Was this a shutdown?

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Yesterday something weird happened. After I came back from work I lay down on the sofa. My thoughts were racing, I had so many voices in my head that I was kinda freaking out. I lay like that approximately for 4 hours without moving a muscle. Then my boyfriend asked if we could feed our new baby parrot together. I got up and helped him. I remember feeling like I was on autopilot and seeing my surroundings in a distorted way. (Probably derealization, which I have very often these days.) I don't remember what happened afterwards. Today in the morning my boyfriend talked to me and I talked back. He said 'oh, you're talking now!' Apparently I stopped responding to him after we fed the parrot. He tried to talk to me and I was not saying a word. I don't even remember going to bed where I woke up today. I was feeling slightly sick when I woke up. Can this be a sort of shutdown?

When I was young I daydreamed often. Daydreaming is a form of mild disassociation. Later in life, I developed this into a skill. I can put my body on autopilot and let my mind run off and try and solve a problem. I view it as a unique valuable skill.

You said "My thoughts were racing, I had so many voices in my head". So it sounds like you had some information that need to be processed and resolved and that is what your mind did. Your body was on autopilot and your mind was very busy working.

Yes, you are right. If you experienced this disassociation you probably would have some recollection of it. So yes it was a form of shutdown caused by stress.

Consider that you have a complex brain. The outer brain is called a social brain, the middle often produces a fight or flight response and the inner or core brain is similar to that of an infant. When the brain is subjected to stress, it collapses inward. If a social response is ineffective, it collapse down to the middle brain and then finally to the core brain. In the fight-or-flight response, the objective is to get away from the source of threat. All of our muscles prepare for this escape by increasing their tension level, our heart rate and respiration increase, and our whole basic metabolic system is flooded with adrenaline. Blood is diverted to the muscles, away from the viscera. The goal is to run away, or if we feel that we can't escape or if we perceive that the individual that's trying to attack us is less strong than we are, to attack them. Or if we're cornered by a predator—in other words, if there's no way to escape—then we'll fight back. Now, if none of those procedures are effective, and it looks like we're going to be killed, we go into the shock state, the tonic immobility. Again, this all goes back to our animal heritage.

Humans experience this frozen state as helpless terror and panic. It is a state of utter hopelessness. Sometimes these are referred to as meltdowns or panic attacks. Tonic immobility is the last-ditch of defense cascade, occurs in traumatized humans. Immobility correlates with tachycardia and low heart rate variability. Cardiac deceleration response is hypothesized to be part of a freezing-like defensive response that includes reduced body sway and heart rate deceleration. Tonic immobility is an innate behavioral response characterized by temporary, profound physical inactivity, analgesia, and relative unresponsiveness to external stimulation that occurs in response to inescapable threats. It is a form of disassociation similar to self-hypnosis.

Being physically, mentally, and emotionally immobilized by overwhelming stress permits an individual to not feel the harrowing enormity of what’s happening to them, which in their hyperarousal state might threaten their very sanity. In such instances some of the chemicals (i.e., endorphins) secreted functions as an analgesic, so the pain of any injury (to their body or psyche) is experienced with far less intensity.

One of the things that Bessel van der Kolk showed when he first started to do trauma research with functional MRIs is that when people are in the trauma state, they actually shut down the frontal parts of their brain and particularly the area on the left cortex called Broca's area, which is responsible for speech. When the person is in the traumatic state, those brain regions are literally shut down; they're taken offline.  Some Aspies report that during a meltdown, they have difficulty processing speech. It is like hearing white noise. Others indicate they lose their ability to think in words. Rather they revert back to thinking in terms of pictures and video clips and when they try and communicate, their words come out as gibberish. Others indicate they lose their ability to process all sensory inputs. Sometimes during a panic attack, the whole body goes limp and the person will collapse on the floor.

For an individual this state of tonic immobility is very scary one to experience. The individual literally lose control over their actions. Highly traumatized and chronically neglected or abused individuals are dominated by the immobilization/shutdown system. Chronically traumatized individuals tend to be plagued with dissociative symptoms, including frequent spaciness, unreality, depersonalization, a general disengagement from life and various somatic symptoms and health complaints.