If I had to identify a single organizing principle for understanding psychological experience—anxiety, insomnia, panic, rumination, emotional reactivity, performance under pressure—it would be this: nervous system arousal.
Almost everything that troubles people psychologically can be understood through this lens. And almost every effective intervention, regardless of its theoretical framework, works at least partly by shifting arousal in one direction or another.
This doesn't mean arousal is the only thing that matters. But it's a unifying variable that often gets overlooked while people chase more complicated explanations.
"Every intervention should be evaluated through one question: does this increase or decrease my nervous system arousal?"
The 3AM vs 11AM Mind
Here's an illustration. Think about a problem that's been troubling you. Now imagine confronting that problem at 3AM after a restless night. Now imagine confronting the same problem at 11AM after good sleep, a workout, and a decent breakfast.
The problem is identical. Your circumstances haven't changed. But your experience of the problem is radically different.
At 3AM, everything feels insurmountable. Solutions seem impossible. Catastrophic interpretations feel not just plausible but inevitable. At 11AM, the same situation feels like a hassle—maybe a significant one, but manageable. You can see options. You can engage without drowning.
What changed? Not the situation. Not your intelligence. Not your resources. Your nervous system arousal changed. At 3AM, your nervous system is in a fundamentally different state—depleted, dysregulated, oriented toward threat. At 11AM, it's resourced, regulated, capable of nuanced response.
This isn't weakness. This is biology.
The High-Performer Paradox
Here's where it gets interesting for high-functioning people.
High performers typically solve complex problems through cognitive effort. They think hard. They analyze. They strategize. When they hit obstacles, they apply more thinking.
This works brilliantly for most challenges. But anxiety and insomnia aren't thinking problems—they're arousal problems. And applying more cognitive effort to arousal problems often makes them worse.
Your frontal cortex—the thinking, planning, analyzing part of your brain—goes progressively offline as arousal increases. The very tool you're trying to use becomes less available the more you need it. Meanwhile, the effort of trying to think your way out creates more arousal, which further impairs your thinking capacity, which makes you try harder, which...
You see the loop.
"Simple problems can have simple solutions. But smart people often can't accept that—they keep looking for something more complicated."
The Insight About Thinking
On your best nights of sleep, how much cognitive engineering are you doing? How much strategizing about how to fall asleep?
Zero. You're not thinking about it at all. Sleep happens when you get out of the way and let millions of years of evolved biology do its job.
So how would more thinking help? More analysis, more strategizing, more effort—these are exactly what you're not doing on good nights. The thinking is the problem, not the solution.
This is counterintuitive for people whose strength is thinking. It feels like giving up. It feels like you're not applying your capabilities to the problem. But sometimes the capability of "sophisticated analysis" is exactly the wrong tool—like using a hammer on a screw.
The Practical Framework
Once you understand arousal as the central variable, intervention becomes clearer. You stop asking "what's the right thought to think?" and start asking "what will lower my nervous system arousal right now?"
This reframes everything:
- Breathing techniques work not because of mystical properties but because slow, deep breathing directly activates the parasympathetic nervous system, lowering arousal.
- Exercise works partly because it provides a productive outlet for physiological activation and partly because it increases baseline capacity to handle stress.
- Sleep hygiene works because it reduces factors that elevate arousal during the period when you're trying to sleep.
- Cognitive reframing works not by changing the situation but by changing interpretations that trigger arousal elevation.
Different techniques, same underlying mechanism: shift the arousal dial.
The Right Technique, Right Time
There's a crucial nuance. Every psychological phenomenon exists on a continuum of intensity. CBT-style cognitive techniques work at mild-to-moderate arousal levels but can backfire at high intensity because the frontal cortex is too offline to engage with them.
This means the same technique can be helpful at 4/10 intensity and counterproductive at 8/10 intensity. "Think about this differently" is useful advice when you can think. When you can't, it just adds the frustration of failed effort to whatever you're already experiencing.
The right technique at the wrong time is effectively the wrong technique.
At high arousal, you need techniques that bypass cognition entirely—physical interventions, physiological circuit breakers, anything that works on the body rather than requiring the mind to function well. Thinking techniques can come later, after you've brought the arousal down enough for your frontal cortex to come back online.
The Organizing Question
Whatever psychological challenge you're facing, try running it through the arousal lens. Ask:
- What's my current arousal level?
- Is this arousal level helping or hindering my ability to respond effectively?
- What would shift my arousal in a helpful direction right now?
- Am I trying to use cognitive tools when physiological tools would work better (or vice versa)?
Arousal isn't everything. But it's the variable that explains more than any other single factor. And it's often the variable that's most directly actionable in the moment.
Start there.