You finish reading a text message, and your chest tightens. Nothing’s actually wrong. You know it’s just a text. You even know your reaction is way out of proportion. But knowing that doesn’t help one bit. Maybe you’ve even laughed at yourself about it. And still, there it is: that sense of dread, or danger, or just tension.
That gap, between understanding a reaction and still having it anyway, is one of the most human things people bring into my therapy room. Many people don’t come in because they can’t solve a problem. They come in because they’re suffering in a way their mind can’t quite grasp. Over the years I’ve come to think there’s one way of looking at this that tends to bring real relief. Not because it fixes anything, but because it eases the self-blame.
Lasting patterns have conditions that keep them going
Here’s an image I find helpful. A flame only holds its shape because fuel and air keep flowing through it. Cut the flow, and it’s gone. Living things work the same way. Your body holds its temperature, chemistry, and structure only by constantly taking in energy and shedding heat. You never rest from being alive. None of us do. In living systems, order isn’t a resting state. It’s maintained, moment by moment, by work.
Here’s what matters: a habit, a reaction, or a belief that keeps coming back usually has something keeping it going. That doesn’t make it good or bad, and it doesn’t explain all of it. What it does is tell you where to look.
This leads to a gentler question than the one we usually ask ourselves: when a reaction keeps showing up, what’s feeding it? Not “what’s wrong with me.” Just: what is this thing made of, and what keeps it alive?
An alarm built for a small world
Your body’s stress response is old. Really old. And parts of it can be a poor fit for the world most of us live in now. It responds most readily to danger right in front of you: the racing heart, the sharpened focus, energy pulled away from digestion and rest so you can act. But it also responds to danger that’s social, symbolic, or imagined. A subject line can land like a threat. So can a look from someone across the room. That isn’t foolishness. It’s a system built to take the possibility of danger seriously.
The threats most of us picture first have a beginning and an end. A storm passes. An argument gets settled. The danger moves off. Your body gets word that it can stand down. Alarm, then recovery. A loop that closes.
Modern life doesn’t always let that loop close. Work stays unfinished. The news keeps bringing new danger. What other people think of you stays vague and open-ended. Sometimes your body just doesn’t get a clear answer to the one question it keeps asking: Is it over?
Robert Sapolsky made this point famous with the zebra. When a lion gives chase, the zebra’s stress response surges. When the chase is over, it settles. The zebra gets its answer. People don’t always get theirs. Our stress can stay switched on long after the moment that set it off, especially when the situation is ongoing, unclear, or hard to resolve. We can end up carrying a body built for short emergencies through problems that don’t come with an ending.
What’s missing is the answer
Many living systems stay responsive because what they do has consequences, and those consequences come back around and shape what happens next. In cybernetics, that’s called feedback. When the right information gets back, a system can adjust. When it’s weak, delayed, or buried, a pattern can keep running even when it’s costing you.
Your inbox refills. The news doesn’t end; it updates relentlessly. The judgment of a thousand strangers never settles into the verdict of the few people who actually matter. The alarm keeps asking, is it over? And sometimes nothing answers clearly. So the alarm keeps going. It may simply be doing what a protective system does when the question is still open: staying ready. But staying ready costs something: your attention, your sleep, your digestion, your sense of safety. Over time that cost can add up. Researchers call part of that buildup allostatic load, the wear and tear on a body that stays on alert for too long.
If that’s even partly true for you, then some of what feels like personal failure might be something gentler: an old, faithful system waiting to hear back. That might even be part of the answer to the most tired question we ask ourselves: Why can’t I just let this go?
Seeing it isn’t the same as fixing it
I want to be clear with you here, because reality is more important than comfort: none of this necessarily makes the reaction disappear. Understanding rarely does right away, and that’s exactly where we started. The chest still tightens. The message still lands.
But it changes the question, and that change matters. Instead of asking what’s wrong with you, which is a question with no kind answer, you can ask what the alarm is still waiting to hear. That question has somewhere to go. It opens a different conversation.
That’s not a solution. It’s a way of seeing.
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Sources and further reading:
- Wiener, Norbert. Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948). On feedback, homeostasis, and how living systems maintain themselves.
- Sterling, Peter & Eyer, Joseph. “Allostasis: A new paradigm to explain arousal pathology.” In Handbook of Life Stress, Cognition and Health (1988). On how the stress response adapts to ongoing demand, and why it can become maladaptive when the demands never resolve.
- McEwen, Bruce S. The End of Stress as We Know It (2002). On allostatic load and the cumulative wear of unresolved activation.
- Schrödinger, Erwin. What Is Life? (1944). On order maintained through energy expenditure in living systems.
- Sapolsky, Robert. Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers (3rd ed., 2004). On how stress responses calibrated to acute threats go wrong in chronic conditions.
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