How to Stay Sane in a World That's Gone Bat Shit Crazy

The world feels like it’s running on rocket fuel and a lot of women are holding it together with white knuckles. I break down what’s happening underneath the overwhelm using simple neuroscience.

We zoom out to name the macro stressors many of us are swimming in: global and political instability, economic unpredictability, constant corporate restructures, and the creeping question of what AI means for our jobs and identity. Then we go underneath the surface, into nervous system regulation and stress physiology. Your brain is built to keep you alive and conserve energy, so uncertainty lights up an ancient survival system that can’t tell the difference between a lion and a notification. That’s why doom-scrolling feels irresistible: it’s your brain hunting for information to feel safe, inside a feed that never ends.

From there, we unpack a deceptively simple paradox: we need certainty and we need variety. Chosen variety is fun. Unwanted variety is a problem, and right now many of us are drowning in it. When the gap between the certainty you need and the certainty available gets too wide, old survival strategies come roaring back perfectionism, overworking, people-pleasing, procrastination dressed up as “strategy”. Trying harder with new routines and tighter control only adds fuel to chronic nervous system activation.

We finish with three practical steps to help you feel more steady: notice your patterns with curiosity, get ruthless about what’s actually in your control, and try 24 hours off the feed to stop outsourcing safety to your phone. If this lands, subscribe, share it with a friend who’s white-knuckling life, and leave a review. What pattern do you notice most in yourself right now?

The Balance & Beyond Podcast Hosted by Jo Stone, founder of The Balance Institute

For women who are already succeeding, but beginning to wonder if they're willing to keep losing themselves in the process.

We know high achievers, because we are one. This podcast draws on Jo's 20 years in global leadership and thousands of hours coaching executives and ambitious women: the patterns she sees, how to untangle them, and what it actually takes to keep your success without paying for it with yourself.

If something landed today, there's more where that came from.

And if you know a woman this would resonate with, send it her way.

🎙️https://www.balanceinstitute.com/podcast
🔗 www.balanceinstitute.com
💼https://au.linkedin.com/in/stonejoanne
📷 @therealjostone

Transcript

Welcome To Balance And Beyond

Jo Stone (Host) 0:27

Welcome to Balance and Beyond, the podcast for women who've outgrown the old model of success. The ones who look fine on the outside but know the way they've been living no longer fits. If you're standing in the space between who you were and who you're becoming, this is for you. Honour the space you've created today. Let's dive in. That shit crazy. Seems like the only way to describe how the world feels right now. Not just a bit nuts or a bit crazy, but insane. And so much so that you never know what you're going to wake up to. Everyone's feeling it. But we've been here before. We are the generation who grew up with no nets on our trampolines. We can do hard things. But I don't know you, but this season feels different. In today's episode, we're going to talk about what's really going on, why all your usual coping strategies just aren't working anymore, and why trying harder just makes it worse. I am not the first to say this, but this environment is not normal. We talk about sustained uncertainty or systemic uncertainty, so much so that your system was never designed to hold all of this at once. You know what's going on, but let's just talk at a macro level here. We've got global instability. Hello, World War III, maybe, maybe not. Political instability globally, some of the key leaders in the world. We've got a whole lot of economic instability. How much will milk cost next week? What's happening with my petrol prices, my interest rates? These are all things that are hitting us very much at an individual level. We've got the whole, what's happening with AI? Is my job safe? Every corporate is in constant rounds of restructures, re-orgs, trying to pivot, let alone the uncertainty of, I don't know, having children, living with other humans, their own levels of uncertainty. Everyone's swirling around this cesspool with varying degrees of fascination. So this hits us hardest, though, because we hold everything together on such a nice edge that it used to be that a sick kid would tip us over or a colleague left and we'd have to pick up the slack. But now the kind of rocket fuel we're dealing with on how we've lived our lives has just pushed so many women over the edge. And this hits us hard because our job and what we've become really good at is we manage, we control, we deliver, we hold it together, we color code, we plan, we make lists. But what's going on right now can't be managed. You can't optimize it, you can't project plan it. You can't color code your way out of this. For a woman whose entire operating system is built on competence and control. This is a very specific type of health. Let's talk about what's actually going on underneath all the crazy. Your brain's number one job is to keep you alive. Let's just be really, really clear. It doesn't care about how happy you are or how fulfilled you are, none of that shit. It wants to keep you alive. Job number two is to conserve energy. And it conserves energy, obviously, by keeping you alive. Uncertainty violates both of those. Your brain wants to do today what it did yesterday, because yesterday you survived. So the brain goes, tick, I did my job, I kept you alive, I want to do that again. And if now what you're doing tomorrow is different from what you did today, your brain goes, ugh. And not to mention, changing all the time takes a huge amount of cognitive fuel. Our brain, particularly our prefrontal cortex, takes up huge amounts of energy. And so if we have to think through everything constantly, what does this mean for me? And what's happening here? And we're burning unnecessary energy that your brain does not like. Now, our brains, it sounds very primitive, but this is what we're dealing with. 99% of what's in your noggin has come from the savannah. And this served us really well. It got us here because the more cautious ancestors were the ones that didn't get eaten by the lion. So when we are in a time of uncertainty, once upon a time, let's go back to the savannah, we were out looking for berries, or we were out looking for water, and we would hear a twig snap. In that moment, everything in our body would go, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, what's that? I don't know what that is. I can't see it. So my brain would start turning off things like digestion. It pumps a whole lot of chemicals into my brain, like adrenaline and cortisol, pumps everything down to my limbs, has hyper focus on my visual senses because I am now very, very focused on the world outside me. I've heard a twig. I'm now listening for, oh, there's a rumble in the bushes. Senses, alert, alert, alert. Okay, hair on arms brush up because I'm trying to now use all my senses to go, is there danger here? Is there danger here? Pattern recognition starts to come in. Okay, well, last time there was a twig snap and a rumble in the bushes, then something bad came out of it and somebody around me died. So pattern recognition, one plus two equals full survival mode kicks in. But that survival mode is meant to be temporary. You either go, oh shit, and you find out it's a lion and you deal with that, you run, you climb a tree, you do whatever you need to do, or you go, oh, it's just a warthog, and you then come back to baseline. But with our brains now, that twig snap is a teens notification. The lion becomes a tweet, a headline, or your brain doesn't know the difference between that and the lion. When there's no actual lion, that feeling of oh, that exhale, okay, it's not, or oh, it is, our stress response never learns to switch off. It just keeps scanning forever. Oh, oh, oh, ping. Oh, what was that? Oh my gosh, oh my gosh. And this is why we become so exhausted and yet still why-in while your brain's still churning through lists at 10 p.m. and 3 a.m. and all the things, and it feels like everything's broken. Now your nervous system isn't necessarily broken, it's doing its job perfectly. But the world we're living in breaks all the rules. It's why the lure at the moment I am seeing so many people double down on their scrolling, their screen time, because that doom scroll loop is your brain hunting for information to feel safe. And the feed never ends. It never says, you're done. So the safety that you are looking for never actually arrives. As humans, we have some fundamental needs. Of course, if our brain wants to keep us alive, safety is number one. But there's two of these fundamental needs, there's six that I teach my clients about, that are on steroids. And they're a paradox. And it's really important that you understand how this paradox is working so that you can feel back in control, even just a teensy bit more. Two of our core human needs are certainty, which is around that safety. But at the same time, we also need variety. Because if every day is exactly the same and your brain almost gets its wish that I wake up and I do the same thing at the same time, and there's nothing different in my environment, we're gonna get bored really fast, especially women like us. We're gonna get bored exceptionally quickly. We like a little bit of variety. But here's the irony: variety we like, we call a surprise. Variety we don't like, we call a problem. Right now, we are drowning in involuntary variety. We over-index typically on certainty. We love planning, scheduling, the color coding, the meal planning, and our safety is built on holding on to everything because then we can control what comes next. We have fewer surprises in theory, or fewer problems is the story that we tell ourselves. But the gap between what your level of certainty that you need right now and the certainty available is enormous. And in that gap is this crazy hum that sits underneath everything, all of these macro factors feeding you. And because it's not just your house in your suburb, in your city, it's everywhere, it's global, and we are so connected. This uncertainty feels like it's just coming at you from all sides and it's inescapable. So, what happens to us when we can't get the certainty that we need, when we feel like everything's batshit crazy and we are just spinning in circles? Well, if you can't get the certainty you need, your brain rewinds. It goes back to when it used to have certainty. And I just say that so many people right now are so hyper-focused on the uncertainty that's out there outside of themselves that they've completely forgotten that actually uncertainty comes from within. But we'll come back to that point. So, what happens is you reach for the old playbook about when you used to feel safe and then you dial it up. We're seeing this with people yearning for yonder years, when maybe gender roles were clear-cut, or where men felt like they were in charge, hello, manosphere, or when life was just simpler. There's this continual lure that we all seem to have of I'm just gonna blow it all up and go to the country and live a simpler life. Something underneath this as well, that it's not just going back to our childhood where everything felt safe, everything felt certain. There was a good amount of variety. It was a birthday party, or what present were you gonna get, but you're gonna get a present. Again, controlled variety. It goes back to this wiring that's older than us, goes back to your mother, to your grandmother, back generations, and ultimately back to the savannah for a world you don't live in anymore. So, what starts to come back online are a specific set of survival strategies that have been running in the background for years. In normal times, these survival strategies of why you've achieved what you've achieved. Whether it's things like your ability to be incredibly empathetic or have high IQ, your ability to get lots done, your ability to push yourself more than most, your high achieverness, your type A, your attention to detail. But in uncertain times, they get amped up. And not just amped up, but we're talking here volume, pace, intensity. They go from being useful to being compulsive. And from a tool that maybe you used to use or a way that you used to consciously let rip in some places to a tool that's now using you. I'm curious, ask yourself the question: what have you noticed in the last few months? What feels like it's more, more intense, maybe more reactive, more tightly wound, more white-knuckled? I'm seeing more women say yes because they're worried about their job. I'm seeing more women start pushing the hours because they're seeing everybody else around them do it. So we say a rising tide lifts or boats, but my God, when that rising tide is more hours and more work, because everyone feels like they're even more behind than they used to be. If any of that is true, if the pace feels more frantic and it's not just it's like, yes, it's exciting and there's always new innovations and it's great, but underneath that, ooh, yay, this is exciting, there's a whole collective, like, oh shit, where is this going? And what does this mean for me? So I'm just gonna hold on tighter. If you've felt that more, it's not you losing it, it's that old survival wiring coming back online because the world has stopped making sense. So you're gonna revert back to what you know. Any old habits you had, if you've been a perfectionist, my God, rocket fuel, look out. If you have been a procrastinator in the past, well, yes. Now there are a million and one ways that you can, in theory, be strategic, but actually just procrastinating on the thing. We've just dressing it up in different clothing and calling it something else. So, our strategies, one of our key ways that we've always got through as high achievers is we just try harder. Let me, let me get more organized, I'll get a new list, I'll get an app, I'll go on retreat, they're great. Digital detox, I know I need another book, another routine, I'll journal, I will sort my hormones, I'll eat more protein, I'll do all of these things, and they're gonna make me feel better. Now, I'm all for bringing your focus back to you. So if you want to lift weights, if you want to do protein and that gets you some certainty, that's great. However, they tend to only work briefly because maybe you weren't meant to be in the office that day and you'd planned your food and then something shifts. This constant feeling of the rug being pulled out from you. So even the best laid plans that you may have had around diet, nutrition, movement, seeing friends that you know are good for you, they just don't seem to happen. And then you feel worse because you couldn't even stick to the thing that was meant to fix the thing. And you add that to the pile of all the things that you're bailing on. And this is because ultimately every strategy that you tend to have is aimed at surface level. Whether it's trying to stop the scrolling, trying to stop overworking, working late, trying to put in a boundary, trying to sleep better, trying to stop snapping. None of these are actually the problem. They're just symptoms of a system that is in complete overload and is looking for certainty in all the wrong places. The real problem under those symptoms is chronic nervous system activation. So a nervous system is becoming a little more buzzwordy lately, but it's the old survival patterns on overdrive, the certainty that you need and the certainty that you have available. You can't fix that with a new morning routine that you know is probably going to be over in three days when there's the next crisis. The work we need to do isn't at the surface. It never was. The work is always in the operating system underneath. The one running all these patterns without your permission. Your perfectionist didn't say, can I really ramp up? It just went, let's go. Now, we're not going to fix this today. This is what we do inside our broader containers, but I want you to start to see it, which is the first real move. I want you to do three things, which is going to make a massive difference to how you feel on a day-to-day basis. When some of these patterns fire, I want you to notice your pattern with curiosity, not criticism. More of a, oh, there I go again. I'm doing that silly thing where I overfunction. Oh, look, I'm being a martyr. Look at me. Rather than a, oh my god, what the fuck is wrong with me? Because the moment you can see it, you're one step outside it. And ironically, you're starting to get more certainty in how you're operating. So that's step one. Step two is I want you to get ruthlessly honest about what's actually in your control right now. Even though you might not be able to control what's happening in the world, you can control what you put into your eyes, your ears, your body. You can control your attention, you can control your thoughts, you control your emotions. That's it. It's a pretty small list. Everything else, including the news cycle, including grocery prices, including politicians, is outside your sphere of influence. The energy leak you have of trying to control the uncontrollables is one of the biggest drains in your life right now. And just a heads up, obsessively trying to get more information about what's going on, whether you're going down tweets, whether you're following people that are hyper-obsessing over information, is actually one of the patterns firing. There's a fine line between being informed and being obsessed, or you're checking news sites multiple times a day. I'd say that you're falling into the latter category. Now, step three, notice your patterns. Get ruthless about what's on your control. Wonder what happens if you take 24 hours off the feed. Not forever, God forbid I'm not asking you to stay disconnected, but just one day. No news, no politics, no scrolling for safety. You will be flawed by how much you are attached to your phone and how much you are outsourcing your sense of safety and certainty to an object. You do this for 24 hours, and my God, we talk about digital detox. I'm more talking about certainty here. You will feel so much more in control. You will realize that perhaps fueling your body with things that don't help you right now is not healthy. So you are not broken, you are not weak, I promise, and you're not overreacting. The world really has gone batshit crazy. You are a capable, intelligent, responsible woman whose nervous system and body is doing exactly what it was designed to do, especially add hormones to all this. And my God, like everyone's going a bit crazy. But we're operating in a world that has changed faster than your wiring. So to reassure you, you don't need more discipline, you don't need a new planner. What you need to do is understand what's running underneath a version of you that is starting to show up now. I'll see you next time.