This is a freeze response which is a result of a sum determination by your brain that you aren’t sure of any action that’s better than nothing.

Basically it means when the environment is not well known, your brain decides to freeze, on the basis that any action is more likely to have negative results than positive ones.

There are many places this prediction can comes from.

For example if you’re sick or otherwise weakened, then any mishap is likely to cause more damage to you. Your overall level of vulnerability or susceptibility to harm will influence your likelihood of freezing.

Another thing is if you just don’t know what’s around you. Like, if you’re in a minefield, freezing is a good move until you have more information.

Social interaction and also work can be like a minefield. If you make the wrong decision without understanding the context, you could get hurt. So the less you understand, the more likely you are to freeze.

But understanding isn’t just about the long term learning of subject matter like mechanical engineering or the French language. It’s also about understanding the current state of things. Who has just said what and whether a certain project is ahead or behind or when someone’s going to have a schedule opening for you or whatever.

There’s all this information we have to learn afresh each day, to be ready to make decisions that don’t blow up in our face.

It’s a minefield with new mines each day.

And here’s where it gets ultra fucked: let’s say your social skills aren’t as good as you’d like and you’re worried about your reputation, perhaps a result of facing rebuke for underperforming recently. This creates what’s called a double bind. Double binds create stress and lower your sense of safety and make freezing (and all sorts of other stress responses) more likely.

A double bind is when there’s no safe choice, and either choice could be the wrong choice in a way that it’ll seem obvious in hindsight.

Here the double bind comes from: If you go out seeking information will it hurt you socially? Make you less liked? Harm your relationship with the team?

What if you suspect it might have been said in the meeting? But you don’t want to seem like you weren’t paying attention, by asking. But without the right info, you’d make the wrong decision on this thing. But you also don’t want to see yourself as someone who manipulates perceptions to shape your image, so you quickly jerk your head to clear it and think of something else when you realize that’s the calculation you’re making. But then again it’s so naive to think focusing on the work product is all it takes and yadda yadda yadda.

And then you realize that the thinking itself could be distracting you from actually moving forward, so you think “fuck it I just need to move” but then you move forward without the full story and you make a mistake and it makes your fear of mistakes worse!

This is getting long.

Main point is you’ll tend to freeze when you don’t know what to do. And the more quickly the state of things changes around you, the more likely you’ll fall behind and not have the info to feel safe making decisions. Also, your own stress levels will modulate how much of this uncertainty you can tolerate before you brain decides to kill the dopamine throttle and make you just sit still.