Tough isn’t the same as cold. Anyone can be cold.

Shutting down is easy and it gets mistaken for strength constantly. Going cold costs nothing: you stop caring out loud, you make the joke instead of the sentence, and from outside it reads as being unbothered. The genuinely difficult version is staying warm while things are hard, which takes more from you than any amount of armor.

On the next bad day, do one warm thing you do not feel like doing. Answer the message, ask how somebody else is, say the true thing instead of the sharp one. You are not being soft. You are holding a position that is much harder to hold than the cold one.