After a busy day of excelling at work and tending to your daily tasks, it’s not uncommon to feel pretty drained by the time you get home. But if you experience that feeling frequently or find yourself stuck in bed and unable to do things for yourself, you could be in a state of “functional freeze.”
A functional freeze is a mind-body response to being stressed or overwhelmed. It can look like struggling to decide what task to complete next, and spending hours in one spot looking at your phone instead, says Liz Tenuto, known on social media as “The Workout Witch.”
“Functional freeze is this interesting place that I feel like a lot of women exist and live in quite regularly, and that’s where you can still get all of your tasks done during the day,” Tenuto tells CNBC Make It.
“Then when they get home and when they finish everything, they just completely crash out and have a hard time getting out of bed.”
Tenuto has a degree in psychology and has studied the impact that stress and trauma can have on the body. Functional freeze is a common form of freezing that she sees in her clients, and better understanding that state and how to get out of it is a hot topic on TikTok thanks in part to her viral videos.
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