The Alarm Isn't the Emergency

Years ago I wrote about a neighborhood app that nearly convinced me snakes were about to invade my house. I'm not exaggerating. I opened the app calm. Five minutes later I was anxious, scanning every corner of my yard, certain something was coming. Nothing in my actual circumstances had changed. My yard was exactly the same yard it had been five minutes before.

Only my thinking had changed. And my thinking had been fed.

I don't use that app anymore. But the pattern hasn't gone anywhere. It's just found new vehicles. A few weeks ago I wrote about sitting on the couch with my husband, watching GLP-1 commercial after GLP-1 commercial, sometimes back to back, each one quietly insisting that our bodies were problems in need of a solution. We muted them. We said out loud the commercials we'd actually want to see. It helped, a little.

Same mechanism. Different decade.

A neighborhood app feeding danger that wasn't there. A targeted algorithm feeding inadequacy that wasn't there either. Both doing the same thing: taking something that felt like information and delivering it with enough repetition and urgency that it started to feel like reality.

Here's what I keep coming back to: The thing doing the convincing is rarely reality itself. It's usually just thinking—fed, amplified, and delivered at exactly the moment we're most likely to receive it. The neighborhood app knew when people were home and scrolling. The algorithm knows when you're tired and soft and most likely to feel like something about you needs fixing. Neither of them is lying exactly. They're just showing you a very particular slice of the world, over and over, until that slice starts to feel like the whole picture.

And our nervous systems, wired to respond to threat, wired to take incoming information seriously, do exactly what they're built to do. They sound the alarm. But the alarm isn't the emergency.

That's the thing worth remembering.

The anxiety that rose in me while scrolling the neighborhood app was real. The discomfort that rises when you've watched your fourth body-focused commercial in a row is real. The feeling is real.

The snake wasn't in my yard. The emergency wasn't in your body.

Our job…then and now…is to notice when that's happening.

To pause long enough to ask: is this what I actually think, or is this what I've been fed? Is this an actual emergency, or is this an alarm that got triggered by something designed to trigger it?

That's not always easy. The feeds are good at what they do. But the noticing is a skill. And like any skill, it gets easier with practice.

You don't have to stop consuming entirely. You just have to remember that consuming is happening. That what comes in shapes what feels true, and that you get to decide how much authority to give it.

I wrote about the snake app back in 2019 — you can read that one here. And the GLP-1 commercial post is here if you missed it. Same pattern, worth seeing together.

The algorithm's alarm is not the same as an actual emergency. Your yard is probably fine. And so, most likely, is your body.

If you've been living inside someone else's version of what's wrong with you for so long it's started to feel true — that's worth untangling. That's exactly what therapy is for.