Have you ever felt, no matter how hard you try to cope with the adversities life throws up, you feel stressed and anxious, and the more you try to cope, the more it feels like you’re fighting a losing battle?

There is a system running in the background of your mind that is designed to keep you moving in the right direction, striking a delicate balance between pursuing achievement and navigating adversity, while knowing when it is time to pause, taking time out to recover. You use it every day, usually without realising it. So you’ll take natural breaks when studying or working, and you’ll rest after a session at the gym. Ironically, this system, which is designed to protect your life, is often the very thing that sabotages you with the extreme demands of modern life.

To understand why we burn out, stress out, and spiral down towards anxiety and depression, we have to look back 30,000 years towards our distant ancestors.

The Three Allies

As an evolved human being, your life is plotted by three fundamental emotional systems. Think of them as the three allies.

1. The Drive System (The Hunter) This is the “Go” button. For our ancestors, this system released dopamine to motivate them to find food, water, and shelter.

• Today: It’s the energy that gets you to the gym, pushes you to finish that project, or gets the kids to school on time. It feels like excitement, focus, and achievement.

2. The Threat System (The Protector) This is the “Stop” button. When a predator appeared on the horizon, this system flooded the body with adrenaline and cortisol. Heart rate up. Breathing shallow. Hearing attuned.

• The Reaction: Fight, Flight, Freeze, or Submit. It’s not about happiness – to the body and mind, it’s about survival, irrespective of what the threat is.

3. The Soothing System (The Healer) This is the “Rest” button. After escaping the tiger, our ancestors would return to the tribe to bond, share food, and rest. This system releases oxytocin and opiates.

• The Function: It tells the Threat system, “The danger is over. You are safe.” It allows us to recharge so we can eventually go back to Drive.

In an ideal world, these three move in a fluid cycle based on how we feel, not what we have to achieve:

The Modern Glitch: Tigers vs WhatsApp

Here is the problem: Your hardware is 30,000 years old, but your software is running in the 2000s.

Our ancient brains cannot distinguish between a physical threat to our life like a tiger and a psychological threat to our ego or to our place in the tribe, like a passive-aggressive email, a vague text message, or social media ‘dislike’ reaction.

To your body, all of those adversities and triggers are tigers.

When you receive that email, your Threat system flares up. You get the physical buildup to run or fight – the racing heart, the shallow breath – but you are sitting at a desk. You can’t punch the email, and you can’t run away from your office.

Why You Feel Stuck in the ‘Threat’ Loop

If it were just emails, we might manage. But this imbalance isn’t just a random biological glitch. Modern life is actively designed to keep the Threat and Drive systems locked in a downwards spiral, making balance nearly impossible to maintain.

We are swimming in cultural forces that act as accelerants for this anxiety loop:

• The Weight of Trauma: For many, past experiences where they felt unsafe have rewired their Threat system to be on a hair-trigger. When your physiological baseline is “the world is dangerous,” the Drive system has to work overtime just to make you feel barely okay.
• The Pressure Cooker of Culture: We live in a “hustle culture” that glorifies the Drive system above all else. Rest (Soothing) is rebranded as “laziness” or a “lack of ambition.” Society tells us that if we aren’t constantly achieving, we are failing and that is a message that feeds directly into the Threat system.
• The Social Media Comparison Trap: This is a 24/7 drip-feed of threat. Scrolling through highlight reels triggers a deep sense of “not enough-ness” (Threat), which immediately kicks the Drive system into panic mode: “I need to buy that, achieve that, look like that just to be safe.”

These forces keep your foot firmly planted on the accelerator pedal, bouncing you endlessly between fear and frantic action, leaving the Soothing system in the dust.

The Hustle Trap

When we feel threatened by modern life (job insecurity, financial worry), we usually try to fix it using the Drive system.

Our cognitive brain starts screaming: “Work harder! Work longer! If I just figure this out, I’ll feel safe.”

We try to “hustle” our way out of anxiety. But this backfires. By constantly pushing the Drive system to suppress the Threat system, we are just pouring petrol on the fire. We aren’t soothing the nervous system, we’re revving it up.

This leads to a downward spiral. The more threatened we feel, the harder we drive. The harder we drive, the more exhausted and “threatened” we feel. This is the mechanism of burnout.

When you are stuck in this loop, your world shrinks. You lose perspective. You can’t problem-solve creatively because your brain is locked in “survival mode.” You might stay in a miserable job because the idea of leaving feels like a death threat, blinding you to the fact that you have options.

The Antidote: The Power of Feeling “Small”

A way to break the Threat-Drive loop is to manually engage the Soothing system. We get snippets of information throughout life in what we call ‘self-help’ but it’s only offered in snippets so we receive the message that things like yoga and meditation are good for you, but nobody ever tells you why in terms of what matter – you. There is a reason why these things make you feel calmer and it has nothing to do with the specific thing you do but noticing the need to do it is what is critically important and doing whatever you want to do to make yourself feel calmer. That might be yoga but it also might not. I find the things you can do for free in life are the best methods of soothing and calm.

Soothing feels counter-intuitive because when we are stressed, we feel we must do something. But the answer is to stop. We need to signal to our primitive brain that the tiger is gone.

How do we do this?

1. Connection We are social animals. If you have loved ones, ask for a hug. If you have a dog, fuss them. Connection releases oxytocin, which acts as a chemical brake pedal for your anxiety.

2. Radical Self-Care If you don’t have others around, you must give care to yourself. This isn’t about “treating yourself” to a purchase, it’s about physiological rest like deep breathing, a warm bath, or simply sitting still.

3. The Perspective of Nature One of the most powerful triggers for the Soothing system is Awe.

Go outside. Look at the sunset and really look at the changing colours. Feel the contrast and the sense of beauty is always there for you. It changes but it’s always there. Look up at the sky either during the day or at night and really try to absorb the sense of its vastness and how minor you are in comparison.

You are important to you and that is how it should be but when you notice these things, you feel a gentle reminder of your place in something larger. It doesn’t erase the weight of what you’re carrying, but it can offer a moment of breathing space. Your challenges are real, yet they are not the whole story. The world holds steady beyond the stress of a difficult boss or the pressures of life and burden of trauma. The sun will rise tomorrow, bringing with it the possibility of renewal.

This perspective doesn’t solve the problem, but it solves the panic problem. It takes you out of the Threat system, allowing your brain to come back online. Once you are soothed, you can re-enter the Drive system with clarity, creativity, and calm, rather than panic.

Takeaway

You cannot think your way out of a survival response. You have to soothe your way out. The next time you feel the “Tiger” of anxiety rising in your chest, don’t try to outrun it. Stop. Look at the sky. Breathe. Remember who you are and where you are in relation to others. Reset the system.

This practice is also a gateway to resilience. The more often you pause in these moments, the stronger your resolve becomes to notice when threat strikes and to take time out. More downtime allows more processing, and with that comes greater resilience.