Why Do We Wake Up and Rush Into the Day?

By
Mfame Team
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50

Role Pressure & Conditioning (From Psychology & Neuroscience):

  • From childhood, especially through schooling, we are conditioned into a cycle of waking up, rushing, performing, and repeating.
  • This creates neural pathways of routine behavior, reinforced by reward–punishment mechanisms (grades, approval, salary, etc.).
  • This conditioning becomes automatic — we get up not from joy, but from obligation and pressure.
  • A baseline anxiety gives us the needed adrenaline push to keep us going.

“The brain is a prediction machine. Once trained, it runs on habitual loops.”
 — Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made

🧠 Our Mind Uses Anxiety as a Motivator

🔬 Neuroscience & Psychology View:

1. Anxiety as Survival Tool

Anxiety evolved as a protective mechanism — to keep us vigilant, responsive to threats, and ready to take action.

 “Anxiety is the price we pay for the ability to imagine the future.”
 — Daniel Gilbert, Harvard psychologist

2. Amygdala & Fear Response

    • The amygdala, a part of the brain’s limbic system, is wired to detect threats.
    • It overrides rational thinking when activated, triggering a stress response even to non-physical threats like public speaking or job loss.

“The amygdala is like a smoke detector — quick to respond, but it can’t always tell a real fire from burnt toast.”
— Joseph LeDoux, neuroscientist

3. Default Mode: Anxious Alertness

Modern neuroscience confirms that our brains are negativity-biased to keep us safe:

    • We overestimate threats.
    • We ruminate on the past or worry about the future.
    • Studies show mild anxiety is a baseline state for many people.

📊 Everyday Anxiety Scale (1–10): 

Why We’re Above 5 Most Times

Humans often operate with baseline anxiety above 5 due to: This baseline gets worsened by:

Anxiety Trigger Nature of Fear
Career uncertainty Fear of failure, irrelevance
Financial insecurity Fear of poverty, survival
Future unpredictability Fear of the unknown
Self-esteem & image Fear of rejection, not being enough
Peer competition Fear of inadequacy, comparison
Social environment Fear of judgment, exclusion
Physical threats Health, accidents, aging
  • Overexposure to social media
  • News cycles of doom
  • Lack of deep connection or grounding

🧠 We Chase Hormonal Happiness to Soothe Anxiety

🔬 Modern Life: A Hormone-Driven Escape

Most of our daily choices — shopping, binge-watching, social media, eating out, drinking, casual hangouts — are not just for fun.

They are strategies to temporarily relieve inner restlessness or anxiety, caused by:

  • Uncertainty about future
  • Insecurity or self-comparison
  • Existential boredom
  • Social pressure and FOMO

These activities work by triggering hormones:

Activity Hormone Triggered Effect
Shopping Dopamine Reward anticipation
Social media Dopamine, Oxytocin Validation & bonding
Eating/sugar Dopamine, Serotonin Pleasure, mood lift
Alcohol Dopamine, GABA Short calm, later crash
Hangouts/parties Oxytocin, Dopamine Belonging, distraction

But the relief is temporary. It doesn’t eliminate the cause of anxiety — it pauses the symptom.

🧠 “We’re not addicted to substances — we’re addicted to relief.” – Dr. Gabor Maté

  • On a scale of 1 to 10, how anxious do you usually feel each day?
  • What’s one thing that helps you stay calm or grounded?

– From Dr. Vis Desk

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Reference: Medium