NATURAL SIGNALS, SOCIETAL SYSTEMS
NATURAL SIGNALS, SOCIETAL SYSTEMS
Why Stress, Anxiety, and “Disorders” Might Be Messages — Not Malfunctions
Humans are animals.
Not metaphorically.
Literally.
We evolved over an absurdly long stretch of time to move, build, hunt, rest, socialize, explore, observe, adapt, and respond to real-world feedback.
Our nervous system didn’t evolve inside cubicles, classrooms, traffic, debt structures, and abstract social systems.
It evolved inside land, weather, effort, consequence, and direct cause-and-effect.
That matters — because the body and mind still speak that older language.
The Modern Assumption
Society tends to treat things like:
Stress
Anxiety
Depression
Anger
ADHD
OCD
as internal malfunctions.
Chemical problems.
Cognitive problems.
Personal defects.
The default assumption is:
“Something is wrong with you.”
My experience — lived, not clinical — led me to a different interpretation:
What if many of these are not failures… but signals?
The Signal Model
In nature, stress and anxiety have a purpose.
They exist to say:
Pay attention.
Something is off.
Adjust.
Adapt.
Change direction.
If you take on something too large, too risky, too unstable, or too misaligned with your capacity, your nervous system reacts.
Not as punishment.
As feedback.
Your mind doesn’t just process ideas.
It tracks fit.
Fit between:
Effort and reward
Risk and capability
Environment and instinct
Load and capacity
When those fall out of alignment, you feel it.
The Shift Society Makes
Instead of treating stress and anxiety as information, modern systems often treat them as conditions to suppress.
The lesson becomes:
Cope.
Push through.
Normalize discomfort.
Medicate the signal.
Blame the individual.
So instead of asking:
“What is this telling me about how I’m living?”
We’re trained to ask:
“How do I make this stop so I can keep going?”
That’s a fundamental inversion.
When Signals Get Ignored
In my personal framework, stress and anxiety are early-stage indicators.
They’re the tap on the shoulder.
When they go unexamined long enough, they often harden into something heavier:
Depression
Chronic anger
Numbness
Withdrawal
At that stage, the system isn’t whispering anymore.
It’s forcing a stop.
Not because it’s broken — but because it’s overloaded.
The “Personal vs Global” Collision
A lot of this tension shows up when people try to live in global space with personal systems.
Global space is abstract:
Institutions
Ideologies
Politics
Social identity
Mass narratives
Distant structures
Personal systems are physical:
Body
Energy
Time
Relationships
Environment
Skill
Effort
Direct consequence
When someone tries to anchor their entire life in systems they can’t touch, influence, or feel directly, something strange happens.
The nervous system loses ground truth.
And when there’s no ground truth, uncertainty grows.
When uncertainty grows, anxiety follows.
A Different View of “Disorders”
I don’t see things like ADHD or OCD as simple labels for “broken minds.”
I see them — in many cases — as misalignment between environment and instinct.
ADHD, Reframed
Take a highly active, responsive, physically oriented person.
Put them in:
A chair
A screen
A rigid schedule
A low-feedback environment
Eight hours of enforced stillness
Then call their reaction a disorder.
From another perspective, that’s not dysfunction.
That’s a mismatch.
In a different setting — building, moving, working land, training, creating, repairing, exploring — that same energy often looks like capability instead of pathology.
OCD, Reframed
Now take someone living inside:
Too many obligations
Too many possessions
Too many liabilities
Too many systems they have to manage but don’t control
That can create a mental state of constant load-bearing.
Always tracking.
Always organizing.
Always stabilizing.
From one angle, it’s “compulsion.”
From another, it’s a system under excess weight trying to hold itself together.
Coping vs Resolving
This is the dividing line for me:
Coping makes life tolerable.
Resolving makes life aligned.
Coping keeps the structure the same and changes how you feel inside it.
Resolving changes the structure itself:
Environment
Relationships
Commitments
Load
Direction
Pace
Priorities
One numbs the signal.
The other listens to it.
The Blame Loop
A lot of people get caught in this pattern:
Feel stress →
Get told something is wrong with them →
Try to fix themselves instead of their situation →
Stay in the same structure →
Feel more stress
Over time, the problem starts to feel internal, even if the pressure is external.
That’s a hard loop to escape.
Nature as a Reference Point
In natural systems:
Effort leads to result.
Action leads to consequence.
Energy gets spent physically.
Problems get solved directly.
There’s feedback.
In abstract systems, feedback is delayed, distorted, or invisible.
The body still expects the old rules.
So when the new rules don’t make sense to the nervous system, it responds the only way it knows how — through signal.
What This Isn’t
This isn’t a rejection of medicine.
This isn’t a denial of biology.
This isn’t a universal claim about every person or every condition.
This is a lens.
A way of asking a different first question.
Not:
“What’s wrong with me?”
But:
“What in my life doesn’t fit?”
The Unencumbered Position
I don’t treat stress, anxiety, or emotional states as enemies.
I treat them as instruments.
Not always accurate.
Not always clear.
But rarely meaningless.
Sometimes they’re pointing inward.
Sometimes they’re pointing outward.
The work isn’t to silence them.
The work is to interpret them.
Final Thought
Systems want stability.
Bodies want alignment.
When those two drift apart, the body speaks up.
You can suppress the message.
You can ignore it.
You can label it.
Or you can listen and ask:
“What needs to change — inside me, or around me — for this to make sense again?”
That question alone has more power than most answers.