Dwain Northey (Gen X)

Stress feels like one of humanity’s most successful inventions—right up there with deadlines, alarms, and the idea that everything must happen now. It isn’t a natural disaster or a force of gravity; it’s a story we tell ourselves about pressure, expectation, and consequence. And yet, despite being man-made, stress is painfully real in its effects. Our bodies don’t care that it was invented in boardrooms, calendars, or social hierarchies. They respond as if a predator is always nearby.

What began as an evolutionary response to actual danger—a sharpened awareness, a surge of energy to fight or flee—has quietly morphed into an equivalent response to imagined danger. Missed emails, unpaid bills, social judgments, future what-ifs: none of these can wound us physically in the moment, yet our nervous systems react as though they can. The same chemical cascade once reserved for survival now floods our bodies over thoughts alone.

What makes stress especially cruel is how differently we each interpret it. The same situation that sharpens one person into focus can paralyze another. A deadline can feel like motivation or a threat. Silence can be peace or panic. Stress has no universal language—only personal dialects shaped by memory, trauma, upbringing, and fear. So we walk around sharing the same world but carrying entirely different chemical storms inside our bodies.

Those storms matter. Stress quietly rewires us, flooding our systems with cortisol and adrenaline, throwing off sleep, digestion, mood, and clarity. It convinces the heart to race when nothing is chasing us and teaches the mind to rehearse disasters that may never come. Over time, it doesn’t just exhaust us—it erodes us, blurring the line between survival and living.

I often wish stress weren’t real, or at least that it came with an off switch. Imagine a world where urgency didn’t masquerade as importance, where rest wasn’t treated as weakness, and where being human didn’t require constant justification. Maybe stress once kept us alive, but in a world of imagined dangers and endless demands, it has outlived its purpose. And now we’re left trying to unlearn a fear that no longer serves us, hoping that one day we’ll remember how to breathe without bracing for impact.