Ignoring Alarms
“Our bodies are constantly bombarded by visceral warning signs, and, in an attempt to control these processes, we often become expert at ignoring our gut feelings... We learn to hide from our own selves.”- Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, Dutch psychiatrist.
Imagine a deer grazing peacefully in a meadow. The wind shifts and a wolf appears. And in that instant the deer’s entire body changes. Its ears rise up. It raises its head up to hear the smallest of sounds and movements. Its heart races. The blood leaves the digestive system and rushes to the muscles. Its pupils widen. Basically, every call of the body prepares the deer for one purpose only and that is its survival. And then the deer runs. It leaps over rocks, dodges shrubs and escapes from the wolf chasing it. When it has realized it has outrun the wolf it stops. It pauses. And its body begins to shake. First the legs. Then the torso and then the face and ears tremble. The skin quivers. It breathes deeply. And after a few moments it looks around and returns to grazing as before. As though nothing happened. The danger has passed and its nervous system knows it. The stress response has come to an end.
Now imagine you- a human being. Your angry boss criticizes you. Or your partner says- we need to talk. Your body technically reacts exactly as the deer. Your heart races. Breathing becomes shallow. Muscles tighten. Stress hormones flood the bloodstream. The nervous system prepares to fight, run or freeze. But unlike the deer, you cannot run. You are unable to yell. You cannot shake. You cannot cry. You smile politely. And say- “I’m fine. Its chill”. You swallow your words. You sit perfectly still while the body is preparing for a battle that will never happen.
The boss walks away. The partner walks away. The argument ends. But inside the body, the emergency has not. The nervous system has started a survival response that was never allowed to finish. This is one of the hidden costs of civilization. From childhood most of us are taught that survival responses are unacceptable. We are told-
Don’t cry
Be brave
Stop shaking or fidgeting
Calm down
Don’t be so emotional
And slowly we are conditioned to learn that fitting into society is sometimes rewarded more than listening to our biology. Our bodies speak one language while our cultures speak another. And this creates a split inside us. For one part of us sees danger and the other part insists that nothing is wrong. Over years this becomes exhausting. The nervous system is not confused because life is difficult. It is confused because it keeps preparing for action while being repeatedly told not to act. Imagine pressing the accelerator of a car while keeping one foot firmly on the brake. What happens? The engine gets strained. Heat builds. Fuel is burned but the car barely moves. Most of us live this way every day. Our bodies pressing the accelerator but minds pressing the brake. And eventually we don’t feel energized. We feel tired. Not because we lack strength but because so much of our strength is spent holding our lives, minds and bodies together. This helps to explain why stress is not just about what happens to us. It’s also about what our bodies were not allowed to complete. An argument with a boss or a partner can last only 8 minutes but the body’s preparation for that event can linger much longer if the nervous system never receives clear signals that the threat has truly passed. This does not mean that every illness or emotional struggle comes from unfinished stress. Human health is influenced by many factors- genetics, relationships, environment, infections, nutrition and even chance. But chronic activation of the stress response can contribute to wear and tear on the body over time, affecting mood, sleep, attention, immunity and physical health. So, the truth hence emerges- humans are uniquely capable of suppressing, delaying and overriding our natural stress responses because of self- awareness, language, memory and social rules.
For all us humans, survival has no ending. A zebra does not wake up in the morning worrying about the lion that chased it three months ago. A deer does not replay the wolf’s escape a thousand times before going to sleep. A hornbill does not spend days wondering if it should have flown to a warmer place 10 days sooner! Animals perpetually live in a world filled with danger and yet most of them spend little time in fear. Their lives are very intense. But when danger appears every part of their bodies is mobilized to survive and when danger retreats the organism returns to balance. Sadly, we don’t do this. Our greatest gift is also our greatest burden. We possess imagination, memory, language and reasoning. The ability to travel through time without ever leaving the present. For long after an event has ended, we can relive it in astonishing detail. A smell, a sound, a single word can make the body react as if the past has become the present. The wolf is no longer outside. It can live inside the mind.
Our nervous system does not respond to reality. It responds to what it believes is happening. It responds to memory, expectation, imagination and memory. It allows us to plan, anticipate and protect us from future threats. This great achievement of our brain comes at a cost. The same brain that can imagine tomorrow can also become trapped in yesterday. Imagine there was a fire alarm in your hand. Its purpose is to ring when there is fire and smoke. What if even after the fire is gone the alarm still rings. and more so it never stops ringing. What do you think would happen to you? You would stop hearing it. You would call the noise normal. And you might even forget that something like silence exists. This is what chronic stress feels like. The alarm keeps sounding not because the danger is still present but because the nervous system has learned that danger could return any time again. And this is a triumph of the survival instinct. Not a failure of the mind. The brain has one primary responsibility and that is to keep you alive at any cost whatsoever. So, it would rather mistake safety for danger than mistake danger for safety. From an evolutionary lens this negativity bias makes sense. Your ancestor- an ancient man who lived in caves and was cautious survived more often than the one who ignored warning signs. In other words, natural selection favoured nervous systems that remembered painful experiences and used them to predict future threats. The body hence learnt to ask this one question over and over again-
What if it happens again?
This is why two people can walk into the same room and experience completely different worlds. One notices the warmth of the people. The other immediately scans for exits. One hears laughter. The other hears raised voices. The room has not changed. The nervous systems have. Your perception of the world is never separate from the state of your body. When the nervous system feels safe, curiosity becomes possible. Creativity becomes possible and connection becomes possible. But when the nervous system senses danger, the world narrows. Attention becomes selective. The body prepares to fight, flee, freeze, or submit. Digestion slows. Sleep changes. Muscles tighten and breathing becomes shallow. The body sacrifices comfort for survival. And this strategy works beautifully during an emergency. But the problem begins when the emergency becomes a lifestyle. Many people no longer experience stress as an event. They experience it as an atmosphere. They wake up already tense. They carry invisible pressure into every conversation. Their shoulders remain lifted. Their jaw remains clenched. Their breathing never fully settles. Their voice decibels rise and a sense of usher and urgency reveals in the way they speak and converse. Over months and years, the body begins to treat this state as normal. What was once an emergency becomes an identity-
“I’ve always been anxious.”
“I’ve always been on edge.”
“This is just who I am.”
But the nervous system does not think in personalities. It thinks in patterns. It simply repeats what has helped you survive before. This is why understanding stress changes the way we understand ourselves. The racing heart is not trying to betray you. The tight chest is not trying to punish you. The restless mind is not trying to make your life difficult. Each is asking the same ancient question-
“Are we safe yet?”
Beneath every symptom is an intelligent system searching for certainty. It is easy to judge ourselves for feeling too emotional, too sensitive, or too reactive. It is harder and far more compassionate to recognize that these reactions are often the language of a nervous system doing exactly what evolution designed it to do.
The body is not interested in appearances. It is interested in survival. It does not care whether the threat is a charging predator, public humiliation, rejection, or the loss of someone you love. If the brain interprets an experience as threatening, the body responds. This is why emotional pain can feel so physical. Heart racing, stomach tightening, throat choking. The body does not distinguish as neatly between physical danger and social danger as we often imagine. For human beings, belonging has always been tied to survival. To be rejected by the group once meant exposure, vulnerability, and even death. And our biology still carries echoes of that history. Perhaps this is the greatest paradox of being human. We are the only species capable of building civilizations, composing symphonies, exploring distant planets, and decoding the human genome. Yet we are also the species most capable of remaining trapped inside memories that no longer exist. We can carry a single moment for decades. We can imprison ourselves inside an argument that ended years ago. We can continue defending ourselves against people who are no longer standing in front of us. And we must remember that the body is not weak for doing this. It is loyal. And its loyalty is extraordinary. It remembers what once mattered for your sole survival.
The invitation here is not to fight the body, but to understand it. For when you understand the language of your nervous system, you begin to see your reactions differently. They are no longer signs that something is wrong with you. They are signs that something important once happened to you. And the body, in all its ancient wisdom, has never stopped trying to protect the life it was entrusted to keep. All you have to do is rise and learn how to not ignore the alarm. Just listen to the alarm. That’s all.
