Reading · EMOTIONAL WEALTH

The sabre-toothed tiger catwalks through the long grasses, its muscles flexing, head low and forward, eyes scanning, ears listening, nose sniffing. It pauses and licks its teeth in slo-mo left to right. A glistening droplet of drool wobbles at the corner of its mouth. Dinner is in sight. There’s a small group of the creatures that walk on two legs and carry sticks with sharp stones tied to one end, that have more fur on their heads and faces than on their bodies. It’s in that pause, that the tiger sees the opportunities and the possibilities. It sees everything. All of it. All at once. All of it clear.

We no longer face sabre-toothed tigers, but our bodies haven't received the memo. We’ve simply rebranded survival mode as “a busy week” and convinced ourselves that constant overwhelm is just the cost of entry for a modern life.

We call it stress and we’ve normalised it.

We blame the current status quo for our mental health. We say it’s an understandable symptom of modern realities. We blame screen time and those who brainwash us to scroll. We blame hustle culture and those who tell us we’re failing if we don’t get up at 4AM, work only 4 hours a week, and 4x our income every month. We blame our loneliness and lack of community and connection on factors outside of our control.

But deep down we know it’s not normal, don’t we? How can it be? How can that be what life is meant to be?

Is this really it? Live fast, die old, leave an exhausted crumpled crinkled corpse?

(If you’re lucky)

And yet… we keep going, keep pushing through, keep taking on more, keep acting like we can handle it, like our livelihood is in danger if we don’t do more, prove more, or perform more.

Everything is stressful. Everything is triggering. The hopelessness of inbox zero, the meeting about a meeting, the random raised eyebrow from Gareth in accounting that meant nothing but suddenly means everything.

You think you can’t stop or slow down or pause.

You think everything will fall apart if you do.

That the Big Boss Man would call you into his office and ask you to take a seat. That you’ll be leaving with your desk-stuff-and-things in a cardboard box as you’re escorted from the premises grateful for the cardboard box that’s soon to become your home!

So you keep going, until you’re exhausted. You’re full of tears and free of hope. The responsibility-free cardboard box home starts looking like a suite at the Four Seasons.

Most people who are stuck in a spin-cycle of overwhelm are convinced they don't have time to do anything to help themselves stop being overwhelmed.

But what if we did stop, or pause, just for a moment?

I spent half a century (at least) not stopping. I was fuelled by adrenaline and didn’t even know it. I thought constant anxiety, overthinking, and stress were just part of being a capable, high-functioning adult. I tolerated it as being normal. I hated the rumination, the discomfort in my body, the constant angst about my health. But I thought it was just “me”.

On the outside, I kept going. I built, achieved, reinvented, and adapted.

But on the inside, I was hyper-vigilant… always scanning, always “on alert”. It was exhausting to sustain, but stopping didn’t feel like an option. So I did what many high-functioning humans do… I kept moving. Reinventing. Chasing the next version of life that might finally feel right.

I thought the problem was that I hadn’t found my path yet, so I had to keep going.

Then I saw what I didn’t want to see at the time - I wasn’t lacking purpose or direction or meaning…

I was trying to build a life with a nervous system that didn’t feel safe. And you can’t build anything lasting or real on an unsafe foundation.

Once I saw that, I saw everything else differently.

I saw how I’d been through all of the “4 F-words” of survival mode throughout my life (the Fight, the Flight, the Freeze, the Fawn) over and over again.

(No wonder I was exhausted and overwhelmed all the time!)

I remember one particular scenario where I cycled through them all to see which one would get me the best outcome in the situation...

(It’s only in retrospect that I could see what was happening at the time.)

I started with Freeze (the shock and surprise of finding myself there, with a discomforting layer of shame, holding my breath, physically shrinking, pulling backwards, mind blank).

It didn’t work.

I shifted to Flight (every part of me wanted to get out of the room but I couldn’t, my mind racing, coming up with arguments, negotiations, but the amplified sound of my heartbeat drowned out any reasoning).

It didn’t work.

I followed up with Fight (I got angry in the hope of standing my ground, sitting up taller, heat spreading through my chest into my cheeks tightening my jaw. But I held the anger inside of me. Mad at myself.)

It didn’t work.

At a loss, I ended in Fawn (believing that if I was passive and pleasing, the situation would end sooner...)

(Especially as the three other Fs had failed me FFS)

It ended when it ended. I got out physically, but my mind and nervous system stayed in that room.

I played out the whole scenario over and over for a long time! Wondering what I could have done differently, how I might have changed the outcome, how I could have avoided it in the first place…

And I wore a cloak of shame like it was the latest fashion item.

I know that my nervous system was doing exactly what it was designed to do in that room. Every single F-word response was an attempt to keep me safe from something that had been classified as a genuine threat to my survival.

But… how often do we cycle through the 4 F-words when there is no actual threat to life? And yet our bodies react in the exact same way…

How often are you on edge, on alert, triggered, reacting, panicking, worrying, ruminating? When it’s not a threat to your actual life.

You see, the problem isn’t your nervous system.

The problem is the software we have installed. We’re all running Caveman OS, and the prime directive of the programming is to stay alive.

(And of course, we want that to be running!)

The nervous system is incredible! And very bloody useful in a prehistoric world where danger was real, physical, and (hopefully, mostly) temporary. Our caveman ancestors had to recognise the patterns that alerted them to danger. Like movement in the long grasses when there was no breeze, or squawking birds doing a mass exit from a tree, or the smell of something “off”…

The sabre-toothed tiger either got you or it didn’t.

Either way, it was over, you were dead, or the energy you created by one or more of the 4 F-Words was used up, dissipated and completed through movement (fighting or running), through sound (screaming or grunting), or through shaking (sabre-teeth will have that effect)… all of it physical expression in the body.

The (surviving) cavemen completed the stress response triggered by the presence of the tiger and went back to the fire to rest. They’d sit in a circle and tell the stories of the day, or paint them on the walls of the cave.

Prime directive accomplished.

Survival mode deactivated.

Nervous system reset.

Sleep protocol loading...

And our nervous systems still expect that kind of closure after a stressful event. It’s still waiting for the fireside calm, the completion of the stress response, the exhale that signals to the body, “It’s over now, I am safe.”

But you never get it.

Because Gareth’s eyebrow leads to the inbox leads to the meeting about the meeting leads to the drive home where you rehearse the conversation you’re dreading leads to the wine leads to the scroll leads to the 4am ceiling-staring where your nervous system is still running the threat assessment it never got to complete.

There is no campfire, dammit!

And a nervous system that never gets to deactivate stays on, like a low hum, always scanning for danger… Using up whatever energy it has left in the body just to stay on alert.

And then everything is overwhelming because there’s no room to handle anything when you’re already handling everything!

And the only way out of overwhelm, when everything is too much, is the opposite of what every nerve ending is screaming:

You have to slow down, you have to make the time to pause.

(Regardless of all the overwhelming overwhelm of being overwhelmed!)

Everything happens in the pause.

And it’s not the pause you earn after the to-do list is done (you already know that one never comes!). The pause you intentionally make. Even if it’s a small one, an imperfect one, or an interrupted one! Take three deep breaths before opening an email, or stand outside for 60 seconds, or put one hand on your heart and one on your belly and feel what you feel while you’re feeling it.

Take this pause right now:

Drop your shoulders.

Unclench your jaw.

Take a deep breathe in and exhale long and slow…

(That’s right.)

Because the pause is the only place where something other than reaction is possible. It’s space that allows for creation, even if the only thing you’re creating is the space to choose your response.

It’s a start. It’s something you can build on.

Like the cavemen, you can allow the stress response to complete, you can get grounded in the pause, you can regulate your nervous system in the pause.

And like the tiger, you can see the opportunities and the possibilities. You can see everything. All of it. All at once. All of it clear.

That’s the reward for slowing down, for pausing, for stopping.

I know what you’re thinking:

“But, I don’t have time to slow down.”

Show me your screen time. I’ll wait.

The flames shimmy and sway, disco dancing as they whisper in crackles and snaps. The cavemen sit in a circle lit by the fire, their giant shadows shape-shifting and distorted on the walls of the cave. They share their stories from surviving another day. “That Inbox-osaurus was a big one today but I got it to its knees!”, “I had to run from a Meeting-adon.”, “Staying really still and hiding from the Trigger-raptor was the only option I had for a moment and then I ran for cover!” Each of them is calm, survival mode is completed and deactivated in the safety of the cave.

The Normalised Overwhelm of the Modern Human

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