Why Everything Feels Like An Emergency

Hey there,

Urgency used to mean something…

A fire. A phone call in the middle of the night. A knock at the door.

Now it sounds like a notification, a banner, a red dot, or a “just checking in” email.

None of it is life-or-death, but all of it feels immediate.

And when urgency becomes background noise, your nervous system stops knowing when to relax.

Somewhere along the way, everything started feeling like it needed a response.

You feel it when you read an email and don’t respond right away, and your body reacts as if you ignored someone waving at you in traffic.

Not because it was important, but because it was there.

Modern life didn’t just get busier, it got louder and more interruptive.

And slowly, urgency became the default emotional setting.

Not panic. Not stress. Just this low-grade sense that something is always slightly wrong.

That you’re missing something.

That you should probably check.

What’s strange is that when you zoom out, nothing is actually happening.

No fire, no crisis.

Just a steady stream of signals asking your body to react as if there is.

Emails marked “urgent.”

Breaking news banners.

Slack messages that feel like they need an answer, even when they don’t.

Your brain doesn’t know these things are harmless, it just knows they interrupt.

And interruption feels like a threat.

This isn’t about productivity, but calibration.

Your nervous system evolved to respond to danger, but now it’s being asked to respond to everything.

So it never fully powers down.

It just stays ready.

And that’s exhausting.

You can feel it in small ways….

Rest feels undeserved. Silence feels uncomfortable. Calm feels suspicious.

You sit down to relax, and your body asks, “What are we ignoring right now?”

What makes this tricky is that none of these things are emergencies on their own.

But your body experiences the accumulation, a hundred tiny alerts with no real resolution.

Over time, your stress response becomes the baseline.

Everything feels urgent, even when it isn’t.

I noticed this in myself at night.

Nothing was due or wrong, yet my body still felt tense.

Like I’d forgotten something important, but there was nothing to remember.

It wasn’t anxiety, it was alertness.

We live in a culture that confuses urgency with importance.

If something interrupts, it must matter.

But urgency is not truth, it’s a delivery method.

And right now, everything is being delivered like breaking news.

This is why calm feels harder to access.

Not because you forgot how to relax, but because your nervous system rarely gets evidence that it’s safe.

No clear endings. No real closures.

Even rest is interrupted.

You live in a strange ‘middle state’.

Not panicked. Not calm. Just permanently on edge.

Everything feels like an emergency because your system doesn’t know how to tell the difference anymore.

The goal isn’t to eliminate urgency. (Some things really do matter!)

The goal is to retrain your nervous system to recognize when they don’t.

That starts by giving it something it rarely gets: clear signals of safety.

One of the simplest is ending things.

Finishing conversations, closing loops, and letting moments resolve.

When you’re done working, be done.

When you’re resting, actually rest.

Another goal is creating quiet that isn’t filled.

Not silence with a feed, but actual quiet, just long enough for your body to realize nothing’s happening.

And maybe the most important goal is this: stop treating every interruption like a decision.

Most things don’t need immediate action. They need later.

Urgency loses power when you stop responding reflexively, not because you stop caring, but because your body learns that not everything is a threat.

A calm life doesn’t come from removing stress.

It comes from teaching your body what isn’t stressful.

So if everything has been feeling like an emergency lately, that doesn’t mean something is wrong with you.

It means you’re reacting to signals, not situations.

Not everything needs your nervous system’s full attention.

Some things can wait, and some things are just noise.

And learning that difference might be the most calming skill you build this year.

If nothing feels like it’s on fire right now, that’s probably a good sign.

– Scott

P.S. Get more stuff from me (so my wife doesn’t make me go back to a “real” job):

• My podcast

• YouTube

• Instagram

• TikTok