![]() ![]() So some people recover from emotional shock in several hours. If, for example, you already lost your job this year, and now have had an accident that left you injured, you might take more time to feel better than someone who just had an injury. This means you will have your own unique time line for getting over shock. Traumatic experiences will interact with your personal vulnerabilities and the any unresolved difficult experiences in your past. We can have negative thoughts like, ‘Why bother, when everything is just going to go wrong?”. When something happens that leaves us deeply upset, life can temporarily lose its meaning. ![]() Compulsive behaviours can also be a problem. Or if you are often the sort to take time out by yourself and be practical, you might find yourself going out every night, drinking when you usually don’t. If you are usually social, you might just want to be alone and hide out at home. You could suffer a bit of a temporary personality change after a shock. Photo by Jalil Saeidi for Pexels someone else entirely. There can also be a cycle of guilt (it’s all my fault), shame (what will people think), and blame (I hate them for doing this to me). In the next we are lost to victim thinking, feeling sorry for ourselves and crying. In one moment we think, “I am bigger than this”, and we feel powerful. The stress of a shock can also leave us illogic and emotional. When the mind is struggling to make sense of a difficult situation, it doesn’t leave much headspace to deal with everything else that needs our attention. Although for some people stress makes them sleep more than ever, even if might be a disturbed sleep, full of dreams. Sleep is often affected when we experience stressful things. This sends a cocktail of chemicals and hormones through your body that can manifest as things like a racing heartbeat, muscle tension, headaches, stomach upset, and random aches and pains. When your brain decides that there is ‘danger’ around, it triggers the primal ‘ fight, flight, or freeze’ response. You are experiencing physical side effects. Life might even feel unreal, as if you are disconnected and floating slightly outside of your body, watching yourself carry on doing things. You might feel as if your brain has turned to mush, or you have ‘ brain fog‘. The problem arises if emotional shock triggers previous life trauma, anxiety we already struggled with, or if it evolves into a more serious mental health issue. These are normal and for the majority of people they start to fade and settle down within a few months.” This may happen straight away or for some people it may be several weeks or months later that reactions occur. “After experiencing or witnessing a frightening or traumatic event, it is common for people to experience strong physical feelings and emotions and/or to find that they are behaving differently. As the NHS says in their guide ‘ Understanding Reactions to Traumatic Events’, Emotional shock is actually your mind and body’s normal and healthy way of processing difficult experiences. That said mental health professionals may use the term to help you understand your overwhelmed state after a difficult event.Īnd it’s not ‘bad’. It is not actually a clinical diagnosis, but just a popular term. We keep rationalising what happened, and telling ourselves to just ‘get over it’.īut we can’t snap out of feeling strange and unsettled, no matter how hard we try. It’s in those moments after we live through something hard or challenging. Emotional shock hits all of us at one point or another. ![]()
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