Measuring emotional ‘emptiness’ could help manage this potentially life-threatening experience

Imagine a hollowness deep in your chest, a vacant space where feelings needs to be. Imagine being numb and devoid of all emotion, completely satisfied or sad – with any sensations simply passing throughout you. You are watching the world go by from behind a screen – so disconnected that you are feeling 1,000,000 miles away from people you care about essentially the most.

This is how lots of of individuals have described the existential feeling of emotional “emptiness”. Perhaps some facets may feel familiar to you. After all, research has repeatedly shown that emptiness is a standard experiencefelt by a lot of us world wide.

For some, emptiness could also be a fleeting experience during a time of immense difficulty in our lives, which passes. Following a period of feeling empty, we may give you the chance to sense ourselves returning, feeling progressively more connected to our inner-self, other people, and the world around us.

But for some, emptiness is a chronic, debilitating experience which has been found to be strongly connected to quite a few life-limiting mental health difficulties corresponding to depression, anxiety and experiences of hearing voices, including for individuals who receive a diagnosis of a personality disorder.

Recent developments including latest measurement toolsnonetheless, are beginning to shine a lightweight on this elusive experience, enabling researchers and mental health professionals to higher support individuals who feel this manner.

What is emptiness?

In 2022, together with a colleague, I proposed a formal definition of emptiness as:

A sense that one goes through life mechanically, devoid of emotions and purpose, and due to this fact is empty inside, with emptiness often being bodily felt in the shape of a discomfort within the chest. This is coupled with feelings that one is disconnected from others, ultimately invisible to others, and unable to contribute to a world that is still the identical, but from which one is distant and detached.

Our research found that while emptiness is experienced by individuals who have mental health difficulties, additionally it is felt by those that have never suffered with their mental health before, and who could have never felt the necessity to seek help from professionals.

Despite this, across all of those that took part within the research, it was found that greater feelings of emptiness were related to poorer mental health and lower satisfaction with life.

Emptiness and mental health

People who feel empty often or on a regular basis are more prone to have self-harmed, considered suicideor gone on to make an try and end their life.

These findings add to previous research showing that emptiness is expounded to harmful use of medicine, alcohol, and unsafe sex. Other studies show that feelings of emptiness appear to affect every aspect of an individual’s individual and social world.

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Self-harm, suicide and use of gear or sex could be understood, then, as ways of coping with or distracting from the emotional pain of feeling empty.

Measuring emptiness

Thankfully, research on this much-needed area is progressing. Our 2022 definition has increased the understanding of emptiness amongst researchers and health professionals, and has led researchers to develop a brand new way of measuring and tracking it over time.

The Psychological Emptiness Scalecreated in 2022 by clinical and social psychologists alongside statisticians, is a questionnaire consisting of 19 items. It asks people questions corresponding to whether or not they feel emotionally numb, that they’re going through the motions, and that they haven’t any direction in life.

This tool is now available for researchers and mental health professionals to make use of to formally assess an individual’s level of emptiness. It allows this complex, existential feeling to be accurately captured and quantified.

This will enable researchers to properly study emptiness, explore questions on the way it develops, and the way different therapeutic interventions may help people to administer and reduce this sense.

Emptiness is a commonly experienced and potentially life-threatening feeling. Accurate measurement marks a big step forward in our ability to discover, understand and supply support to individuals who feel this manner, within the hope of ultimately reducing distress and saving lives.