Care Pack #017
Feeling Unreal
For when you, or the world around you, has stopped feeling real. It is frightening, it is common, and it is not what you are afraid it is.
Before you begin, where are you right now?
One tap. It gives you something to measure against at the end.
There is a glass wall between you and the room. Your hands are doing things but they do not feel like your hands. You are watching yourself have a conversation from somewhere slightly behind your own head. The street you have walked down for years looks like a set. Memories from last week feel like they happened to somebody else.
It is one of the strangest things a mind does, and almost nobody reports it, because the only words available make it sound like you are losing your grip. So people sit on it, sometimes for years, while quietly terrified that it is permanent.
It has a name, it is common, and for most people it is the mind turning the volume down under too much load rather than anything breaking.
- 1.Do not check whether it has gone yet. Monitoring it is part of what holds it in place
- 2.Reach for strong sensory input rather than subtle: something cold in your hands, a sharp taste, bare feet on a hard floor
- 3.Name five things in the room out loud, and say what each one is for
- 4.Move deliberately. Stand up, stretch, walk to another room and back
- 5.You know that this feels unreal. That knowing is intact, and it is the thing telling you your mind is working
Am I losing my mind?
This is the question underneath, so it deserves a direct answer rather than a soothing one. The thing that distinguishes this experience is that you know it feels unreal. You are aware that the wall of glass is not literally there. You can say "everything feels fake", which requires knowing that it is not.
That intact awareness is the distinguishing feature. Being able to describe it as strange is evidence of the thing you are frightened you have lost.
If that is not where you are, if you are not sure whether something is real, or you are seeing or hearing things other people do not, that is a different experience and it is worth getting assessed sooner rather than at the end of the wait. Not because it is shameful, and not as an emergency by itself, but because it changes what would help and there is no sense waiting months for the wrong appointment. Contact whoever referred you, or your GP, and say plainly what is happening.
And if the unreality is arriving alongside not feeling safe with yourself, that part does not wait for any appointment. Call or text 988.
Why a mind would do this
The most useful way to hold it is as a circuit breaker. When a system takes more input than it can process for long enough, one available move is to reduce the intensity of everything: turn down feeling, turn down immediacy, put a layer between you and it.
That is protective in the short term and horrible to live inside for long, which is roughly the trade your nervous system made without consulting you. It shows up most in people under sustained stress, in the aftermath of frightening events, alongside heavy anxiety, and during long periods of exactly the kind of waiting this site exists for.
It generally lifts as the load comes down. That is why the work is lowering the load rather than straining to feel present, which is another form of monitoring and tends to hold it in place.
The monitoring loop
Everyone who has this does the same thing: checks. Am I still feeling unreal? Is it worse than an hour ago? Let me test whether that chair looks normal yet.
Checking keeps your attention pointed at the symptom, and attention on the symptom is what sustains it. It is the same mechanism that makes you suddenly aware of your own blinking.
The move is not to fight it but to let it be there while you put your attention on something with texture. Cold water, a strong taste, a task needing your hands. Occupation loosens it far more effectively than examination.
What amplifies it
Not sleeping
The fastest and most reliable amplifier there is. A few bad nights alone can produce this in someone who has never had it.
Panic
Unreality is a very common part of a panic response, and then the unreality becomes the next thing to panic about, which is its own loop.
Cannabis
Strongly associated with both bringing this on and prolonging it, sometimes long after use stops. Worth being honest about with a clinician.
Screens and scrolling
Long stretches of passive input with no bodily involvement tend to thin the sense of being present. Hours disappear and so does the day.
Skipped meals, dehydration, too much caffeine
Unglamorous and genuinely significant. These are worth ruling out before anything more complicated.
Where to go next
If panic is part of how this starts for you, the panic pack is the other half of it. And when you do get seen, use the words: ask about depersonalisation and derealisation by name.
You are still in there, noticing all of this. That was never the part that went missing.
You reached the end. Where are you now?
One tap, however it landed.
Take this one with you
You will not remember which page this was on at three in the morning. Put your email in and this pack comes to you, then one steady letter a month. Never a gate, and it stops the moment you say so.
There is more on the shelf
66 other packs sit alongside this one, written for the stretch you are in. All of them free, all of them yours.
See the other packsThis digital shelf is free for everyone, and it stays that way because people hold it open. You can be one of them, from $12 a month. Nobody is ever charged to read a pack.