The story of a racing mind and a frozen body

“The cost of staying switched on” - Kew gardens, Holiday Season

If you’re capable, driven, and used to thinking things through, but you’re doing all of this under a grey cloud, close to exhaustion, this may feel familiar.

You’re a high performer. Your mind works quickly. It plans ahead, anticipates problems, refines details. You rely on your thinking because it’s strong. You prepare because it’s sensible. You stay ahead because it’s responsible. For a long time, this way of operating has worked. It’s helped you simplify complexity, carry responsibility, and keep pressure at bay.

From the outside, everything looks fine as work gets done and life keeps moving. But…something feels off.

Decisions take longer than they should. Starting feels heavier. You might feel stuck without actually being stuck. If you recognise yourself here, it’s likely that your mind is doing most of the work on its own.

The mind is a powerful tool. It helps you move through the day efficiently, handle tasks, meetings, and decisions, and already think about what’s next. While the mind is doing this heavy lifting, the body is still there, but mostly on mute. The space to notice physical sensations, emotions, or subtle internal signals becomes very small. This is where cognitive overcontrol comes in.

Cognitive overcontrol is what happens when the mind becomes the primary way of managing almost everything. It thinks, leads, decides, evaluates. It keeps things organised, consistent, and under control. This is a real strength, especially in demanding environments. It supports reliability, professionalism, and high performance.

The issue isn’t having a strong mind.

The issue is what happens when thinking starts to replace experience instead of supporting it.

When the mind leads all the time, other sources of information slowly drop out. The body contributes less. Emotional signals get quieter. Intuition becomes harder to access. The feedback you normally get from actually doing something arrives late, or not at all.

Why does this matter? Because we don’t experience life through the mind alone. We experience it through a whole system: mind, body, and emotions. When parts of that system are muted, the load on thinking increases.

So the mind compensates, by planning more, by replaying conversations, by going through the same information again and again, trying to get clarity before acting. At some point, thinking stops supporting action and starts trying to stand in for it.

That’s when analysis paralysis shows up. The mind doesn’t switch off but decisions take longer and even simple things feel mentally expensive. Effort increases, but still everything feels like it’s taking ages.

This is usually the moment people turn on themselves. Am I procrastinating? Am I unmotivated? Am I just lazy?

Most of the time, it’s none of that. It’s an imbalance as too much of life is being processed in the head, and not enough is being experienced through the body.

Functional freeze is a state that the nervous system defaults as a safety mechanism to avoid feeling whatever emotion or sensation while still staying functional throught the day. This is the part that’s easy to miss, because it doesn’t feel like being frozen.

You’re still functioning, showing up and doing what needs to be done.

Life continues, but with a slight numbness as the body isn’t giving much feedback. Sensations feel like background noise and emotional signals are muted. Breathing stays shallow without you noticing. You’re moving and living, but you’re not fully experiencing it.

Since the body stops actively feeding information into the system but instead executes and follows instructions, the mind steps in to compensate.

The loop carries on with thinking taking over completely, planning becomes endless and analysis deepens. Everything runs through the head.

This is why functional freeze and analysis paralysis often sit together. The mind overthinks to fill the gap left by the absence of bodily and emotional feedback.

Without that feedback, there’s no clear sense of “this feels right” or “this doesn’t.” So the mind tries to manufacture certainty in advance by replaying conversations, revisiting options, scaning for what might be missing, all in an attempt to stay safe.

That’s when thinking becomes mentally expensive.

From the outside, you still look fine. Competent. Reliable. In control. Which makes it easy to assume this is just how things are.

It isn’t.

This pattern often sits alongside strong internal standards. There’s an expectation to understand quickly, perform well early, and move efficiently through learning curves. There’s very little tolerance for not knowing, trying things out, or being in process. So instead of starting, you think more. Instead of experimenting, you refine. Instead of learning through experience, you try to get it right in your head first. The more you care, the more responsibility you carry, and the more you value professionalism, the tighter this loop becomes. Sooner or later creativity drops, enjoyment fades and progress starts to feel effortful.

This is where patience becomes essential. Patience that allows learning to happen over time instead of demanding immediate clarity. Patience creates space for repetition, adjustment, and play. Without it, urgency takes over, and the freeze deepens.

How to get unstuck: Bring the body back In

Getting unstuck doesn’t mean forcing yourself out by thinking harder. It means letting the body back into the conversation so the mind doesn’t have to carry everything alone.

One of the simplest ways to do that is through the breath as a way to reintroduce sensation and feedback in the conversation.

Short term

The next time you notice your mind looping or everything feeling heavier than it should, try this:

• Change position first. Straighten your back if you’re sitting. Shift your weight right and left if you’re standing. Let the body know something is different.

• Then bring attention to the breath.

• Breathe in through your nose for a count of 3, letting the breath drop into the belly.

• Breathe out through your nose for a count of 3.

• Pause for 3.

• Repeat this for a few breaths.

  If thinking kicks in, come back to the counting. Let the breath give your system something concrete to do.

  After about ten breaths, return to normal breathing and add a small movement. Roll your shoulders. Turn your head. Take a few steps. Then begin the next small action.

When the breath slows and the body moves, the system gets more information. Thinking naturally eases, the freeze begins to soften and the body is coming back to the equation.

Long term

Functional freeze doesn’t only mute physical sensations. Over time, it also loads on emotional baggage. When the body stays in autopilot for long enough, emotions that don’t have space to be felt don’t disappear. Frustration, grief, fear, anger, even excitement and desire can all be held under the surface in the name of coping, performing, and keeping things moving.

Concious connected breathwork creates space for this to process.

Through a connected breathing pattern, the body is given enough continuity and safety to take the lead again. Sensations begin to return. Emotions surface, as there is finally room for them.

Unfreezing starts to happen as a natural consequence. The body starts to feel again and what has been stored starts to move. And as that happens, the mind no longer has to work as hard to manage everything.

For people caught in analysis paralysis, this is often the missing piece. The mind has been doing its job exceptionally well. The body simply hasn’t had the opportunity to process what’s been suppressed.

By allowing the body to process what’s been held, thinking naturally softens. Decisions feel clearer and action feels less effortful. Presence returns and when the body comes back online, it starts offering feedback again. When patience is present, learning feels possible. When play is allowed, action feels safer. When the inner tone softens, momentum returns. Thinking stays sharp. Standards stay high. Without trying to run everything from your head alone.

That’s the shift. Letting the whole system do its job.