How to Be Human — A Three-Part Series on How Women have Lost Connection with Our Humanity and How We get It Back
We are living in an age where crisis is no longer an occasional rupture in the fabric of daily life — crisis is the fabric. The "crisis" is manufactured, curated, sold, and resold across every media platform, political narrative, and economic model. The reason is unsophisticated — crisis captures attention. It hijacks the nervous system, short-circuits reflective thought, and propels immediate reaction. In an attention economy, immediate reaction is the most monetizable human state there is.
Outrage, fear, indignation — these are high-yield emotions. They generate clicks, shares, engagement metrics that translate directly into revenue. News organizations learned long ago that calm headlines don’t drive traffic. Politicians know that nuanced debate doesn’t mobilize a base.
In a world built to capitalize on emotional flooding, emotional regulation is not taught, encouraged, or rewarded. It is quietly, systematically eroded.
The Biology of Being Overwhelmed
The biological reality is blunt. When we are constantly flooded with emotionally charged stimuli, the brain’s architecture changes. Chronic stress elevates cortisol, shrinks the hippocampus — the center for memory and emotional regulation — and amplifies amygdala reactivity, the fight-or-flight machinery that evolved for occasional acute threats followed by periods of recovery.
Today, that recovery never comes. Before one crisis is metabolized, another demands response. The nervous system stays locked in a state of perpetual emergency that was never meant to be permanent. In this landscape, being emotionally reactive is not a character flaw. It is a conditioned state, and a profitable one.
Every platform, every algorithm, every media channel is engineered to trigger responses that bypass reflection.
When I understood that — really understood it, not as an intellectual concept but as something I could feel happening in my own body in real time — the shame I’d been carrying about my own reactivity began to dissolve. I wasn’t broken. I was responding exactly as designed.
The Illiteracy We Inherited
From an early age, most of us were conditioned to view emotional expression through the lens of reward and punishment. Children who express anger get shamed. Those who show vulnerability get labeled weak. Schools, workplaces, families — they teach that managing emotion means suppressing it or performing it for social approval.
The result is emotional illiteracy dressed up as maturity. We recognize the loud emotions — anger, excitement, despair — but we can’t name the subtler ones underneath. Disappointment. Longing. Shame. The feelings that actually drive the behavior we can’t seem to change. Without that literacy, emotional life becomes reactive by default:
A criticism becomes a personal attack. A disagreement becomes a betrayal. A moment of uncertainty spirals into an existential crisis that the body cannot distinguish from physical danger.
I lived inside that cycle for years, convinced that my intensity was the problem, that if I could just contain it better I’d stop causing damage. What I didn’t understand was that containment and regulation are entirely different things. One is a cage, the other is capacity.
Steadiness as Subversion
True emotional regulation is the capacity to feel fully without being overtaken. It is the slow strengthening of internal architecture that can hold complexity without collapse. This doesn’t look like calm. Sometimes it looks like sitting in a car for twenty minutes after a conversation because the feeling needs somewhere to land before you act on it. Sometimes it looks like saying I need to come back to this instead of detonating in the moment. It is unsexy, undramatic work that no one will applaud.
But here is what I’ve found — regulation doesn’t dampen the richness of emotional life. It deepens it.
When you are not constantly overwhelmed by manufactured intensity, you become capable of more nuanced, textured feeling. Beneath the loud emotions that dominate reactive culture lie subtler, more complex ones that connect you more honestly to yourself and to other people. The emotions you were never allowed to feel become accessible once you stop drowning in the ones you were engineered to perform.
In a culture that profits from emotional reactivity, calm is subversive. In a political landscape fueled by outrage, steady presence is radical. In a market economy driven by anxiety, a regulated nervous system is a quiet refusal to be turned into a product of someone else’s crisis architecture. It is one of the core capacities we must rebuild if we are going to remember how to be human — not the optimized, algorithmic version, but the messy, contradictory, fully alive one.
What would shift if you stopped treating your emotional responses as verdicts and started treating them as information?
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