I am subscribed to receive emails from HeartMind Institute, a transformational education platform dedicated to helping individuals step into their fullest, most heart-centered expression of life. They offer virtual summits, online courses, and a supportive community.
One email I received has stayed with me. Not because it offered a new technique or strategy, but because it highlighted the sheer volume of what modern humans are being asked to carry every day.
As I read it, I found myself thinking, "No wonder so many people feel overwhelmed."
I want to share it with you because I think it helps explain why you may be feeling exhausted, overloaded, reactive, or like you're barely keeping up. Sometimes understanding the load we're carrying can be just as important as learning how to carry it.
Here it is:
Let's take an honest look at the world your nervous system is trying to navigate right now.
In the last 24 hours alone, you've likely processed more information than your ancestors encountered in an entire year.
The numbers are staggering: The average person touches their phone 2,617 times daily and consumes the equivalent of 174 newspapers worth of information, a five-fold increase since 1986.
Meanwhile, the content of that information continues to intensify.
Wars live-streaming into your pocket while you eat breakfast. Climate scientists are now using the word grief in their research papers. Economic uncertainty as background frequency. Political polarization at levels not seen in generations. Social media algorithms designed to trigger your threat-detection system.
And we are the loneliest population in recorded human history. The Surgeon General formally declared loneliness a public health epidemic in 2023. Less time in nature. Less uninterrupted presence with family. Less genuine rest between demands.
And underneath it all: a profound uncertainty about who and what to trust.
If you feel chronically exhausted, reactive, or like you're barely keeping your head above water, at HeartMind we want you to know:
Your nervous system isn't broken. It's having a perfectly healthy response to an unreasonable world.
For hundreds of thousands of years, human nervous systems evolved in conditions of radical simplicity:
- Small tribal groups with deep, consistent connections
- Acute, resolvable threats followed by genuine recovery
- Natural light/dark cycles that regulate cortisol
- Regular immersion in nature that automatically restored balance
What your nervous system was never designed for:
- Chronic, unresolvable threat cues arriving 24/7 with no clear resolution
- Electromagnetic and sensory overstimulations keeping your brain in constant low-grade alertness
- The collapse of natural rhythmsand artificial light disrupting the sleep architecture your body needs to process stress
- Decision fatigue at an unprecedented scale, approximately 35,000 choices daily compared to a few hundred in pre-industrial life
The physiological cost is real:
Cortisol, your stress hormone, was designed to spike briefly during danger, then return to baseline as the threat resolved. But when threat cues are chronic and unresolvable, cortisol stops spiking and simply stays elevated.
Chronically elevated cortisol suppresses immune function, disrupts sleep, impairs memory, accelerates cellular aging, and gradually erodes the very neural structures responsible for emotional regulation.
The world's chronic stress is literally reshaping your brain and body.
You're not struggling because you lack resilience.
You're struggling because the load is genuinely, objectively unreasonable.
(And I’ll add a few more lines…) Imagine carrying a 50-pound backpack. With enough strength and endurance, most people can carry it for a while.
Now imagine carrying a 500-pound backpack.
At some point, the issue isn't your resilience. The load itself has become too much for any human being to carry.
Many of us are trying to navigate modern life with the equivalent of a 500-pound backpack: constant information, endless decisions, chronic uncertainty, and little time for genuine recovery.
If you're struggling, that doesn't mean you're weak.
It may simply mean you're trying to carry more than your nervous system was designed to carry alone.
The solution isn't to become tougher and tougher until nothing affects you. The solution is to build your capacity to recover, reduce unnecessary load where you can, and recognize when your nervous system is asking for support.
The world may not become less demanding anytime soon.
But you can learn to work with your nervous system instead of fighting against it.
And that starts with letting go of the idea that struggling is a sign of failure.
Here’s to calming stress at the source.
PS. Quick update of what I’m up to… Last weekend, I flew to Reston, Virginia to attend the annual Association for Comprehensive Energy Psychology conference. This week, I am in Steinbach at a booth in the Manitoba Association of Fire Chiefs conference. I keep learning and sharing. :)
With heart,
Louise
The Stress Experts
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