Why You Feel On Edge All the Time
By Andy Petranek
That low hum of unease has a mechanism, and once you see it, it starts to loosen.
I went through a stretch where I caught myself scrolling way more than usual. Checking headlines, refreshing feeds. I told myself I was staying informed.
Each scroll just added one more thing I couldn’t control to the pile of things I was already tracking. I went looking for clarity and came back with churn, over and over.
And I’d bet you know the feeling. It shows up small: patience gets shorter, reactions come quicker, and a quiet unease runs in the background without ever fully shutting off.
The world gives it plenty of material. Politics run hot. AI moves faster than most of us can metabolize. The economy lurches, the culture shifts, and the future gets harder to picture with every news cycle.
Here’s the thing I keep coming back to, though, with clients and with myself.
The events are real. And your internal experience is driven by something much closer to home: what your mind does with those events, especially when the ground feels unsteady.
We’re built to need a certain amount of predictability. Some solid ground under our feet. When that erodes, the mind steps in to protect us. It starts writing stories about where all of this is headed and what might go wrong, and it runs those simulations day and night.
The problem is that your nervous system can’t tell the difference between a simulated future and a present threat. The body reads the story as breaking news. Muscles tighten. Breathing gets shallow. Attention narrows. You’re sitting in a perfectly safe room, bracing against a danger that exists only in a draft your mind wrote 10 minutes ago.
Stay in that state long enough and it starts to feel like personality.
Then we try to think our way out of it. That mostly fails, because the machinery running this sits underneath your reasoning, and it takes no memos from the front office.
So here’s what I actually do, and what I’d offer you.
When you notice the unease, pause and ask 2 questions.
What story am I telling myself right now about what this means?
And what am I assuming about the future that I don’t actually know?
You can leave the story alone. Arguing with it is optional, and so is swapping it for a sunnier version. The whole move is seeing the story as a story: a projection your mind built, out of thin material, so it could feel prepared.
The moment you see it that way, something opens. A little space between you and the narrative. And in that space, your nervous system starts to settle on its own, because the threat it was bracing for turns out to be made of thought.
This is normal human machinery, by the way. Every mind does it. Mine still does, and I’ve been at this kind of inner work for 30 years, including almost 7 of them sitting at a Zen center.
The practice is catching the moment your attention slides out of what’s actually here and into prediction. Catch it. Name the story. Come back.
And be patient with yourself while you learn. The mind has been running this protection racket for a long time, and it genuinely believes it’s helping.
The ground you’re looking for is under your feet the whole time, in the one place the mind rarely checks: right here.
With love, Andy