Shock Isn’t Laziness. It’s Triage.

Filed under: Field Notes

There are days after collapse where doing nothing isn’t a choice.

It’s my system throwing a breaker so the whole house doesn’t burn down.

From the outside, it looks like avoidance. Like I’m procrastinating. Like I’m being soft. Like I’m “not trying hard enough.”

From the inside, it’s different.

It’s static. Fog. A strange calm that isn’t peace—more like the absence of movement. Like my body has decided: we are not doing anything reckless today.

Freeze isn’t a flaw. It’s a body response.

We talk about stress like it only comes in two flavors: fight or flight. But there’s another response that matters just as much—freeze. Sometimes the nervous system hits pause. Immobilizes. Goes still. Not because I’m “choosing nothing,” but because my system is choosing not to escalate when it thinks escalation could be dangerous.

If you need a clean, clinical description of that “pause button,” the Cleveland Clinic overview of fight/flight (including freeze) describes freeze as becoming immobilized in response to threat.

And once I name it that way, it changes how I treat myself. I stop calling it laziness. I start calling it what it is:

Triage.

Sometimes shutdown prevents fallout.

Because when everything is raw, the impulse to react can be dangerous.

Especially anger.

In grief language, anger is one of the classic reactions people recognize—whether the loss is a person, a job, a life structure, or an identity. The Britannica summary of the five stages of grief names anger as a common stage people report. And I’ve lived that part: the surge that feels like power, the heat that convinces you you’re “taking control,” the urge to make a call, send a message, say the name, burn the bridge.

But rage can be gasoline.

It can take a bad situation and make it legally messy, socially radioactive, financially worse, or just harder to recover from. Sometimes the most intelligent move my body can make is to shut the whole system down for a moment—long enough for my mind to catch up with reality—so I don’t turn pain into permanent consequences.

Freeze, in that sense, isn’t cowardice. It’s restraint without having to “perform” restraint.

This isn’t only personal. It’s social.

This is where the sociological frame helps me stop turning everything into a private defect.

Because a collapse doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It happens inside systems: workplaces, markets, institutions, reputations, social ties. And when those systems shift, the nervous system often pays the price.

C. Wright Mills pushed the idea that what we experience as personal struggle is often entangled with larger public conditions. That link between private experience and public context is exactly the point of the sociological imagination—and it’s captured well in Britannica’s discussion of Mills’ argument that individual experiences connect to wider social patterns (the “personal troubles” / “public issues” idea). See: Britannica on “the personal is political” (including Mills’ framing).

Durkheim gives me a word for the disorientation after collapse: anomie—a breakdown of the usual norms and expectations that tell you what’s next, what’s right, what’s stable. When the old rules stop working, the world can feel instructionless. See: Britannica on anomie.

So when I’m in shock—when I can’t move, can’t plan, can’t “just do the thing”—it isn’t always a motivation problem. Sometimes it’s my body responding to a social reality: the ground shifted, the script dissolved, and my system is trying to keep me from making it worse while the new map loads.

The pause is also a choice.

Covey’s language lands here because it’s practical: don’t spend your life reacting like a pinball. Choose where your effort goes. Work inside what you can actually influence. The FranklinCovey overview of Habit 1 (“Be Proactive”) lays out that “Circle of Influence” idea plainly.

And on days when my body freezes, I can treat that freeze as part of being proactive—not the whole plan, but a strategic moment inside the plan. A refusal to let anger drive. A deliberate pause before I speak, act, accuse, or detonate.

Not forever. Not as a lifestyle.

Just long enough to keep the house from burning down.

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One line I am keeping:

One boundary I am setting:

One step for tomorrow:

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References

• Cleveland Clinic — Fight-or-flight response (includes freeze)
• Encyclopaedia Britannica — Five stages of grief
• Encyclopaedia Britannica — “The personal is political” (includes Mills’ “personal troubles” / “public issues” framing)
• Encyclopaedia Britannica — Anomie
• FranklinCovey — The 7 Habits: Habit 1 (Be Proactive)