Why You Feel Like a Zombie: Emotional Bugs in Depression and Anxiety

You open your laptop and try to write a reply. Just one reply, you tell yourself. But the words don’t come. The screen glares back, waiting. There’s that ache behind your eyes again, and the same unread messages blinking in the corner like distant alarms you’ve long stopped hearing. You feel tired, and also wired. Everything is too much, and yet nothing seems to matter. You haven’t cleaned the sink. You haven’t replied to Alice. You haven’t been to the gym. You vaguely remember this state. Not in sharp detail, but enough to recognize it. You’d been doing well for a while, long enough that you assumed it was behind you. That whatever had once weighed you down had been outgrown, resolved, or left in another version of your life. But now, something's stirring again. You find yourself retracing the days, scanning for triggers, wondering if there was a moment that tipped the balance. And still unsure whether this is just passing turbulence, or the return of something insidious.

Somewhere else, another version of you in a parallel life, in the same chair. You open your laptop and you are already spinning. Your hands hover, then dart, checking tabs, closing windows, reopening thdm again. You scroll through half-read messages and check your phone while waiting for one app to load, then forget what you were doing. You type a few words, delete them, then rewrite the same sentence differently four times. You catch yourself tapping your foot. You stretch your neck. You notice you’ve been holding your breath. Your breath is shallow, your shoulders are tense, you are bracing yourself. You scan the inbox for danger, bad news, subtle tone shifts, anything that might require immediate damage control. You’re jumpy, restless, alert. You reread a sentence five times before sending it. You already regret what you haven’t yet written. You open three tabs looking for answers, then forget what you were looking for. You toggle between apps compulsively, clicking and closing, scanning and circling, trying to stay ahead of something you can’t name. You don’t know what’s wrong, only that something might be, and it’s your job to catch it before it gets worse.

What you’re feeling has a pattern to it. You might recognize it in your moods, in the way your thoughts loop, or in the tension that settles into your chest. These are shaped by underlying systems that operate beneath awareness but shape nearly everything you do. It’s coming from systems shaped to carry out the long-term biological priorities of life itself. Your emotional programs weren’t made make you happy or even support your subjective goals. They were made to keep your ancestors and you alive long enough to pass on your genes. When what you care about drifts away from what your system is wired to pursue, you get friction. That friction can look like fatigue, like withdrawal, like the sense that you’re missing something but can’t quite name what. Or it can show up as restlessness and urgency. Same architecture, different signals. But underneath, the message is clear: the priorities of the system don’t always match the priorities of the person.

The Seven Core Emotional Systems: The Mechanics Behind Your Well-Being

Your emotional system isn’t a cloud of vague feelings. It’s an organized set of neural programs, each evolved to solve specific survival problems. These are your primary emotional systems, and they go by names that sound deceptively innocent: [1]

• SEEKING: Your go-getter. Motivates exploration, learning, and reward-chasing.
• PANIC/GRIEF: Your grief engine. Signals social loss, evokes support-seeking.
• PLAY: Your social learning suite. Builds trust, skills, and joy through interaction.
• FEAR: Your alarm system. Detects threats, triggers withdrawal or vigilance.
• RAGE: Your bouncer. Protects boundaries and asserts control.
• CARE: Your nurturing side. Motivates connection, protection, and social bonding.
  
• LUST: Your reproduction agent. No explanation needed.

In a well-being-optimized system, these seven work like a finely tuned board of directors. But in depression and anxiety, they've locked themselves in a basement and handed the microphone to the most dramatic member.

Depression: When Your Motivational Systems Go on Strike

Depression isn’t just sadness. It’s a full-system power outage in your SEEKING and PLAY networks, with a megaphone handed to PANIC/GRIEF. Think motivational dead zone meets unrelenting internal heartbreak.

Systems that flatline:

• SEEKING: You're not curious. You don’t care about rewards. Everything feels like cardboard.  [2,3]
• PLAY: You withdraw. Social interaction feels exhausting or meaningless.  [4]
• CARE: Your capacity for giving or receiving affection shrinks. You’re emotionally offline.  [4]
• Prefrontal cortex: Your executive functions (planning, regulating, reframing) are dimmed. You’re not just low, your “manage feelings” department is understaffed and asleep at the wheel. [2,3,5]

Systems on overdrive:

• PANIC/GRIEF: That persistent ache of loneliness, disconnection, or grief? That’s this one. It keeps the internal alarms ringing. [4,5]
• Amygdala and limbic system: Hyperactive. You react intensely to minor slights or sad thoughts. It’s like living inside a melancholic Instagram filter that can’t be turned off. [5]

Anxiety and PTSD: When FEAR Grabs the Steering Wheel and Floors It

Now imagine the kind off opposite problem. In anxiety disorders, your emotional system doesn’t shut down, it breaks the speed limit. Your FEAR system thinks you’re under attack. Constantly. From everything.

Systems hijacked:

• FEAR: Always on. You’re scanning for threats, real or imagined. Your amygdala is a caffeinated chihuahua barking at every shadow. [3,5]
• RAGE: Not always obvious, but often bubbling under the surface, especially if your anxiety shows up as irritability or snapping. [4]
• Amygdala connectivity: The threat-detection hub connects tightly to your emotional and decision-making regions, flooding your experience with anticipatory doom. [5]

Systems shut down:

• Prefrontal cortex: The regulator. The negotiator. Unfortunately, it’s taking a nap while FEAR throws a rave. [3,5]
• SEEKING: Who has time for curiosity when you’re busy catastrophizing? [4]
• PLAY: Laughter? Lightness? Interaction? Suspiciously dangerous activities. [4]

When Depression and Anxiety Join Forces (Comorbid Horror Show Edition)

A lot of times you won't fit neatly into one category. Depression and anxiety often cohabitate like dysfunctional roommates. SEEKING is off. PLAY is gone. But fear still screams while sadness hums in the background like a broken fridge. The result is an emotional misadventure. Anxiety can even hijack the brain regions that are dormant in depression, like the insula or medial prefrontal cortex. So you might feel both numb and overwhelmed, detached yet panicked, a combo meal of contradictory suffering. [3]

Chronic stress only makes things worse. It ramps up RAGE system activity, not the emotional outburst kind, but the cellular inflammation kind, via a receptor charmingly named RAGE (Receptor for Advanced Glycation End Products). Yes, even your microglia are pissed off. [6] (Microglia are your brain’s tiny, paranoid cleanup crew—roaming around with mop buckets full of cytokines, ready to clean up messes or start molecular bar fights depending on their mood.)

Summary: Your Emotional System Isn’t Broken. It’s Running Old Code.

Here’s the brief:

• The complaint no. 1: Depression
  Hypoactivated Systems: SEEKING, PLAY, CARE, Prefrontal Cortex
  Hyperactivated Systems: SADNESS/PANIC, Amygdala/Limbic
• The complaint no. 2: Anxiety
  Hypoactivated Systems: Prefrontal Cortex, SEEKING, PLAY
  Hyperactivated Systems: FEAR, RAGE, Amygdala Connectivity
• The complaint no. 2: PTSD
  Hypoactivated Systems: Prefrontal Cortex, SEEKING
  Hyperactivated Systems: FEAR, SADNESS/PANIC, Amygdala
• Amygdala hyperactivation and prefrontal hypoactivation are common neural signatures across mood and anxiety disorders, reflecting the interplay between emotional reactivity and impaired regulation. [3,5]

You emotional system is not exactly failing. It’s just doing its job, in the wrong context. Your emotional systems evolved to make copies of your geney by keeping you alive and reproducing. Now they’re managing unread emails, dating apps, and performance reviews. And they’re doing it badly.

But there’s good news: emotional systems are retrainable. What’s dysregulated can be recalibrated. That’s what emotional development is: upgrading your system from its genetic default to something that actually supports your life.

Because you’re not a hunter-gatherer in a lion-infested savannah. You’re trying to function in a Slack-infested open-plan office while keeping your inner zombie from eating your to-do list. And that requires strategy.

Sources

[1] Panksepp, J. (2004). Affective neuroscience: The foundations of human and animal emotions. Oxford university press.

[2] Int-Veen, I., Laicher, H., Torka, F., Kroczek, A., Bihlmaier, I., Storchak, H., Velten-Schurian, K., Dresler, T., Täglich, R., Fallgatter, A. J., Ehlis, A.-C., & Rosenbaum, D. (2023). Prefrontal hypoactivation induced via social stress is more strongly associated with state rumination than depressive symptomatology. Scientific Reports, 13(1), 15147. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-41403-y

[3] Schlund, M. W., Verduzco, G., Cataldo, M. F., & Hoehn-Saric, R. (2012). Generalized anxiety modulates frontal and limbic activation in major depression. Behavioral and Brain Functions, 8(8), 1-5. https://doi.org/10.1186/1744-9081-8-8

[4] Montag, C., & Panksepp, J. (2019). The Dutch translation of the Brief Affective Neuroscience Personality Scales (BANPS). Personality Neuroscience, 2, e6. https://doi.org/10.1017/pen.2019.6

[5] Sha, Z., Wager, T. D., Mechelli, A., & He, Y. (2019). Identification of common neural circuit disruptions in emotional processing across psychiatric disorders. Nature Human Behaviour, 3(3), 265–273. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-018-0370-3

[6] Zhang, Y., Zhang, H., Zhang, Y., & Wang, Y. (2023). Persistent increase in microglial RAGE contributes to chronic stress-induced priming of depressive-like behavior. Brain, Behavior, and Immunity, 115, 101–113. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bbi.2023.01.005