in who they are outside of performance, achievement, and sport.

This post is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for individualized mental health care. If you are experiencing a mental health crisis, please contact your local emergency services or call or text 988 in the United States.

References: 

Chapman, B. P., Fiscella, K., Kawachi, I., Duberstein, P., & Muennig, P. (2013). Emotion suppression and mortality risk over a 12-year follow-up. Journal of Psychosomatic Research, 75(4), 381–385. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpsychores.2013.07.014

Lieberman, M. D., Eisenberger, N. I., Crockett, M. J., Tom, S. M., Pfeifer, J. H., & Way, B. M. (2007). Putting feelings into words: Affect labeling disrupts amygdala activity in response to affective stimuli. Psychological Science, 18(5), 421–428. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01916.x

Siegel, D (1999). The developing mind: Toward a neurobiology of interpersonal experience. Guilford Press.

Tyra, A. T., Fergus, T. A., & Ginty, A. T. (2024). Emotion suppression and acute physiological responses to stress in healthy populations: A quantitative review of experimental and correlational investigations. Health Psychology Review, 18(2), 396–420. https://doi.org/10.1080/17437199.2023.2251559