Stress Mistakes Everything for an Emergency
Stress is an ignorant state. It believes that everything is an emergency. — Natalie Goldberg
—What lingers after this line?
One-minute reflection
What's one small action this suggests?
The Central Claim: A Distorted Way of Knowing
Natalie Goldberg frames stress not just as a feeling but as a kind of ignorance—an impaired state of awareness that misreads reality. In her view, stress narrows perception until nuance disappears, and the mind loses the ability to distinguish between what is urgent and what is merely uncomfortable. From there, her second sentence clarifies the mechanism: stress “believes” everything is an emergency. By giving stress a believing mind, she suggests it operates like a faulty narrator inside us, constantly announcing danger even when circumstances don’t warrant it.
False Alarms and the Body’s Emergency System
This emergency mindset has a biological parallel: the fight-or-flight response evolved to handle immediate threats, not overflowing inboxes or social friction. When stress treats every demand as life-or-death, the body can react with the same intensity—tight chest, racing thoughts, shallow breathing—as if something is truly chasing you. Consequently, the problem becomes less the original task and more the repeated triggering of an alarm system. Goldberg’s point lands here: when the system is activated too often, it stops being informative and starts being noise.
How Stress Shrinks Attention and Time
Once the mind is convinced an emergency is underway, attention contracts. You stop seeing options—delegation, delay, simplification—and instead experience a harsh binary: act now or fail. Even time becomes distorted; a deadline next week can feel like a siren blaring in the present moment. As this narrowing continues, priorities flatten. A missed call, a typo, or an awkward interaction can feel disproportionately catastrophic, not because they are, but because stress has stripped away context and proportion.
The Ignorance of Over-Identification
Goldberg’s “ignorant state” also hints that stress persuades us to over-identify with thoughts. The mind generates urgent stories—“If I don’t answer immediately, everything will fall apart”—and stress treats those stories as facts. In that sense, ignorance is not stupidity; it’s forgetting that thoughts are events in the mind, not reliable commands. A simple example is the common impulse to respond instantly to every message. The compulsion masquerades as responsibility, yet it often comes from stress equating responsiveness with survival.
Returning to Discernment: What Is Actually an Emergency?
If stress makes everything an emergency, relief begins by restoring discernment. A practical pivot is to ask, “What happens if this waits an hour?” or “What is the true consequence?” These questions reintroduce gradations—important, preferable, optional—where stress insists on only one category: urgent. As discernment returns, so does choice. You can still act quickly when something is genuinely time-sensitive, but you stop donating emergency energy to ordinary life.
A Writer’s Remedy: Attention as a Form of Sanity
Because Goldberg is closely associated with writing and mindfulness, her quote also reads like a craft lesson: attention is sanity, and stress is the loss of it. Writing practice often begins with noticing what is present—breath, sensation, the plain facts of the moment—before spinning conclusions. In that light, the transition from stress to clarity isn’t dramatic heroism; it’s a return to seeing. The emergency narrative quiets when you repeatedly come back to what is actually happening, and the mind relearns that most of life, even when difficult, is not a fire.