What Wants To Warm Up? Coming Out Of Functional Freeze In Eating Disorder Recovery
Change is in the air.
After living nomadically for a few years, I finally found myself on solid ground, only to watch everything I had built dissolve. What followed was a deep season of groundlessness, one that invited me to slow down, step away from being busy, and pause long enough to feel what was beneath it all.
This pause was more than rest. It revealed something I hadn’t seen so clearly before:
I had been living from a nervous system state of functional freeze.
What Is Functional Freeze?
Functional freeze is a state of nervous system dysregulation where mobilizing energy (fight/flight) gets trapped under a blanket of shutdown and numbness. You’re not collapsed or visibly in distress. In fact, on the outside, you're probably highly functional — doing, achieving, showing up.
But internally, it’s like you have the gas and the brake are on at the same time.
With such powerful opposing forces firing simultaneously, over time, the body begins to break down.
This state can insidiously disrupt everything from digestion, sleep, and mood, to immunity and hormonal balance. It’s common in people with addiction and eating disorders, and sadly, it’s also normalized by our hustle culture and diet culture alike.
Functional freeze is often linked to a nervous system that ties the need to prove one’s inner worth and value to external achievements and validation. It’s like you’re running around with an empty cup, giving to others, but unable to nourish and fill up your own cup.
Eating Disorders as Functional Freeze
In my own life, and in the lives of many clients, I’ve come to see eating disorders not just as cognitive distortions, but as somatic strategies — ways the body communicates unmetabolized experiences when words and support are unavailable.
Disordered eating became my body’s way of saying: “Something inside is too much to feel.”
This is why so many people with EDs describe feeling like a “walking head,” numb or robotic. Beneath the freeze is often a highly sensitive, intuitive nervous system that has learned to shut down in order to survive to be in relationship.
What people learn to shut down, numb, repress, block, or invalidate are any feelings that carry a charge that is too big, too much, or unacceptable — as deemed by the people around them. An icy freeze covers everything in order to maintain enough connection, cementing the functional freeze state.
It works for a while until life becomes colourless, dull, tasteless and unfulfilling, starved.
Bottom-Up Healing: Where Change Begins
For years when I was struggling with an eating disorder, I tried top-down approaches to recovery. I focused on stopping behaviours and changing thoughts. But the real shift came when I found polyvagal-informed somatic work and plant medicine.
The changes that have emerged from this healing work has been incremental, over many many years. Breaking the cycle of functional freeze is ancestral and collective, alongside it being an individual journey. The layers are deep, and it takes time to excavate, from the ground up, and to consciously choose to not live or normalize the habitual patterning of functional freeze.
A bottom-up approach is powerful because story follows state.
When we shift the nervous system into regulation (bottom up), the story of the eating disorder (top down) doesn’t need to be fixed or forced away — it begins to transform and dissolve on its own.
In a regulated state:
Clearer perspective, thought, and rationality returns
Eating feels more balanced
Body image improves
Creativity emerges
Curiosity blossoms
Relationships feel safer
Life feels more possible, naturally, without trying or forcing
This is what bottom-up healing looks like. Rather than pushing ourselves into change, we titrate transformation, adding in sustainable, nourishing tools, practices, and rhythms that help us feel present, safe, and grounded in our bodies again. Rewiring and transforming can only happen when we are present and embodied.
Psychedelics, Flow, and Feeling What Was Frozen
Plant medicines and psychedelics have been an essential part of my journey because they do something very simple yet profound:
They help us feel what we were once unwilling or unable to feel.
In the presence of skilled, somatic-based preparation and integration, psychedelics can support the thawing of freeze, reconnecting us with our bodies, our emotions, and our soul’s deepest longings. This isn’t about forcing catharsis, it’s about returning to an aligned and natural state of warmth, flow, and coherence.
Being able to envision and create a life without an eating disorder-like behaviours becomes accessible as psychedelics widen our vision, soften the limiting beliefs, usher in hope and inspiration, and bring our bodies into a more compassionate and regulated state.
Their visionary capacities helps us widen our space of possibility through helping us dream beyond what we think and embody are possible.
So, How Do We Come Out of Freeze?
Start by asking yourself:
What am I unwilling to feel? (Thank you Tara Brach for this inquiry).
To dethaw the functional freeze, we are required to shift from a state of bracing to one of embracing.
Coming out of functional freeze is not about “doing more.” It’s about accepting and embracing the parts of us we’ve pushed away, especially the tender, fiery, grieving, and longing ones.
Here are some gentle ways to begin:
Track sensation: Notice what warms you emotionally, physically, spiritually
Follow pleasure: What brings aliveness? Laughter? Inspiration?
Welcome parts: Practice self-acceptance towards the frozen or numb states
Orient to goodness: Let your senses take in beauty, safety, and softness around you
As the freeze begins to thaw and you feel more regulated, digestion improves, intuition returns, relationships feel more connected, and life starts to feel more vibrant, more honest, more you.
This is because when we start coming out of functional freeze, our senses are more accurately perceiving the external environment, we are more attuned to the body and its cues (the internal environment), and we are able to listen to our internal systems that are giving us really important cues for our safety, well-being, and internal sense of balance. This is our intuition coming online.
Functional freeze isn’t a flaw; it’s a brilliant survival strategy that outlived its usefulness. And coming out of it isn’t a race. Dethawing takes time. Let yourself move at the pace of your nervous system.
“The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I change.” — Carl Rogers
As we embrace ourselves with warmth and honesty, we return to our natural state: regulated, resourced, and resilient.
May you trust your timing. May you listen to the subtle longings within. And may you feel held, always, by your body, by the Earth, by love.