My mother is working through congestive heart failure right now. Missed out on her post-discharge medications for a week — long story — her compensated heart function decompensated, and back to the ER she went.
You can live a lot longer these days with a CHF diagnosis, compared to when I first learned about it in the ‘80s.
But it’s still a kicker, learning that you have a condition that will make you non-functional in a matter of days without the right medications.
It’s your New Anatomy.
We all have evolving anatomy
Contrary to the platitude that “people don’t change,” your mirror tells a different story.
Our skin isn’t as translucent and glowing as it once was; certain parts are less perky, and our midsections are thicker and saggier. (Not always; I’ve seen some remarkably snug and trim Europeans and Asians around.)
Most of these changes we accept, in ourselves and others.
Health changes, though, can be drastic. XYZ stops working, sometimes forever, and XYZ can be important, like a chunk of brain tissue, how your spine moves, or the functioning of your heart and lungs.
The organism CAN adapt, like a dog without a leg, or a mother plowing through life like an M1 Abrams tank.
As long as you don’t let the losses get to you.
Things get to humans all the time
It’s almost our defining feature. Something bad happens, and we go off the rails.
Case in point: suicide.
The person’s suffering was so severe that they decided to end it all; whatever the situation, they were unable to see a way out of it.
In the animal kingdom, this happens so rarely that scientists believe there is little to no convincing evidence that animals purposefully end themselves at all.
Among humans, it is the 3rd leading cause of death for ages 15-29.
Everyone farts
If you’re reading this, I hope that you are not at risk.
But occasionally, everybody feels things getting to them.
We all have “Leave me be, while I lie on the sofa with a t-shirt over my eyes” afternoons.
Pint of chocolate ice cream periods.
Or teeth-clenching, head-pounding, ulcer-inducing, Are you frickin’ kidding me?! moments.
Some handle the tough stuff “better” than others; there are phrases for this in every language, in English, “letting it slide,” “rolling with it,” or “being thick-skinned.” It’s universally understood that getting sideswiped by Life is a thing, as is the flip-side phenomenon that some people are relatively immune to this.
I suspect they’re kind of dumb
Full disclosure: I aspire to this kind of idiocy.
It’s usually considered a fault during your school years. Now, I’m not so sure.
He just doesn’t think things through.
She just doesn’t seem to get it.
Can’t they read the room? I can’t believe they asked such a dumb question.
School brings a lot of pressure to bear to respect the rules, be a model student/citizen, and police yourself (and preferably other students) so the teachers don’t have to work any harder or more thanklessly than they already do.
Social conformity. And during the adolescent years of chaos, there are worse things to encourage. You may not have read Lord Of The Flies, but your teachers certainly did.
But if your teachers ever told you how well-behaved you were, I suspect that’s a mark of distinction of how much you’d internalized the organizational rule set.
As long as everyone colors inside the lines, things will stay pretty peaceful. So you’ve gotten very, very good at imagining all kinds of awful things the minute your crayon strays outside the lines.
You pull yourself back, all on your own, and hard.
It makes for civilized behavior.
But taken to an extreme, it also makes for overthinking.
Overthinking consequences can be dramatic
OVERthinking implies what in medicine we call a pathology. You’ve gone too far and something no bueno is happening.
Anxiety in all its forms is riddled with overthinking: excessive worry and the physical symptoms accompanying it. Somewhere between 1 in 10 and, more likely, 1 out of 3 of us will experience this +/- depression during our lifetimes. Catastrophization is overthinking to the nth degree.
Imposter syndrome that paralyzes content creators, coaches, and people starting their own businesses is all about overthinking.
And it’s very common in PTSD, depression, and suicide.
Real-life events, like congestive heart failure or losing a limb, are challenging enough to deal with.
But an animal can lose a leg, and after the wound heals, is hopping around like nothing happened in a matter of weeks. A human being can apparently have all their parts, yet think themselves into a dark corner, or worse.
And everything in between: look up Louis Zamperini’s story, then Anthony Bourdain’s.
2026: the year to NOT be the sharpest tool in the shed
There’s definitely more Overthinking going on than ever before. What’s changed isn’t our DNA — we haven’t suddenly become a species of super thoughtful valedictorians.
What’s changed is the stage upon which we fret: the Internet, social media, and how much time we collectively spend in what science fiction writers called cyberspace.
Cyberspace stopped being the sole domain of writers and that one computer geek in class, generations ago. You, your kids, your neighbors, your colleagues, their bosses, and everyone they know and interact with spends A Whole Lot Of Time steeped in digital data: cyberspace.
And cyberspace is a virtual world. We think it into existence, with the help of 60 extremely curated digital prompts per second of sights, sounds, and people just on the other side of our screens, who aren’t actually there.
The Internet has trained us to overthink. And we didn’t even see that coming.
So going into 2026, I’ll make a prediction:
It will be just as important to preserve your mind as it has always been to look out for your body.
Be on the lookout for heart attack, cancer, stroke, diabetes, and neurodegenerative diseases, yes.
But as critical, if not more so, be aware that your mind drives much of what you do, and the choices you make.
And that the sandbox that your mind plays in to make up its stories about what’s going on in the world, making plans for the future, what’s sensible and what’s risky — that sandbox is no longer in your own backyard. Unless you’re extremely careful, it’s in Jeff Bezos’ or Larry Ellison’s server farms, and their programmers, AIs, and algorithms.
Being “sharp,” i.e., super plugged in, current on breaking news and trends, well-versed on a huge variety of factual and technical topics (thanks to AI and constant access to the Internet), if unbridled, is a liability.
Welcome to the 2nd quarter of the new millennium.
Leave a Reply