Are we stuck in defence mode?
Why need to remind ourselves and our society that it's OK to feel safe
Hi, it’s Tom. This is the first in an ongoing series of written articles bringing you some of the insights and topics from the podcast in a digestible written format. This article picks up on a conversation about health that Asim and I had in Episode 11 and asks whether it might have bigger implications for the health of our society.
A couple of years ago, I experienced something that changed not just how I think about recovering from illness, but how we heal as a society too.
It started with me going through a burnout that peaked with falling ill with a nasty virus that completely wiped me out. The virus itself cleared up after a week or so but yet I didn’t recover. For over six weeks, I felt like a AA battery that was essentially flat but would occasionally show a tiny bit of charge, just enough to fool me into thinking it might work before going completely flat again. I'd get up thinking that I had a bit of energy, try to do something basic like make breakfast, and then just... fade. Completely. It was unlike anything I'd experienced before.
The doctors weren't particularly helpful. "Post-viral fatigue," they said. "It could take months, sometimes years. You’ll just have to be patient and wait it out." That's not the kind of advice that works well for me. I believe in being proactive with my health and was determined to find a solution. So I started researching, and that's when I stumbled across something fascinating about how our cellular machinery responds to threats.
The mitochondrial switch
Apparently, there's this thing that happens at the cellular level that's fairly well-accepted in science but not widely talked about. Your mitochondria, which are the little powerhouses in every cell of our bodies, normally operate in energy production mode. They keep everything powered up and energised.
However, when you're dealing with an illness like a virus, they switch into a completely different mode. Instead of focusing on energy production, they shift into resistance mode to produce things that the body needs to overcome the illness. That’s actually part of the reason why it’s so common to feel exhausted while ill, not because the illness is making us tired, but because out mitochondria are have down regulated energy production in order to focus on the more urgent job of support the immune response.
This makes perfect sense as an emergency measure. When you're under attack, you want all available resources focused on defence, not on routine maintenance and operations. The problem comes when the war is over but nobody told the mitochondria.
Stuck in defence mode
What I learned was that sometimes, for reasons that aren't entirely clear, the mitochondria don't get the "all clear" signal. The virus is gone, the immediate threat has passed, but these cellular powerhouses remain stuck in resistance mode. They're still acting like they need to fight a war that's already over. The rest of the body is still living on ration stamps while the war factories keep churning out equipment that isn’t needed in peace time.
This explained so much about what I was experiencing. My body felt like it was conserving energy for some battle that was no longer happening. Normal activities felt impossible not because I was still sick, but because my cells were still behaving as if they needed to save every bit of energy for fighting an enemy that was no longer there.
Here's where it gets interesting. There are ways that you can send the signal to the mitochondria that it’s time to switch back to their normal energy production mode. These methods include fasting and the one that worked for me, which was exposure to Near Infrared Light (NIR). Sunlight has been sending this signal to living things since the dawn of time and helping support mitochondrial function in mammals like ourselves, but in our modern lives where we live mostly indoors and wear clothes outdoors, we rarely actually get the sunlight we need on our skin. We might not notice most of the time as the effects may be mild, but when the body gets stuck in the wrong mode, like with Post Viral Fatigue, it becomes much more apparent that something is missing.
In my case, I decided to take a risk and fork out the money for an infrared light device in the hope that it had some effect. And the effect was remarkable. Not much happened in the first couple of days of using the light, but then I quickly started improving. I went from barely being able to function to feeling (almost) like myself again. It was as if someone had finally delivered the message to my cells: "The war is over. You can go back to normal life now."
So the question then arises; are there other aspects of life where we’re stuck in the wrong mode and might not even realise it?
Is our entire society stuck in the wrong mode?
What if the same thing that happened to my mitochondria after that virus is happening to all of us, all the time, on a much larger scale? What if our entire society has switched into some kind of permanent resistance mode, constantly mobilized for threats (real and imagined) with no mechanism for standing down.
Think about the information environment we're swimming in. Every day, multiple times a day, we're presented with evidence that the world is dangerous, unstable, and getting worse. Wars, economic crises, political conflicts, climate disasters, health scares. The news operates on a simple principle: if it bleeds, it leads. Bad news gets attention. Calm, stable, even happy and inspiring situations don't make headlines.
This creates a constant drip-feed of threat signals. Our nervous systems, which evolved to deal with immediate, local dangers, are now processing global catastrophes as if they were happening in our immediate environment. We're biologically wired to take threats seriously, but we're psychologically unprepared for a world where we're constantly exposed to everyone else's threats as well as our own. It's like having an emergency broadcast system that never stops broadcasting emergencies. The alarms are constantly sounding and many of us, even when everything is fine in our immediate lives, struggle not to hear them.
Has the threat response become a threat?
Just like my mitochondria switching into resistance mode made perfect sense during an actual viral infection, our collective hypervigilance makes sense when there are real and present dangers to navigate. The problem comes when the defence mechanisms themselves start creating more problems than the original threats.
Chronic stress, whether individual or societal, has cascading effects. When we're stuck in fight-or-flight mode, we make different decisions. We become more reactive, less creative, more tribal, less generous. We focus on short-term survival rather than long-term flourishing. We see everything through the lens of threat assessment rather than opportunity recognition.
At a societal level, this shows up as political polarisation, where every disagreement becomes an existential battle. It shows up in our relationship with technology, where we're constantly checking for the next piece of alarming information, feeding our addiction to our devices and our disconnection from the “real” world outside of them. It shows up in our economic systems, where everything is optimised for short term gain or crisis management rather than sustainable well-being.
We've built a society that's constantly ready for battle, but seems to have lost the ability to recognize when it's safe to relax, even for a moment.
The signals we're missing
What would the "all clear" signal look like for a society? What would help our collective nervous system recognize that it's safe to stand down from high alert?
I think part of it might be as simple as regularly acknowledging what's actually going well. Not in a naïve, everything-is-fine way, but in a realistic recognition that alongside genuine challenges, there are also genuine successes, progress, beauty, and reasons for hope. For most of us, there are many moments in our lives when at least in our own immediate environment, everything is just fine.
When did you last hear a news story about a problem that got solved? About a community that's thriving? About a innovation that's making life better? These things are happening all the time, but they don't fit the threat-detection algorithm that drives our information systems.
We're incredibly good at identifying what's wrong, but we seem to have forgotten how to identify what's right. And maybe that's part of what keeps us stuck in defence mode.
The lost art of celebration
I've been thinking about how different cultures throughout history have created regular opportunities to send "safety" signals to their communities. Festivals, rituals, gatherings where people could collectively acknowledge abundance, mark achievements, express gratitude and celebrate connections.
Many of these traditions served a function beyond just entertainment. They were ways of regularly resetting the collective nervous system, reminding everyone that despite ongoing challenges, there were also things worth celebrating, connections worth maintaining, and reasons to feel secure in the community.
When did we stop doing this? Even the festivals many of us do retain, like Christmas, for many people can now feel like sources of stress rather than relief. When did it become somehow naïve or irresponsible to acknowledge joy and abundance alongside problems and scarcity?
I'm not suggesting we ignore real challenges or pretend everything is perfect. But what if we're so focused on threat detection that we've lost the ability to recognise safety and abundance when they're actually present? How much better might life be if we were able to embrace these moments?
Switching off the alarms
We might find that if we can find ways to communicate safety to our various internal systems then we might create more positivity in our own lives, but it might also ripple out into wider society, not just in people’s moods, but in their behaviours.
Simple things like spending time in natural light, taking walks without podcasts or music in our ears, eating meals without scrolling through our phone, and having conversations with people we care about without an agenda might be low hanging fruits to tell our nervous systems that we’re safe to be present and to exist without constant vigilance.
Perhaps more important might be to pay attention to how much of our information diet consists of threat signals versus safety signals. Not ignoring important information, but being more intentional about balancing awareness of problems with awareness of beauty, progress, connection, and possibility and giving ourselves permission to switch off from things that don’t affect us in the present moment.
And then there’s the addition of joy. What if we thought about joy not as a luxury we can afford once all the problems are solved, but as a necessary signal that helps prevent us from getting stuck in permanent defence mode?
I’m not talking about fake positivity or pretending problems don't exist. I’m talking about recognising that the ability to experience and express joy might actually be part of our collective immune system. Communities that can celebrate together, that can find humour in difficulty, that can recognise beauty alongside struggle, are more resilient and and healthy communities.
Maybe we need to be more intentional about creating opportunities for collective "all clear" signals. Regular reminders that despite genuine challenges, we're also surrounded by extraordinary beauty, remarkable human (and non-human) kindness, and countless reasons for gratitude.
Learning to stand down
Of course, the tricky part is figuring out when it's actually safe to relax versus when ongoing vigilance is necessary. Some threats are real and require sustained attention. The art is in learning to distinguish between appropriate concern for genuine current challenges and getting stuck in reactive patterns that are no longer serving us. It seems to me that this is a skill that we need to re-learn.
Maybe part of the solution is as simple as asking different questions. Instead of just "What's wrong?" also asking "What's working?" Instead of just "What are the threats?" also asking "What are the opportunities?" Instead of just "What are we losing?" also asking "What are we gaining?"
Not because the problems aren't real or important, but because a nervous system that only ever receives threat signals eventually becomes less effective at responding to actual threats. A society that only ever focuses on what's wrong eventually loses its capacity for the kind of creative, collaborative problem-solving that actually addresses complex challenges.
What if the most radical thing we could do right now is regularly remind ourselves and each other that despite everything, it's still possible to be amazed by a sunset, grateful for a friend's kindness, excited about a new idea, or simply content to be alive?
Maybe that's not naïve optimism. Maybe that's how we signal to our collective nervous system that it's safe to think beyond mere survival. And who knows, doing that might be exactly what we need to actually solve the problems we're facing.