Is emotional blunting the same as equanimity?
He is like Buddha... doesn't react emotionally to anything. Stays calm. But where is that calmness or indifference coming from? Is it from insight of an evolved self or is it a result of medication? The curiosity led me to distinguish between equanimity and emotional blunting.
Equanimity or upekkhā means experiencing emotions without being overwhelmed or controlled by them. You can still experience profound joy, grief, compassion and love, but you react to them calmly without craving or aversion.
Emotional or medical blunting is a chemical side effect of medicines where one's feelings become flatter. It means that the emotions themselves are less intensely experienced. It is fairly common and most often linked to antidepressants, especially SSRIs (like sertraline, escitalopram, fluoxetine). Surveys suggest roughly 40–60% of people on antidepressants report some of it. What people describe it as:
- Feeling less sad, but also less happy or excited
- Caring less about things that used to matter
- Finding it hard to cry, laugh, or feel close to people
- Feeling “fine” but somehow absent
How do equanimity and emotional blunting differ? Well they can look the same from outside. Both people seem calm and don’t react much. But the key difference is what’s happening inside them:
Blunting reduces the intensity of feelings so emotions and sensations arrive weaker. There is less to react to. Someone with equanimity might experience grief fully without losing their balance. Someone with emotional blunting might barely experience the grief at all.
Equanimity keeps the intensity of the feeling but changes the reaction. In Vipassana, you are trained to notice sensations more clearly, not less. What reduces is clinging to pleasant sensations and aversion to unpleasant ones. So while medical blunting lowers awareness, equanimity, in the Vipassana sense, requires awareness to go up.
Joy and care: Medical blunting usually reduces positive feelings too, and people often say they “care less.” So less empathy. Equanimity or upekkhā on the other hand is always accompanied with empathy, care and compassion for others.
Where it comes from: Blunting is a chemical side effect. Upekkhā comes from knowledge and insight, mainly seeing directly that sensations arise and pass (anicca). Btw, here we need to distinguish from “equanimity of unknowing” (aññāṇupekkhā), meaning indifference that comes from not seeing clearly. So a person who is simply unmoved because they don’t understand, is not being equanimous.
Responding: An equanimous person can still act firmly despite the agitation or excitement. A blunted person often has less drive to act at all.
With so many people on anti-depressants these days, I am curious what does it mean for empathy and emotional connection between human beings? Roughly 150–300 million people worldwide are estimated to be on anti-depressants, which is about 2–4% of the world’s population. Most of them are in richer Western countries.
I wonder and this topic concerns me because I know people with whom I had a richer emotional connection before they were started taking anti-depressants. Now they feel emotionally vacant, and I feel disconnected from them. With every interaction with them I am left wanting, and I can imagine how hard it must be for people who live closely, everyday with them. The people taking the meds take it for good reason I imagine, the numbness probably helps them deal with whatever difficulties they are facing in life. But what does it do for their quality of life and the ones around them? What could be a better alternative that would keep them more alive internally, while helping them deal with the difficulties?