This article is late, and I'm not going to pretend it isn't.

If you're on my email list, you know these usually arrive on Tuesday mornings. It is currently Tuesday evening. And here's the part I want to confess right up front, because it's the whole reason this article exists: I didn't sit down this morning, struggle with writer's block, and lose the battle. It's worse than that. I didn't realize I hadn't written an article at all until 5:04 this afternoon.

Not "I was avoiding it." Not "I couldn't find the words." It simply did not exist in my mind. A thing I have done nearly every week, a rhythm I love, vanished from my awareness like a sock in the dryer. And when I finally noticed, my first feeling wasn't panic. It was curiosity. Because I know myself well enough by now to ask the better question.

Where did I go this week?

Where I Went

I'll tell you exactly where I went, and I'm going to be embarrassingly specific, because I suspect some of you have your own version of this.

I went to Minecraft.

Yes. A fifty-something relationship coach with a doctorate spent a good chunk of Monday and Tuesday building things out of blocks on his computer. And not just Minecraft: Minecraft while listening to my favorite audiobook series in my headphones, the one I've heard before, with the narrator whose voice I know like an old friend. Double soothing. The gentle rain in the game. The soft crunch of breaking blocks. Familiar story, familiar voice, familiar sounds, nothing asked of me, nothing at stake.

If you had walked into my office, you would have seen a man who looked completely relaxed. But here's what was actually happening, and this is the part I want you to understand about yourself: I wasn't relaxing. I was numbing. And there's a difference, even when they look identical from the outside.

Because here's the thing about me, and I've earned the right to say it plainly: going numb is kinda my thing when life gets loud. Always has been. When the pile gets high enough, some people rage, some people spiral, some people organize the garage at midnight. I shut down. I go quiet inside. I find something soft and repetitive and familiar, and I disappear into it, and the noise fades, and so, unfortunately, does everything else. Including, apparently, Tuesdays.

The Pile Was Made of Good Things

Now, you might assume something terrible was happening. Nothing terrible was happening. That's what makes this worth writing about.

My season right now is just... full. Full of clients I love. Full of family. Full of new things launching and life happening at full volume. There was also a piece of uncertainty I'd been circling for a while, a thing I was waiting on that I couldn't schedule or control, and this week it finally resolved into an actual plan. And I noticed something fascinating about the timing: within hours of that uncertainty resolving, my shoulders dropped, my head cleared, and THAT is the exact moment I realized I'd never written this article. The fog lifted, and the first thing I saw was the blank page.

Here's why that matters for you. A few weeks ago I wrote an article about how open loops keep your nervous system's alarm quietly running in the background, asking "are we safe yet?" on repeat. I taught it. I cited the research. I gave you a practice.

And then I lived it for a week without recognizing it in the mirror. The unresolved thing kept part of me braced, the fullness kept the rest of me maxed out, and my system did what it has always done when the input exceeds the capacity: it threw the breaker. Not on the hard things. On everything. Numbness is not a precision instrument. It doesn't dim only the stressful channels. It dims the whole board, and creativity, presence, and awareness go dark right alongside the anxiety.

So if you have ever gone blank in a busy season and concluded that something is wrong with you, hear this: nothing hits you when everything is hitting you. A blank mind in a full life isn't laziness or brokenness. It's a loyal body doing the only volume control it knows.

God's Treatment Plan for an Overwhelmed Man

There's a story in Scripture I come back to whenever I catch myself in shutdown, because it's the most trauma-informed passage in the whole Bible, written thousands of years before anyone had the vocabulary.

The prophet Elijah had just come off the biggest, loudest season of his life, a mountaintop showdown, a dead sprint, a death threat, all of it stacked. And he collapsed under a broom tree, so done that he told God he wanted to die. Now watch what God does, because it's not what religion would predict. No rebuke. No sermon. No "where's your faith?" Instead: "As he was sleeping, an angel touched him and told him, 'Get up and eat!' He looked around and there beside his head was some bread baked on hot stones and a jar of water. So he ate and drank and lay down again." (1 Kings 19:5-6, NLT)

Sleep. Bread. Water. More sleep. That was heaven's first prescription for an overwhelmed man. The famous part comes later, the gentle whisper on the mountain, but notice the order: God restored the body before He said a single meaningful word to the soul. Even God didn't try to have the deep conversation with a man whose breaker was thrown.

That story gives me so much permission, and I want it to give you the same. The soothing itself was never the sin. Rest, comfort, familiar things: that's bread under the broom tree. The question I have to ask myself, and the one I'll hand to you, is simply this: is this a pause, or is it a hiding place? Bread under the broom tree is a pause. Two days in a block world while my actual life waited outside the door had quietly become a hiding place. Same activity, different job.

What Actually Thaws Me

I've been at this long enough to know what brings me back, and it's never willpower. Willpower can't reach a numb man. Three things reach me.

Acceptance reaches me. Not resignation, acceptance: looking straight at the season and saying, out loud if I have to, "This is what's true right now. All of it. The load is real and I'm allowed to feel it." Numbness feeds on the refusal to feel the pile. Acceptance walks over and feels it on purpose, and strangely, that's when the pile gets lighter. It's the same lesson from my clarity article a couple weeks back: the healing starts where the resisting stops.

Taking hold of what's actually mine reaches me. When everything feels like too much, almost nothing on the list is actually mine to control today. But something always is. One phone call. One page. One honest conversation. One article, even a late one. Doing the one thing that's mine doesn't just accomplish the thing. It sends my body a message the numbness can't argue with: we're back at the oars.

And surrender reaches me. Whatever is driving the shutdown, the uncertainty, the waiting, the thing with no date on it yet, gets handed over, by name, to the God who was setting out bread while Elijah slept. Not because surrender is tidy. Because the alternative is carrying an outcome that was never mine to carry, and my body keeps honest books: what I won't surrender, it will numb.

Acceptance. Agency. Surrender. That's my thaw, every time, in roughly that order.

A Practice for This Week

If you're in a loud season, try this before the numbness picks your evening plans for you.

Name the pile out loud. Actually list it, every plate you're spinning, including the good ones, because blessings stack onto the same nervous system that burdens do. Just hearing the whole list in your own voice is an act of acceptance, and you'll usually understand your exhaustion better in ninety seconds than a week of wondering what's wrong with you.

Then sort it into two columns: mine to control, and mine to surrender. Be ruthless. Most of the pile goes in column two. Pick ONE thing from column one and do it today, small and complete. And take column two to God by name, Elijah-style, before the nap instead of instead of the nap.

And when you do reach for your soothing thing, and you will, we all will, just reach for it awake. Set a gentle limit before you start. Ask the honest question on the way in: pause, or hiding place? There's no shame in either answer. But only one of them lets you find your Tuesdays again.

If Numb Is Your Normal

One more thing, said with love. If shutdown isn't just your busy-season visitor but the house you've lived in for years, if you can't remember the last time you felt fully present in your own life, that's not a personality trait. That's usually a nervous system that learned, somewhere along the way, that numb was the safest available option. It made sense once. It's costing you now. And it can genuinely change: I wrote a whole book about it, because I've lived it from the inside.

You're Not Crazy, You're Traumatized: get the audio course here

Or just text me at (303) 435-2630 or email [email protected] and tell me where you go when life gets loud. I'll understand more than you know.

So let's hear it: what's your Minecraft? The place you disappear to when the pile gets high? Drop it in the comments, no shame allowed. Mine has creepers in it.