What Your Always-On Alertness Is Altering

I am staring at the blue light of my phone at three in the morning and my heart is hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird. I just saw a work email notification that could have waited until Monday. It is then I realize the damage of What Your Always-On Alertness Is Altering. I feel the acid in my stomach and the tightness in my jaw. I am a copywriter who is paid to understand the human psyche, yet I am failing to manage my own. We have turned our lives into a perpetual stakeout. We are waiting for a crisis that we have subconsciously decided is inevitable. This constant state of high alert is not a skill. It is a slow poisoning of the soul. I am writing this from the trenches of a nervous system that forgot how to turn off. If you feel like you are vibrating at a frequency that is about to shatter glass, you are not alone. 1. YOUR BRAIN IS LOSING THE ABILITY TO DISTINGUISH BETWEEN A LION AND A LIKED PHOTO. Evolutionarily, we are wired to scan the horizon for predators. Now, the horizon is a five inch screen in your palm. Your amygdala does not know the difference between a missed deadline and a physical threat. It pumps CORTISOL into your veins regardless of the actual danger. This leaves you exhausted but unable to sleep. You are TIRED TO THE BONE yet your mind is racing like a Ferrari in a school zone. You have forgotten how to be bored. Boredom is the soil where original thoughts grow. When you are always on, the soil is salted. Nothing grows there except anxiety and reactive thoughts. You are no longer the architect of your day. You are merely a first responder to other people's emergencies. 2. YOUR SENSE OF TIME IS BEING DISTORTED INTO A NARROW SLIVER. When you are always alert, you only live in the next five minutes. The past is a blur of tasks and the future is a wall of dread. I remember when an hour felt like a long time. Now, an hour vanishes in three refreshes of an inbox. We are losing the capacity for deep, slow work. THE TRAGEDY is that the world's most valuable problems require slow thinking. By staying alert to every trivial ping, you are sacrificing your ability to solve the big stuff. You are trading your GENIUS for a series of micro-doses of dopamine. It is a bad trade. It is a trade that leaves you feeling empty at the end of a very busy day. I look at my calendar and see blocks of time that I have survived, not lived. We are becoming experts at survival and amateurs at existence. THE COST OF THE VIGIL This alertness is a tax on your humanity. You think you are being productive by staying reachable. In reality, you are just being AVAILABLE FOR INTERRUPTION. There is a massive difference between being productive and being busy. Alertness creates a false sense of urgency. Everything feels like it matters EQUALLY. When everything is a priority, nothing is a priority. You are treating a coupon code with the same intensity as a family crisis. I see it in the way I talk to my friends. I am checking my pocket while they are pouring their heart out. 3. YOUR INTUITION IS BEING DROWNED OUT BY THE NOISE. Intuition is a quiet voice. It cannot scream over the sound of a thousand notifications. When you are always on, you rely on data and external validation. You stop trusting the gut feeling that tells you which path to take. I have made my worst business decisions while I was in a state of hyper-alertness. I was reacting to the market instead of listening to my own vision. THE NOISE IS A CAGE. We built the cage ourselves and we call it staying informed. But information is not wisdom. Alertness is not awareness. Awareness is expansive and calm. Alertness is narrow and jagged. I want to burn the cage down. I want to remember what it feels like to have a thought that does not involve a task. 4. YOUR PHYSICAL BODY IS PAYING THE ULTIMATE PRICE. Your muscles are locked in a permanent cringe. Your breath is shallow and trapped in your upper chest. I caught myself holding my breath while reading a news feed yesterday. My body thought I was hiding from a predator. This chronic stress alters your DNA. It ages you faster than the sun. We are a generation of people with the nervous systems of war veterans without ever having left our couches. IT IS RIDICULOUS. IT IS UNNECESSARY. The world will not stop spinning if you put your phone in a drawer for an hour. The sun will still rise if you do not check your bank balance at midnight. I am learning to reclaim the silence. It is the hardest work I have ever done. It requires more discipline to be still than it does to be busy. We equate busyness with importance. We equate alertness with being a high performer. But the highest performers I know are the ones who can turn it off completely. They have a switch. Most of us have a broken dial that is stuck on eleven. I am tired of the dial. I am tired of the phantom vibrations in my pocket when my phone is on the table. We are being rewired to be cogs in a machine that never sleeps. But you are a biological creature. You need rhythms. You need the ebb and flow. If you are always at high tide, you will eventually erode the shore. I am choosing to walk away from the watchtower. I am choosing to let the fire go out for a while. The world can wait. The emails can wait. The imaginary disasters can wait. What Your Always-On Alertness Is Altering is your capacity for joy. JOY IS NOT LOUD. Joy is the quiet presence you feel when the noise stops. I want that back. I think you want that back too. We have to fight for it. We have to be aggressively protective of our peace. It is the only thing that actually belongs to us. Everything else is just noise. Everything else is just the world trying to steal your attention for a profit. Do not let them have it for free. Do not give them your health in exchange for a scroll. I am putting the phone down now. I am going to look at a tree. I am going to breathe until my stomach moves. I am going to stop being a sentry. I am going to start being a human being again. FINAL THOUGHT THE ONLY WAY TO WIN THE RAT RACE IS TO STOP RUNNING.