How to Unfreeze
The Science of Taking Action
Hi everyone—and welcome to my new subscribers. There are over 4,000 of you now. I sincerely appreciate you following along.
It’s been a while since I’ve written—I’d blame that in part on being busy with grad school and work and parenting, and in part on the psychological phenomenon I write about below. It felt timely to write about something that most people I know are struggling with at the moment. I hope you find it useful.
That’s all for now.
H
The Freeze
I want to talk about something I’m seeing across the board right now, in my clients as well as in my community. People are overwhelmed. The political climate, the economy, the pace of change, the sense that systems we depend on are unstable or untrustworthy—it’s a lot. And on top of that, most people are also navigating real complexity in their businesses and personal lives. It’s compounding.
What I’m noticing is that a lot of people have quietly stopped moving. They’re still thinking. They’re still consuming information. They’re still worried. But they’re not taking action, because at some level they’ve concluded that nothing they do will matter against problems this large. And I understand that conclusion. It’s logical. One person volunteering, calling a representative, starting a project, showing up to a meeting—none of that is going to fix the economy or change the political landscape on its own.
But I want to make a case for doing it anyway, and not for the reasons you might expect.
What’s actually happening when you shut down
When your nervous system encounters a threat that it determines is too large to fight and too pervasive to escape, it defaults to a third response: freeze. This is the oldest survival mechanism we have. Your body activates—stress hormones fire, you’re alert, you’re on—but you don’t move. Psychologically, you’re pressing the gas and the brake at the same time.
Your nervous system doesn’t distinguish between a physical threat and the kind of ambient overwhelm most of us are living in right now. Political instability, economic uncertainty, the sense that the problems facing your country or your community are too complex and too far outside your control—these register the same way. If the path forward is unclear and involves too many variables you can’t influence, freeze is what you get.
This is biological, not personal. It’s not a reflection of how little you care or how strong you are. But it does have real consequences, and most people don’t realize how much this state is costing them.
What prolonged freeze is costing you
Stress is your body’s way of preparing you to act. It gives you energy and focus so you can do something. The problem with freeze is that the stress response activates but the action never comes. The cortisol and adrenaline that were supposed to fuel movement have nowhere to go. They just sit in your system.
When this goes on for weeks or months, the effects are predictable. Cortisol stays elevated. Sleep deteriorates. Immune function weakens. Digestion suffers. Anxiety increases because the stress was never completed and compounds. Your body is still waiting for you to finish the response.
There’s a subtler effect that I think matters even more. The longer someone stays in this state, the more their sense of their own capability fades. Psychologists call this self-efficacy—your belief in your own capacity to act effectively. It doesn’t disappear all at once. It erodes in the background, quietly, until even manageable actions start to feel disproportionately hard. Not because they are hard, but because the internal sense that you’re someone who can make things happen has gone quiet.
This is what concerns me most. The overwhelm isn’t just leaving the big problems unsolved. It’s gradually reducing your capacity to act on anything—including the basic responsibilities in your business, your family, and your personal life that are actually within your control.
When engagement isn’t the same as action
Something I see a lot right now is people who are deeply engaged with what’s happening—reading constantly, talking about it, feeling the weight of it—but not actually moving. That engagement can feel like it counts for something, and in some ways it does. Being informed matters. Being in community matters.
But there’s a meaningful difference between a conversation that helps you process and move forward and one that keeps you cycling through the same distress. The second kind—where you’re rehashing how bad things are without ever shifting toward what can be done—actually increases anxiety and deepens the feeling of powerlessness. It can even cancel out the benefits of social connection, which is worth pausing on. The thing that should be helping—talking to people who understand—can become another thing that keeps you stuck, if the conversation never goes anywhere.
The difference is usually easy to feel if you’re honest with yourself. After a conversation about the state of the world, or your industry, or whatever the hard thing is—do you feel like something shifted, even slightly? Or do you feel heavier? Are you exploring what’s possible, or confirming what’s wrong?
This isn’t a reason to stop talking about hard things. It’s a reason to notice where your conversations are taking you.
This isn’t contained to you
Something most people haven’t considered is that their own frozen state radiates outward. Emotions and behaviors move through groups below conscious awareness. When the people around you—your partner, your kids, your team—see you disengaged or shut down, they absorb that as information. If the people they trust and look to aren’t acting, the unconscious read is that action isn’t possible or isn’t warranted.
This is how collective paralysis builds. Not because everyone independently concluded that the situation is hopeless, but because everyone is reading each other’s stillness and matching it. Each frozen person becomes evidence for the next person that freezing is the right response.
The good news is that the reverse is equally true. When someone starts moving, the people around them feel it. Movement itself communicates something to the people who are paying attention to you, whether they’re conscious of it or not.
Why action works, even when it can’t solve the problem
For fifty years, the prevailing theory in psychology was that helplessness was learned—that when people were exposed to situations they couldn’t control, they learned to stop trying. In 2016, the researchers who originally proposed that theory revisited it with fifty years of additional data and concluded they had it backwards.
Passivity is the default. It’s what the brain does automatically when circumstances are threatening and the way forward is unclear. What actually has to be learned, through direct experience, is that your actions can change things. There’s a specific neural pathway that only activates when you take an action and experience a result. The researchers called it the hope circuit.
The part that matters most: this circuit only activates from the lived experience of doing something and seeing something change. Your brain updates its sense of what you’re capable of through experience, not through insight.
At a basic level, your nervous system needs the experience of agency in order to function. And it doesn’t need the action to match the scale of the problem. It needs you to move from stuck to not stuck. That’s the change that needs to be made.
What this looks like in practice
The action can be small. It can be local. It can be unrelated to the thing that overwhelmed you, like simply choosing to take a walk. What matters is the experience of choosing to do something, doing it, and registering the result.
Volunteer somewhere. Attend a community meeting. Start the project you’ve been sitting on. Make the phone call you’ve been avoiding. Finish something around the house that’s been nagging at you. The scale matters less than the completion. Each time you move through that cycle—decision, action, result—the next action becomes more accessible. Self-efficacy rebuilds through repetition.
There’s also solid evidence that helping others in particular produces measurable changes in brain chemistry—more dopamine and oxytocin, less cortisol. People who volunteer regularly report lower depression and a greater sense of purpose. But the mechanism underneath is broader than volunteering. The mechanism is agency itself, and reminding yourself that you have it.
The honest case for doing it anyway
I want to be direct about the math here. Your individual action is probably not going to solve a systemic problem facing your country. That’s true. And I think the instinct to dismiss individual action because it can’t fix the whole thing is one of the main reasons people stay frozen. It feels rational. Why bother if it won’t change anything?
Here’s what it will change. Your cortisol will come down. Your sleep will improve. Your anxiety will decrease—not because the external problems went away, but because your body finally got the signal that you’re not trapped. Your self-efficacy will start to rebuild. You’ll be more present and more capable for the people who depend on you—your family, your employees, your community.
That’s the first ripple. The second is that the people around you will register your shift and feel permission to move. The third is that their movement ripples out into their circles. None of this is theoretical. Behavioral contagion is well documented. Action spreads the same way that freeze does.
If everyone reading this newsletter took one action this week—not a grand gesture, just one deliberate move out of stuckness—the collective impact would be real. Not because any single action would fix a systemic problem, but because several thousand people who were contracting would be expanding instead. They’d be healthier, more present, more engaged, more available to the people and communities around them.
But even setting the collective aside—you should do this for yourself. Because you will feel better. Because you’ll sleep better and be less anxious and show up differently for the people in your life. That is reason enough, and everything else that comes from it is a bonus.
If you’d like to dig deeper
Everything above is grounded in research I’ve encountered in my academic studies or through my own personal research. If any of it resonated and you want to dig in further, here’s where to start:
The freeze response and your nervous system
The newsletter describes how your nervous system defaults to freeze when a threat is too large to fight and too pervasive to escape. This comes from polyvagal theory, developed by Stephen Porges. Deb Dana’s book is the most accessible entry point—it translates the neuroscience into plain language and includes practical exercises.
Deb Dana, Anchored: How to Befriend Your Nervous System Using Polyvagal Theory (2022)
Learned helplessness, the hope circuit, and why passivity is the default
This is the centerpiece of the newsletter—the 2016 reversal showing that helplessness isn’t learned but is the brain’s default, and that agency has to be actively built through experience. The paper is the primary source. Seligman’s memoir tells the full story in readable form.
Maier & Seligman, “Learned Helplessness at Fifty: Insights from Neuroscience,” Psychological Review (2016) — Free full text
Martin Seligman, The Hope Circuit: A Psychologist’s Journey from Helplessness to Optimism (2018)
Self-efficacy — how your belief in your own capability erodes (and rebuilds)
The newsletter describes how prolonged inaction gradually reduces your sense that you can affect outcomes. Albert Bandura’s work on self-efficacy is the foundation for this. His original paper is the shorter read; the book is the comprehensive treatment.
Albert Bandura, “Self-Efficacy: Toward a Unifying Theory of Behavioral Change,” Psychological Review (1977)
Albert Bandura, Self-Efficacy: The Exercise of Control (1997)
Co-rumination—when talking about problems makes them worse
The newsletter describes conversations that keep you circulating through distress without arriving anywhere. The research term for this is co-rumination, and Amanda Rose’s work established the concept. Her 2021 review is the most current and readable summary of two decades of findings.
Amanda Rose, “The Costs and Benefits of Co-Rumination,” Child Development Perspectives (2021)
Amanda Rose, “Co-Rumination in the Friendships of Girls and Boys,” Child Development (2002)
Emotional contagion—how your state spreads to the people around you
The newsletter describes how emotions and behaviors move through groups below conscious awareness. The largest study on this used nearly 700,000 Facebook users and showed that emotional states transfer without any direct interaction or nonverbal cues.
Kramer, Guillory & Hancock, “Experimental Evidence of Massive-Scale Emotional Contagion Through Social Networks,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2014) — Free full text
The health effects of helping others
The newsletter mentions that volunteering produces measurable shifts in cortisol, depression, and sense of purpose. The umbrella review below synthesizes decades of research on this across mental, physical, and social health outcomes.
Sheringham et al., “Exploring the Effects of Volunteering on the Social, Mental, and Physical Health and Well-being of Volunteers: An Umbrella Review,” Voluntas (2023) — Free full text