why burnout isn’t your problem - functional freeze is

The step-by-step reset for when you’re showing up but feel...meh.

You’re technically working…
You’re answering emails, showing up to meetings, doing the thing.

But it all feels flat.
 You’re exhausted. Numb. Disconnected.
 And worse—you’re wondering if the problem is you.

If that sounds familiar, this episode is for you.

Inside, I break down:
 ✔ What functional freeze is (and why no one talks about it)
✔ How it’s silently stalling your energy, execution, and motivation
✔ The subtle signs you're in freeze—even if everything “looks fine”
✔ A simple way to start thawing out and reconnecting with your business again

This isn’t burnout. It’s a nervous system state.
 And once you know what to look for, you can actually shift it.

• 00:04 – What is functional freeze (real-world example)
  03:15 – Why this isn’t burnout—and how it hides in plain sight
  07:40 – What it feels like and how to know if it’s happening to you
  13:22 – How it wrecks your decision-making, execution, and energy
  18:15 – The ripple effect on your team and performance
  22:47 – How to catch it in real-time + daily questions to ask
  29:00 – The somatic reset I use with clients to defrost gently
  
  🔗Links:
  → DM me "DECODE" on Instagram @emilyrosedallaracoach to find out your default nervous system state.
  → Buy "Visible" to read my chapter all about the Nervous System + a link to free nervous system regulation tools.

free resources for leaders & biz owners

• FREE ENERGY BOOSTING TOOLS
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connect with me
- insta → / emilyrosedallaracoach
- linkedin → / emilyrosedallara

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About Emily:
Emily Rose Dallara supercharges teams and leaders using a nervous system first approach.

With over 10 years of experience scaling marketing teams as a CMO, globally in Web3, startups, and crypto, Emily combines her expertise as a growth advisor & leadership coach with nervous system and energy management tools to optimize team performance and leadership dynamics.

She’s also a qualified somatic practitioner, a baby DJ + dog mom.

Awards: Emily was voted a Top Woman of the Future 2022 and a Woman in Web 3 Changemaker by NEAR Foundation, 2023.

Transcript

Emily (00:04)
If you've ever had a week where you've just showed up, answered emails, joined calls, but felt like literally nothing happened, you didn't really feel anything and you feel exhausted at the end of it, this episode is for you. Now, I'm Emily Rose DeLara.

Welcome to Bubbling Out. If this is your first time here, this podcast is for business owners, founders and leaders who want to grow a business that makes money, moves fast and actually feels good to run. Because if you don't know by now, your business doesn't just run on strategy, it runs on how your nervous system is functioning as well. And today we're talking about functional freeze. When you're technically working, but you feel totally disconnected from what's happening around you. Before we dive in,

Inside bubbling out BTS, my telegram group, I've dropped something called the nervous system decoder. Now, this is the ultimate tool to start to figure out where you are at with your nervous system. And remember, your nervous system is literally the basis of your business. It's the foundation for everything. And if your nervous system is dysregulated, your whole business will be dysregulated too, including how your team work as well. So bear that in mind. The decoder helps you to understand what nervous system state you're in at any one time.

and it'll help you understand how to move out of it. It's really the foundations of any work that I get my clients to do on their nervous system and I'm giving it to you for free. So go and head to emilyrosdelara.com forward slash community to go and grab it. Okay, let's jump into today's show. Now, functional freeze is something that I have got a lot of experience with. I used to be a very frazzled

stressed out CMO. And during that time, I had a period where I just didn't feel anything. I remember saying to someone, I haven't cried for like two years. And at that moment, I was in a state of functional freeze. If you'd looked at me from the outside, you would have thought, wow, she's on it. Like she is doing so well. She's earning the money. She's getting results. She's leading the team. But inside, I felt like

a piece of rock. Like I didn't feel anything. I was tired all the time. I felt like my body wasn't working very well. I felt lethargic. felt I didn't feel excited about anything. And I started to question my relationship. I started to question my integrity. I started to question if I was even a nice person or not. I just didn't feel anything.

but everything else seemed to be working right. I was like, what is going on? What is really happening here? And it wasn't until a few years later that I realized I was in this state called functional freeze. Now functional freeze is a blended nervous system state. So if you've listened to any of my podcasts before, go back and listen to learn a bit more about the nervous system. But everything I do is baked in the nervous system, by the way. So I'm an emotional pause.

I'm an embodied processing practitioner and a somatic practitioner as well as a performance and leadership coach. So I combine all these things. And the nervous system is the foundation of everything that we do. If our nervous system is dysregulated, it really impacts the way we show up. It impacts how we behave. It impacts our beliefs, our thoughts, our feelings, our emotions. It then impacts our business because it ripples out into our team and our decisions and everything, right? And so this is why I'm so obsessed with it. And I've seen it really improve performance

for myself and for the teams and clients I work with. Now, functional freeze is a blended nervous system state. So very, very quickly, we have multiple nervous system states on a very basic level. We've got fight flight, we've got freeze, we've got fawn. Okay, very basic. If you want to learn more about that, go get the decoder I've literally put in a table about the nervous system in there. Now, the functional freeze is a blend between...

on, so activated, so moving into fight flight. You might not be fully fight flight, but you're in an activated state, I call it yellow. And it's a mix between that and freeze. So freeze is purple in my spectrum that I use. So you are in this state that's blended where your prefrontal cortex is still online. You can still make decisions. You can still do things that you need to do. So that's why everything looks good on the outside. But on the inside, you feel totally frozen.

You are numbed out, you are disassociated, you are foggy, you feel exhausted, you feel like you just can't really do anything, but you seem to be able to do it. And that's because your prefrontal cortex is still online and other things. Not to get too scientific here. So when you're in this state, everything feels really pointless.

It feels like what is the point of getting up? Like you go to bed and people tell you to do bedtime routine to wake up better in the morning. But why? What's the point in doing it? Because don't feel anything anyway. You wake up and you're like, another day. ⁓ my goodness. Pause. Sorry. The monitor's gone off again. Like it always does this when I'm recording. I think it's because I need to move the mouse or something. OK, I'm back.

I haven't done it again.

Okay, it's still recording anyway. Sorry. And so, yeah, you just feel like you really don't have a point. And when you're a founder and you get to this point, it's quite dangerous because you feel like you want to burn the business down. You feel like, why did I even start this business? And then you start to feel guilty because you're like...

I shouldn't feel this way. Like I was really excited about this business. I have a team. What the hell is going on? And I just want to say this isn't your fault. Something triggered this and your

operating from an old response to something. Now, I talk about this a lot, survival patterns. Another way to see it is like you've got an imprint from the past, an emotional imprint, and now this imprint is just playing out in real time and something that happened in your present life triggered that.

And now it's in full effect. Like it's always been there, but now it's in full effect and it's like, its, in its going. And the reason that this happened is because your physiology is trying to protect you, your brain, your body is trying to protect you from danger. You know that there's no, no actual danger here, but your body and your subconscious thinks there is. And so this is what's triggered this imprint in the background, this pattern.

That's what's happening. You are not fault here. It's all happened in the background subconsciously. And the good thing is once you're aware of it, we can actually change it. I actually worked with a client who was in functional freeze and we're defreezing them at the moment. It takes a bit of time, especially when it's been going on for a long, long time. And they had a business that was very successful and they got it to a certain place and they had a big goal behind it and this big goal was achieved.

and they fell into this.

what they thought was a depression and actually it was functional freeze. They were doing really well. They kept going through the motions. They were making sure that the team was functioning, that the business was functioning, but they didn't really feel anything anymore. And they started to develop this immense guilt around it. Why don't I care anymore? What's happened? They just completely lacked purpose. And a part of it, this trigger for them was they reached this goal and it had triggered something and it left them feeling really defeated. It was like the opposite of what they expected. And they've gone into this long functional freeze where they were just

going through the motions, doing all the things, but felt nothing. And so what we started to do with them is defreeze them in a really interesting way. Now, before I go into that, I want to ask you if you resonate with any of these things, right? Knowing that functional freeze is a blended state. I want you to notice

In your days, do you go into procrastination? If so, how does it feel? Do you feel overwhelmed? Do you feel like you should be doing things or does it just feel like nothing? Like maybe you open up your phone and you just stare at it.

and you just flick through it and you, and it's been like an hour now and you're still on your phone. Is that what happens when you procrastinate? Because functional freeze is not full procrastination. It's you still working, but feeling numbed out and disconnected.

So what functional freeze actually is, is this nervous system state that's blended.

But it's also your nervous system because it's blended in this functional free state. It's also trying to conserve energy. So that's why you feel really tired as well. It's actually making you go more towards low stakes, repetitive tasks like checking emails, like replying to Slack messages and refreshing Slack messages because it's safer to do so because that's energy conserving. And it's kind of like you might recognize this in yourself, but you also might recognize it in your team. It's this being busy for the sake of being busy.

it happens. It's so much safer and so much less energy consuming to be doing those kind of tasks than it is to be doing high impact tasks and that's what happens when you're in functional freeze. So this is kind of what it looks like. Now if you stay in functional freeze for too long it's not going to look good for your business or for yourself. Number one when you're in this state you're not engaged in life, you're not living, you're disassociated and numb.

As much as you're performing on the outside, by the way, you're not performing on the level that you want to be performing on. You're doing the day to day things. You're being busy. You're doing the Gmail. You're doing the Slack. You're applying to things. You're showing up to meetings. That's about it. You're doing the bare minimum to keep things going. And you're relying on everybody else to keep things going for you. But over time, that slows down because they start to notice things are not working well and then they start to demotivate. OK, so doesn't look good. You actually start avoiding decisions. You deflect

decisions to other people because it's too hard to and you're conserving energy so that's going to take up lot of brain power. Don't want to do that, dangerous. You're just doing the things instead of actively stepping up and leading because you've just lost that passion.

You don't feel anything. So you can't actively generate that energy or at least you don't know how to. Okay. And then it starts to ripple out. Like I said, you as a leader, and I've talked about the leadership bubble of balance, you as the leader, however you feel, however you regulated or dysregulated your nervous system is, is directly impacting your team. It's a ripple out effect. Your team start to mirror you. Your team pick up on your energy, the team pick up on your lack of presence and engagement. And over time that

impacts

the business performance and it impacts everything you've built and

When that starts happening, you won't have the energy to do anything about it until it's too late. And I've seen this happen. And this is happening with two of my clients who came to me originally with this state. And we're working to change that for them. In fact, one of them is literally changed it around. It's really impressive what you can do when you've got the tools. Now, you don't want that to happen to you. So how do you pull yourself out of functional freeze?

The first thing that you can possibly do is start to notice if it's happening to you. So maybe you've been listening to this and you're like, that is me. That's me. That's what's happening to me. What the fuck? Like, sorry for the swearing, but you've had that moment and you're like, I actually get this now. But if that's not you and you're not a hundred percent sure, go check out the decoder that I mentioned before. the monitor's frozen again. Sorry, Michael. I don't know why this happened. So weird. I'm coming back, coming back.

Okay, back.

And if you're not really fully sure if that's for you, go get the decoder, like I mentioned before, I'll put the link below to start to understand, okay, actually what nervous system state am I in? If you don't want to do that, what you can do is set an alarm on your phone to remind you to check in with your state. It could be as simple as asking yourself, what sensations can I feel in my body? How do I feel overall? What one word would I describe my current state as right now? What do I feel like doing right now?

Ask these kind of questions to really understand what your current state is. It's assess, assess your current state. And that helps you to develop awareness. Okay, maybe I'm in a free state, maybe sometimes I'm in a super activated state. What does it look like for me? So catch it early, set an alarm to see if this is a pattern, see if this happens all the time. And when you start to notice things, I want you to reconnect with your body. I want you to notice

If you're pushing through things and if it's really hard, I want you to notice if you're doing it with intention and with energy. So when you do these check-ins, when you catch your state, just notice how you want to go forward. So for example, if you caught yourself and you've noticed, I'm like just checking my Instagram and I'm just going through emails, I'm refreshing my emails, why am I doing that?

Notice what the narrative is. Is it I should go and check this email or I don't want to do anything right now. I don't want to do anything. I don't care. Right. Just start to notice how that feels and how that shows up in your body. Have you got any sensations? Do you feel heavy? Do you feel tense? Do you feel open? Start to notice all these things.

and start to notice what you want to do about it. And if you are in functional freeze, a really nice way to start to wake yourself up is just to notice your body and what you're doing. Because a lot of the time you're just like this, you're like tense or you're just like heavy and you don't want to move. You feel like you want to sleep forever. So start to notice by wiggling your fingers, wiggling your toes, making yourself get up out of the chair. Because when you're in functional freeze, you don't actually want to get up and do stuff like if someone says to you, come on, let's go and do a workshop and like dance around stuff. You're like, no, that's way

too much effort. Fuck that. So I want you to get up. I want you to just stand up and I want you to start moving your hands and your arms around. Maybe you want to tap your arms and your hands just waking up, moving the blood and the energy around, shaking your arms out, taking in deep breaths in and out as you do it. Just reconnect to your body and feel what it feels like to be in your body. That's all you want to do when you're in functional freeze is just to start to bring awareness to the body.

And the third thing I want you to do, which is probably the hardest thing, is start your days with intention. Because when you're in functional freeze, you lack this feeling of purpose and drive. It's like you don't care anymore. What's the point? You lose sensations and excitement for life. Now...

There's three questions that I really love that are inspired by Brendan Burchard, love him. And they are every single morning and I actually, and if you follow me on social media, you'll see that I have this little index card next to my bathroom mirror that's covered in splashes and stuff. And it says, how do I want to feel today? Who do I want to be today? And how can I surprise someone today?

And I also have a fourth one, is what can I do if something stresses me out today? How can I be my best self? But first three, how do I want to feel today? Who do I need to be today? And how can I surprise someone today? So the first one, how do I want to feel today? It reminds you that you're in control of how you feel, of how you think and how you are. Okay. The second one is who do I need to be today for other people? What meetings do you have? What opportunities are up for you this week? Are you recording podcasts with

people like who do you need to be to deliver these in the best way possible? It gives you real motivation to change your state. And the third one is how can I surprise someone? You're putting purpose back in your life. You're reminding yourself that it's not just you here, that you're living a life. So you're actively adding purpose to your day.

And when you slowly add these things into your life, it becomes a bit more exciting again. You're slowly waking up your nervous system. You're slowly noticing where you are. You're slowly noticing what is exciting in the day. And another thing that I love is to notice glimmers. So in the somatic world, we talk about glimmers. Glimmers are noticing the beautiful things in life. So a butterfly just flies past the window or you can see the sunlight on the windowsill and it's gorgeous. And you're like, how lucky are we to be in this weather? Right?

It's not just in the good things because your brain is wired for negativity constantly constantly looking for danger and that triggers the subconscious body and it triggers physical sensations So if your brain is looking for anything that's dangerous, then your body is gonna feel it straight afterwards as well So constantly look for the beautiful beautiful things in the world and that starts to help you wake up and unfreeze so all these little nice things that you can do and Obviously functional phrase is quite a deep state to be in and it just take time to work through so these

are all surface level things that will make you start to feel better in the now. I always recommend to work with a practitioner like me or anybody else who you want to work with to help you unfreeze in a very secure, a very secure, safe way. And by doing that, we're able to then increase your capacity to feel.

And that takes time, but in the meantime, you can work on all this other stuff, what I call like emotional band-aids. It helps you to feel better now. It's a bit like having a glass of wine. That's a negative emotional band-aid. Don't do that. But yeah, these are all the things that make you feel a bit better and give you a bit more purpose in your day. Now, before we go, I just want you to remember one thing. Functional freeze makes you look busy, but it keeps your business stuck. Okay?

So

It's really important that you figure out how to get out of it. A lot of people who come to me actually want to close down their business. Like, I don't know why I'm that person, but people come to me like, I just want to work, like close down my business. I need you to help me. Or they want to exit the business. And sometimes maybe that is the right decision, but a lot of the time they haven't given it a chance. And that's because they're stuck in this, this functional freeze. So remember getting out of it isn't about doing more. It's really about getting back into your body. It's about feeling. It's about creating purpose in your.

I hope that was helpful.

I hope that you found parts of this helpful. If you're not in functional freeze, you'll be able to recognize this if you ever fall into it. And maybe if there's somebody in your life who you feel is going through the motions and doesn't really feel great and doesn't have any purpose right now, send this to them as well. Cause I think it'll really help. As always, my mission is to just help people understand their nervous systems because honestly it's everybody's human right to know how to do this. We should be taught this as children to be able to manage our nervous systems, to manage our thoughts, our minds, like every

is so important to live in a really full life. And this is why I give you all this information on the podcast for free. Now, remember, if you want the decoder, go over to emilyrosdelara.com forward slash community, jump into the community is there, or just comment on any of my posts on Instagram decode and you'll get it automatically sent over. I'm going to love you and leave you and I will see you next time. Bye.