When the Body Forgets to Yawn (FUNCTIONAL FREEZE)

                                                                                                             photo from Pinterest.

There were years when I didn’t yawn.

You wouldn’t think much of yawning, would you? And yet, it holds so much wisdom about our nervous system — and about functional freeze.

What happens when we yawn?
Most of the time, it’s a subtle cue the body sends when it’s shifting from one state to another.

You might remember yawning when you were tired — a gentle reminder that it’s time to rest, that your body craves oxygen and release.
Or maybe you’ve yawned in a slightly tense situation — a meeting, a conversation, a moment you wished would end.
Your mouth opens, uninvited, like a small rebellion.

Yawning is one of the body’s ways of returning to balance — moving from fight or flight into rest and ease, from sympathetic activation into parasympathetic regulation.
When the nervous system lives in chronic vigilance or partial freeze, even these natural rhythms pause.
The body forgets how to discharge energy, how to soften.
It keeps holding, even in moments that should invite rest.

For years, I didn’t notice I had stopped yawning.
Only when I began to yawn again did I realised how much tension I had been carrying — how long my system had lived without real exhale.
That was one of my first clues that I had been living in functional freeze.

The Invisible Glass

For years, life felt both numb and on edge at the same time.

My mind was constantly busy — endless to-do lists, work projects, future ideas, family responsibilities.
My body was tired but still pushing.
My soul was confused.
My brain was a computer that never shut down.

I genuinely believed this was what being an adult meant — constant running, managing, surviving.
And perhaps, in some ways, that’s what society teaches us?

But it felt like drinking water and still being thirsty.
Like reaching your goals, yet feeling flat.
Like living behind an invisible glass that separates you from the world. And you want to reach to that world, to touch it, but it feels impossible, so out of reach.

How Functional Freeze Can Feel

• Doing tasks automatically, without presence or joy.

• Feeling “calm,” but flat or distant.

• Being exhausted yet unable to stop.

• Resting, but not feeling restored.

• Watching yourself go through motions, detached from inner signals, disconnected from your own needs. 

• Forgetting basic needs like drinking or eating.

• Procrastinating or feeling paralysed before even small actions.

• Difficulty falling asleep — the mind insists on thinking.

• Pushing through physical pain.

• Jaw pain from suppressed anger or grief (even when you don’t feel angry).

• Blurry or tunnel vision.

• Muscle tension or chronic tightness.

• Restricted breathing.

• Curled-up limbs or a withdrawn posture.

• Reduced gut activity, heaviness after eating.

• Craving carbohydrates or sweets for quick fuel.

• Holding in that pee although you needed to use the bathroom an hour ago. 

The Polyvagal View

In Polyvagal Theory, our autonomic nervous system moves through different states — rest and digest, fight, flight, freeze, and dorsal stillness.

Functional freeze is a blended state: the body carries both dorsal vagal energy (freeze, shutdown) and sympathetic energy (mobilisation).
I see it as a dance — at one moment, we lean more toward sympathetic activation; in another, toward dorsal withdrawal.
When threat feels close, we mobilise. When it moves slightly away, we slip into partial shutdown. There is still not enough safety to exhale.
So we stay protective. We stay surviving.

From the outside, we may appear calm, capable, even high-functioning.
Inside, we feel disconnected — joy and ease feel out of reach because there isn’t enough safety in the system to truly relax.

The term functional freeze isn’t official in Polyvagal literature, but many somatic practitioners use it because it captures what so many people experience:
being alive, but not fully living.

Remembering Safety

The most important thing to know is that these states are not flaws.
They are the body’s intelligent attempts to keep us safe.
Sometimes, the system learns that the best way to survive is to forget authenticity — to adapt, to stay small, to keep going.

If I could tell my past self something, it would be this:

• Don’t try to fix the freeze or any other survival state, better accept it and hug it like an old friend.

• Don’t aim to never experience them again.

• Don’t fear or avoid them — they’re not your enemies.

• Don’t blame yourself for being there.

• Don’t doubt your body’s wisdom when it says, “I’m not fine.”

• Don’t fixate on symtoms minimising; focus on relationship with them and your body. 

• Don’t push without listening.

These states are not signs of failure — they are evidence of survival. You survived. Your body did the best thing it knew to do. It’s written into our biology — patterns shaped over millions of years of evolution. And healing doesn’t come from fighting them, but from slowly teaching the body that safety can return and how it feels. 

That rest can be trusted again.
That the body can remember how to yawn.