the neuroscience of aliveness

Biologically, we can be alive
but not feel alive.

This is the gap between existence and embodiment.

🧠 What keeps us alive:
✧ Heartbeat
✧ Breathing
✧ Cognition
✧ Physical motion

🧠 What makes us feel alive:
✧ Emotion
✧ Presence
✧ Sensory integration
✧ Self-awareness
✧ Meaning-making

When those second-layer functions disappear,
the body keeps going —
but the you inside it feels… gone.

This is sometimes called:
✧ Affective flattening (loss of emotional depth)
✧ Dissociation (mind-body disconnection)
✧ Depersonalization (feeling unreal)
✧ Emotional blunting (numbness)

Often triggered by:
✧ Trauma
✧ Prolonged stress
✧ Repetitive masking
✧ Burnout
✧ Chronic disapproval or emotional suppression

💡 So yes —
If you’re living a life without any emotional access,
you might not be dead…
but you’re not fully here either.

And that’s the kind of death we don’t talk about enough.

✧ soft anchor:

You don’t need to achieve more.
You need to feel again.

That’s what brings you back to life.

🌒 return to the breath:

→ read: what dies before we do?
→ reflect: emotional extinction