Living in Uncertainty – How Distrust Rewires Out Bodies

My friend sent me a link last week with a message that said, 'You need to read this.' I read it. It was convincing, well-written, completely plausible. Then I googled it and found an equally convincing, equally well-written article that said the exact opposite. I sat there for a moment with a strange feeling in my chest — not quite anxious, not quite angry — more like something in me had quietly decided to stop trying.

I just felt flat. Done.

That flatness is worth paying attention to, because it is not nothing. It is what happens in the body when it has been working really hard to find solid ground and cannot. The shoulders drop. The breath goes shallow. A kind of low-grade fog rolls in. You are still functioning — answering emails, making dinner, looking fine to everyone around you — but there is a dullness underneath it all that sleep does not seem to fix.

This is what living inside a constant information fog actually does to us physically. And I do not think we are being honest enough about it.

Here is the thing about how we are wired. When we encounter something uncertain, something that could be a threat, the body mobilises. The jaw tightens. The eyes scan. The breath shortens. We start gathering information compulsively — one more article, one more expert, one more scroll — because the brain is trying to do its actual job, which is to figure out what is safe and what is not. Certainty is the signal that tells the body it can stand down.

But what happens when certainty is not available? When every source contradicts another source? When you genuinely cannot tell whether what you are reading is real? The body keeps scanning, keeps looking, keeps running the whole activation loop — and never gets to close it. The danger alarm stays on, quietly, in the background. And running a quiet background alarm, all day, every day, is genuinely exhausting in a way that is hard to explain to anyone who has not felt it.

I notice it in myself on mornings when I read the news before breakfast. I feel my body brace and my chest tighten just before I open the news page on my phone. I ask myself if I really want to do this to myself, and I don’t want to, but I find myself opening the news page anyway. By ten o'clock there is a specific heaviness behind my eyes, a tightness across my chest, a feeling that the world is slightly too loud. I have not done anything physical. I have just been reading. But my body has been sprinting since seven in the morning.

A client described it to me recently as feeling 'permanently slightly wrong.' Nothing specific she could point to. She was managing fine — functioning, organised, getting things done. But there was a low hum of unease that had been there so long she had almost stopped noticing it. She had quit the news months ago and still felt it. Which makes sense, because you can change what you are consuming, but the body holds the pattern of bracing long after the original trigger is gone.

The thing nobody mentions is that this is also the perfect environment for someone else to make your decisions for you. When we are that depleted — when we have spent all day trying to work out what is true and what is manufactured and who to trust — we are not in great shape to listen to ourselves. We reach for whoever sounds the most confident, the most certain, the most reassuring. We are hungry for someone to just tell us what to think, because our own capacity to assess anything is running on fumes.

Which is, not coincidentally, exactly what a lot of content is designed to produce.

Here is what I keep coming back to. In a world where so much external information has become genuinely unreliable, the body is still giving you real data. Your gut does not run an algorithm. The tightening in your throat when something is off, the quiet easing in your chest when something is right, the particular heaviness that arrives when you are about to agree to something your whole system knows is a no — none of that is fabricated. It can be shaped by old patterns and unresolved experiences, which is why learning to read it takes practice. But it is yours. It comes from inside you, not from someone who has a very good reason for wanting you to believe a particular thing.

So the question is less 'who do I trust out there' and more 'can I find my way back to the signal inside here.'

Which starts with something almost embarrassingly simple. Right now, before you go back to whatever screen is waiting for you — just notice what is happening in your body. Not the news, not the article, not whether any of it is true. Just: is there tightness anywhere? A held quality in your breath? A heaviness you have been carrying without quite registering it?

You do not need to fix it. Just notice it. That one small act of turning your attention inward, even for thirty seconds, is the beginning of coming back to yourself. The noise outside is not going away. But you are still in here. That is the ground worth standing on.

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