Are you feeling…nothing?
The feeling of emptiness is stark in contrast to the emotions that a person is supposed to feel. It sits like a black hole in your chest, devoid of the substance that is supposed to be there.
It dulls emotions, interests, desires, hopes, dreams, and can even go beyond what we expect from negative emotions. The emptiness can eat sadness just as easily as happiness and hope, leaving you feeling barren and void.
To call emptiness a negative feeling may not feel correct, as it is a strong, palpable sense of nothingness. It certainly doesn’t feel positive, but it may not feel negative either. It’s just absent.
You may feel like nothing matters, everything is boring, or that you can’t feel any sort of strong emotions.
Despite that absence, the feeling of nothing is actually an emotion communicating something to you about yourself, your health, or the way you’re living your life.
Humans are creatures that thrive in the vibrancy of emotions and the energy they bring. The absence of that energy can be so crushing when you live with it often or have never experienced it. If you’ve never experienced emptiness before, it can be incredibly alarming to feel nothing when you’re supposed to feel everything, or at least something.
So aside from the most obvious answer – depression – what other things might be causing you to feel so devoid of…anything?
1. You’re lacking any real purpose in your life.
Many people struggle with finding a sense of purpose in this vast universe of limitless possibilities.
What do I do with my life? Does this mean anything? What should I be doing with myself?
The existential dread that comes with lacking purpose can fuel emptiness as it feels like we are missing something we are supposed to have. Some people try to fill the emptiness with their actions, like doing volunteer work or getting a job in a field that can help people.
Seeking purpose is an interesting matter because you may not be ready to find a particular purpose. And we don’t mean that in an abstract, destiny kind of sense. Instead, there might be life experiences you need to have and work you need to do before a fulfilling purpose can click with you.
Perhaps being a parent offers you the kind of fulfillment that would fill that emptiness, but you wouldn’t necessarily know that until after you have a child. Or maybe it’s something more career-focused. Maybe your heart and mind are in tune with being on the sea, something you may not know until you set foot on a boat.
You may even feel a pull toward something that could offer you fulfillment, like a persistent interest or something that really speaks to you. That could help you find a direction.
2. You’re grieving after the death of a loved one.
Grief is a natural emotional reaction to the death of a loved one. Sometimes we can see the end coming and have some time to mentally and emotionally prepare for it. Other times we may lose a loved one unexpectedly. There is always a flood of emotions to deal with when a death occurs, even if it’s not immediate.
Many people turn to grief models to better try to process and understand their grief without really understanding the models. The “Five Stages of Grief” is one such model. What people tend to get wrong about these models is that they are not hard and fast rules. It’s impossible to shove the full scope of emotions into such a narrow box, a fact that the creators of such models regularly talk about.
They may serve as a general guideline. There are stages that you may or may not experience. Some people experience multiple stages at the same time. Others bounce around through different stages as they are mourning their loved one.
Many of the models talk about “numbness” or “denial” as being involved in the grief process and this might explain the emptiness you feel. It can be a difficult experience because, rationally, you know that you should probably be feeling sadness along with lots of other emotions, but you don’t and that’s hard to reconcile.
Grief and mourning are more complicated than they appear. That makes it a good idea to seek a grief counselor. A grief specialist may be able to help you through those persistent empty feelings and mourning.
3. You’ve been abusing drugs and/or alcohol.
Many people turn to drugs and alcohol to cope with the traumas of their life. There’s nothing inherently wrong with periodically having a drink or using legal substances. The problems really start to pick up when those substances are used excessively or as a way to help moderate one’s emotions.
Filling the void of emptiness with a substance can lead to addiction, worse relationships with other people, losing jobs, and changing life circumstances.
Substance abuse can also lead to different physical or mental health issues, other than substance abuse disorder, like sparking a latent mental illness or liver disease. It may also make preexisting health issues worse.
Alcohol is known to impact people with mood disorders, like depression and bipolar disorder, far more severely than people without. It just works differently in their minds and may fuel emotional instability and make depression worse.
One of the reasons people use substances is to help them survive something they are going through. They believe it helps them because it calms them down at the moment. The problem is that extended substance use can have long-term effects that can worsen mental health issues or cause new ones to crop up in the future.
4. You’ve been coping with long-term stresses.
Humans aren’t built to cope with long-term stresses well. Stress causes different hormones to be produced to help a person get through that immediate stressful situation, but those hormones can cause more significant problems the longer they are present.
Long-term stresses can cause depression, anxiety, and in some cases, PTSD. Survivors of domestic abuse, child abuse, and poverty may develop Complex PTSD, which results from never really getting a break from the circumstances they survived.
Avoiding long-term stresses or changing living situations may help. But if mental health problems have developed, it will require a trained mental health professional to heal and recover from.
5. You’re having family, friendship, or relationship issues.
The people around us severely impact our mental and emotional state. Emptiness can be fueled by tumultuous relationships, estrangement, or just the stresses that our loved ones sometimes cause us. It gets much harder to maintain your own mental health when someone you love is suffering or making bad decisions.
Romantic relationships can bring all kinds of additional stresses that may fuel that emptiness. Perhaps the partner has problems they aren’t addressing. You may not be on good terms with their family, which is a source of stress and difficulty. It may also be that the relationship is waning and on its way toward ending. That kind of heartbreak when things don’t work out can always fuel some negativity.
These issues may need to be worked out personally or even with the help of a relationship counselor. Of course, there are also some issues that you just can’t fix, and you may need to reevaluate whether or not the relationship is healthy for you to remain in.
6. You’ve been consuming too much social media.
In recent years, the adverse effects of excessive social media use are starting to come to light. Being continually bombarded with negative news and the highlight reels of the lives of others is fueling massive insecurities, personality disorders, depression, anxiety, and a host of other issues.
It turns out that’s not a good combination when your life may be less than the perfection that many people using social media choose to portray.
That’s not even counting the scummier parts of social media. Social media companies incorporate the human dopamine reward system and Fear Of Missing Out to keep you scrolling to fuel engagement and collect likes.
Like all things, social media needs to be used in moderation if it’s going to be used. Too much is not mentally healthy and can fuel negative feelings like emptiness.
7. Or too much other media and video games.
Much like social media, excessive media use can do similar things.
How many jokes or references have you heard of people binge-watching entire seasons of shows on streaming services? That behavior is unhealthy because it lets us zone out into what we’re watching instead of dealing with the life going on around us.
That kind of behavior facilitates negative emotions like emptiness, but it causes additional complications in life because we may not be paying attention to our responsibilities.
Video games act the same way. It’s so easy to get sucked into a video game designed to be a time-sink to keep you engaged and keep you regularly playing. MMORPGs (Massive Multiplayer Online RolePlaying Games) and MOBAs (Multiplayer Online Battle Arenas) are game genres designed to be treadmills that never end.
Sure, they’re a fun way to pass some time. But using video games as an escape from real life can cause video game addiction in a similar way to gambling addiction. You get hooked on tangible reward loops and just keep coming back for more.
There’s nothing wrong with these things in moderation, but one does need to exercise moderation to avoid making their mental health worse.
8. You’re going through a significant life change or transition.
Life changes and transitions bring with them stresses that can be difficult to deal with. Sometimes these are planned, and sometimes they are thrust upon us by a job loss, relationship ending, changing of housing, or some other serious occurrence.
It’s normal to be stressed and uncomfortable when going through a transition like this, mainly if you aren’t sure where your future leads.
The overwhelming nature of these changes can cause your brain to want to shut down and avoid stress. Those feelings can include emptiness.
You may find that the emptiness passes after the situation is resolved and you’re moving on to something else.
Yes, you may have lost a job, but you put in some applications and have an interview lined up. Relationships end, and that’s unfortunate, but there’s always the chance to find a new opportunity and a better love that fits the person you’re growing into.
These transitions will pass, and you will find your way. Sometimes we just need to have a little patience while our life is burning down around us.
9. You’ve got unrealized goals or regrets that are weighing you down.
Few weights are heavier than regret. Everyone has something that they wish they would have done differently or done at all. Sometimes people have far more than one or two of those regrets stewing quietly in their minds.
Dwelling in that past and the thoughts of what could have been can easily cause negative emotions like sadness, regret, mourning, and emptiness.
Time doesn’t necessarily heal all wounds. Sometimes, it just compounds them and makes them worse if we haven’t found a way to actively deal with them and heal from them.
That may require the help of a therapist to find acceptance for what was and didn’t come to be so that you can look forward to better things for your present and future.
Finally…
People choose to deal with that emptiness in different ways, many of them not healthy. We may try to fill that hole with sex, money, consumerism, video games, distractions, drugs, alcohol, and in more extreme cases – self-harm and even suicide. After all, the physical pain is at least a reminder we’re still alive, can still feel… something.
Anything at all.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. Emptiness is a symptom pointing toward a larger problem that the person may not realize they are experiencing.
That problem isn’t always mental illness either. There are a variety of circumstances and problems that can cause that feeling of emptiness.
The cause of the emptiness will dictate what kind of actions may help alleviate that feeling. In this article, we’ve discussed some of the common causes for that empty feeling you’re experiencing, so hopefully that’s your starting point.
But emptiness can be a difficult thing to tackle on your own. It’s a problem that may be best tackled with a trained mental health therapist, particularly if you have a mental illness that can cause these types of feelings. Don’t hesitate to seek out professional help, particularly if you’re experiencing prolonged periods of emptiness.
