The human brain runs on two different modes, psychologist Jonathan Haidt calls them “discover mode” and “defend mode” and it’s a great model to parse how you operate with reality. The brain is of course far more complex than being purely binary here but there’s still a spectrum we all operate within.
Discover mode is curious, expansive, creative, reward-seeking (hopefully harnessed well and not pursuing blind hedonism). Defend mode is narrow-vision, protective, defensive, threat-scanning (you can imagine we spent a lot of evolutionary time here, for good reason). You’re supposed to move between them fluidly depending on the situation presented. For example, historically, if a wolf appears, you must defend. If it leaves, you can go back to forging for fruits and nuts, finding a mate and other less stressful opportunities. The problem is that for many, modern life keeps defend mode mode stuck on, despite few actual physical threats remaining.
Researchers on this topic found something fairly consistent, when you’re in defend mode, activity in the prefrontal cortex dims. Your brain gets dumber at the precise moment when you think you’re being more careful (a very good formula for poor decision making on complex topics). Being trapped in chronic defend mode stresses you past the point high functioning knowledge economy professionals should regularly go, and makes you worse at creative/expansive thinking. I’ve written before about how inaccurate anxious predictions actually are, where 91% of clinical worries never actually materialize. Defend mode is protecting you from immediate threats, at the cost of intelligence and joy.
Why are so many in modernity trapped in defend mode? For most of those who are, the attention economy has realized defend mode is sticky/addictive and the path of least resistance to hooking you, and discover mode is not (as higher level thinking happens here, so you’re less easily emotionally influenced). Outrage, fear, and threat content get more engagement than curiosity and wonder, so the algorithms optimize for it. This is also why you now see so little, if any actually novel or creative art in your feeds these days. Algos simply don’t know what to do with it. Slow paced beauty and sustainable dopamine don’t make companies money, so it no longer gets prompted (I still try and share it with those of you who have freed yourself from this prison).
Of course, the internet didn’t invent defend mode. You evolved for it, for very good reasons, namely not becoming prey yourself. But behavioral science nerds and analysts in Silicon Valley and Vegas industrialized it, cleverly stripped out any recovery periods, and monetized your resulting stress reactions. None of us evolved to process every single dramatic event from around the world delivered constantly to us, at best your ancestors worried about a few wilderness predators and the tribe over the mountain.
Research on this shows how much this is impacting young people, but it affects everyone similarly: Pew Research Center reported nearly half of teens (48%) say social media has a negative effect on people their age, which is up almost double from 3 years ago, and heavy users are 3x more likely to show depressive and anxious symptoms vs light users. None of this is by accident, your phone pings and your nervous system lights up like something in the dark of the wilderness just moved.
The fix isn’t all that difficult, although requires some self control: notice which mode you’re in and don’t let the internet pull you too far into defend mode. Sign off when you catch yourself being dragged into far off dramas that don’t actually affect you instead of exploring or doing something productive. And remember that discover mode isn’t some kind of fake optimism, it’s a flow state where you can actually think clearly, create, and do things that matter. You evolved defend mode for emergencies, don’t let it be exploited by product managers to beat next quarter’s numbers.