When Your Sick and Tired. of Being Sick and Tired
- Penny Green
- Jun 25
- 5 min read
Updated: Jun 27
If you’ve been feeling tired, foggy, disconnected, or weirdly anxious — and nothing you’re doing is shifting it, there’s a reason.
For many people, what they’re experiencing isn’t burnout, depression, or laziness. It’s a survival response that’s easy to miss because it looks so much like your functioning. But underneath the surface, something has shut down. And until you understand what that is, you’ll keep trying to fix it from the wrong angle.
Functional Freeze: The Silent State Behind Exhaustion, Indecision, and Burnout
In recent years, the term “nervous system dysregulation” has become more widely recognised, and with good reason. But there’s one state in particular that isn’t getting the attention it deserves or needs, despite being one of the most common patterns I see in the women I work with: Functional freeze.
You won’t necessarily collapse in this state.You’re not in bed all day.You’re often still productive, capable, and showing up.
But underneath that surface-level function, your system has gone into shutdown.
What Is Functional Freeze?
Functional freeze is a protective survival response from the nervous system. It’s what happens when your body has experienced too much for too long, stress, trauma, emotional overload, energetic invasion, and there’s been no real resolution or release.
Instead of fight or flight, the system chooses a third option: stillness.Internally, your system slows everything down to conserve energy and prevent further overwhelm. But externally, you can still appear “fine.”
This is what makes functional freeze so difficult to spot. People often continue working, parenting, performing — but their energy, clarity, creativity, and connection slowly and quietly drain away.
What It Can Look Like
Chronic tiredness, no matter how much sleep you get
Brain fog, forgetfulness, or difficulty making decisions
Aching joints
Low motivation or procrastination on important tasks
Emotional flatness — not sad, not joyful, just neutral
Anxiety or internal restlessness without an obvious cause
Sensation of heaviness, particularly in the legs and feet
A growing sense of disconnection from your body or life
Waking feeling unsettled
The Energetic Side
In my work, I often see these symptoms show up before they’re ever recognised as freeze. In fact, I spent years clearing what I simply referred to as “overwhelm” from clients .... a dense, stuck energy that consistently sat in the legs and feet. It wasn’t until later that I realised this was functional freeze presenting energetically.
From an energetic perspective, this isn’t just nervous system response — it’s root chakra overload. The legs and feet are governed by the root chakra, which is tied to your safety, movement, direction, and survival.
When your system no longer feels safe to move forward, it locks up. The energy stops rising. You can still do life, but you can’t feel your way through it or find much joy.
Relationship Residue and Emotional Load
Another piece that often underlies the freeze response is the energy of others. Our nervous systems don’t operate in a vacuum. We carry the residue of our relationships, parents, partners, exes, colleagues, friendships .. long after the physical connection ends.
If a relationship was toxic, manipulative, abusive, or deeply unbalanced, that energy can settle into the field, particularly around the lower chakras. In time, this can compound the sense of stagnation, emotional shutdown, or inner conflict.
I’ve worked with clients who unknowingly carried the energetic imprint of former partners for years, and clearing that presence alone brought back clarity, vitality, and movement.
This is rarely discussed in mainstream trauma or medical spaces, but it plays a significant role in why some people stay stuck, even after doing all the “right” things.
Misdiagnosis and the Menopause Myth
It’s also worth acknowledging how easily functional freeze can be missed or misread. Many women are told they’re simply experiencing perimenopause, hormonal shifts, or the natural effects of ageing... and while those things are very real, they often arrive right at the same time the nervous system hits its limit.
What’s often underneath isn’t just biology ... it’s the build-up of years of unresolved stress, trauma, emotional suppression, and energetic overload. And because these deeper layers aren’t always recognised or explored, the response is usually medication.
While that might provide temporary relief, it often doesn’t reach the root of what’s really going on.
What Helps (and What Doesn’t)
Functional freeze exists on a spectrum, and not everyone experiences it the same way. For some, it looks like low motivation, brain fog, emotional flatness, or procrastination. For others, it becomes physical: aching joints, inflammation, sleep issues, or anxiety that never quite clears. And at the far end of the spectrum is full collapse....where the system shuts down completely, and even basic tasks feel impossible. Recognising where you are on that spectrum is the first step to knowing what kind of support your system actually needs.
Pushing through doesn’t work. Motivational tools, productivity hacks, or forcing yourself into a routine when your system is frozen will usually backfire. What the body needs isn’t more pressure .... it needs permission.
Functional freeze begins to lift through signal safety ...small, consistent practices that let your system know it’s safe to come out of hiding. There are many ways to support this thaw, and in my upcoming book, I’ve developed tiered healing techniques designed specifically to meet you where you’re at.......whether you’re barely holding it together or already on the way back.
The book walks you through the deeper process step by step, the energetics, the bodywork, the re-patterning, and how to rebuild a signal that can hold. But in the meantime, the video below of my recent Masterclass offers a handful of simple, powerful practices you can start using right now.
These include:
Gentle nervous system regulation
Breathwork and orienting
EFT tapping
Energetic clearing of relational residue
Self-healing techniques
Slow, intentional adjustments to movement and diet
Rebuilding trust in your own sense of direction and safety
.
Self Assessment Tool
And If you’re unsure where you sit on the freeze spectrum, if at all, you’re not alone. I’ve created a simple self-assessment tool that helps identify the level of freeze you may be operating from ... whether it’s low-grade functional freeze or something deeper. The questionnaire and results are now available below, so you can get a clearer picture of what’s happening in your system and why it might feel so hard to move forward. This isn’t about labelling .... it’s about insight, and giving yourself the right kind of support.
Final Thoughts
Freeze isn’t a failure ... it’s a form of survival. If your system has gone into freeze, it’s because it didn’t feel safe to stay open any longer. But you don’t have to live there.
This is the work I’ve done for years, and I’m finally giving it the name and space it deserves.
If you recognise yourself in any of this, I invite you to watch the class, and know that you’re not broken. You’re simply waiting to come back online.
Penny x
And if your ready to work through this at your own pace? The full method — from energetic repair to signal safety .. is in the book.
Join the list and I’ll let you know the moment it’s ready.
Disclaimer:
This content isn’t medical advice, therapy, or a substitute for either. It won’t replace your doctor, your therapist, or your common sense — but it might explain why none of them have quite solved it yet. Use responsibly
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