Rumination, Root Cause, & Rumi

In the past few weeks, I have noticed a significant uptick in anxiety. It happens mostly at night after the dishes are done and the apartment is quiet. No matter how good the rest of my day was, my mind starts to spin worst-case scenarios; creating a creeping sense of despair and a prevailing sense of something being “off” or “wrong”. Even worse, it has started to spill over into the next day. And the next.

The anxiety feels like my nervous system has tinnitus. I know this because I have actual tinnitus and the sensation is similar. But anxiety is not a new feeling. My nervous system is similar to a Border Collie’s. A heightened sense of protectiveness and parameter awareness. The need to create “work” if there’s not actual work. The inability to sit still. Overreacting to random sounds and cues. In some ways, this comes in handy in situations that require a higher level of situational awareness. But right before going to bed is not one of them.

I give myself credit that I have, for the most part, remained curious and self-compassionate about the anxiety. Even more importantly, I haven’t created external drama. Nothing in my environment has changed recently. My marriage and my closest relationships are solid. Work is fun and produces decent revenue. I love living in CDMX. I haven’t changed my medication. I’ve also been working out more regularly.

So I know it’s not an external thing. Nor is it related to the state of my soul. So it has to be a systems thing.

“System” is the key word.

To understand the nervous system, the first step is to look at how it actually operates. It behaves less like a machine with separate parts and more like a living ecosystem. Every signal influences another signal. Every response loops back into the system. Nothing fires alone. The entire structure behaves like a coordinated network that updates itself constantly.

Stephen Porges, creator of the Polyvagal Theory, said, “There is no such thing as a ‘bad’ response; there are only adaptive responses”. This creates an important reframing of anxiety as an evolved survival mechanism rather than a flaw

Ergo, to understand systems, you need to apply systems thinking. For me, systems thinking has served as almost its own level of consciousness; the epiphany of seeing the interconnectedness of things. So it makes sense to apply to the nervous system as well.

If you aren’t familiar with systems thinking, here is a short explanation…

Systems thinking studies relationships instead of isolated parts. A system gains its identity from the way its components interact. Every part influences every other part. Patterns form through feedback loops, not single causes. When applied to human experience, systems thinking looks at sensation, thought, memory, behavior, and environment as elements of one interconnected process. This explains why change rarely comes from force. Systems shift when the relationships among their parts shift.

Now let’s apply that to anxiety and the nervous system…

The human nervous system is a two-way system. For the reptile and mammal in us, our mind interprets physical sensations or emotional inputs. These inputs create an interpretation based on a combination of hard wiring and conditioning. Based on that wiring, the interpretation determines the response.

But here is God’s practical joke: the neocortex allows our minds to create sensations in our bodies based entirely on our thoughts. This becomes the essence of the kind of anxiousness I’m experiencing. It is entirely the work of the mind producing the thoughts that create the loops that we call anxiety.

Seeing anxiety through a systemic lens creates a more humane and more scientifically consistent perspective. It honors complexity without mystifying it. It respects biology while acknowledging lived experience. It provides clarity at the level where the actual phenomenon occurs: the system as a unified field of relationships. Interestingly, this kind of thinking opens up the space to apply curiosity and compassion, the two essential elements of dealing with anxiety.

Let’s contrast this with the traditional psychological lens on anxiety…

Traditional psychology often examines elements of mental life in a more segmented way. Thoughts receive analysis in one category. Emotions receive analysis in another. Behaviors fall into their own diagnostic boxes. The problem is our nervous systems don't work that way.

Systems thinking offers a much broader (and more accurate) perspective. It sees the nervous system for what it is, a complex adaptive system that responds to internal cues, external conditions, learned associations, environmental memories, and social context. These influences create loops of perception, interpretation, and response. Each loop invites further loops and the system evolves through these interactions.

When a person understands the loops, intervention becomes more precise. For example, calming the body alters the entire system because the body participates in every loop. A systems lens reveals leverage points: breath, sleep, sensory input, pacing, context, and meaning. These interventions change the interaction, which then changes the experience. The nervous system reorganizes itself when the system receives new feedback.

The Cost of Old Thinking

In a sadly ironic twist, the prevailing ideas about anxiety in the US come from a larger systemic flaw: a deeply engrained cultural pathology that treats anxiety as both a medical problem and a personal failure. This pathology violates the most basic law of systems theory, which says that a system produces the behavior it is designed to produce. A nervous system fires anxiety for reasons that make complete sense inside its own history. Patterns, inputs, and survival learning create that response. So when anxiety is treated as a symptom rather than as a signal, it reinforces that “something is wrong”. Further, if a person believes anxiety is a character defect they inherit a story that lives out of alignment with the reality of their system. That story turns a biological event into a moral indictment. It creates self-judgment, which fuels pressure, which fuels activation, which strengthens the very signals that triggered the shame in the first place. The person ends up wrestling their own physiology as if it represents an enemy, restricting any chance for regulation because shame hijacks the system. It also erodes trust in the body, which removes the foundation for rest, clarity, and recalibration. The nervous system continues doing the job it learned to do, and the person carries the belief that they failed in theirs.

Spirituality and Anxiety

I hold a clear distinction between the nervous system and the soul. The soul carries intuition, consciousness, and spiritual intelligence. The nervous system carries wiring, memory, and biological prediction. Spiritual experiences influence the nervous system in powerful ways, yet the nervous system still operates on its own rules. Prayer and meditation support the soul and create meaning, yet the body requires its own form of regulation.

Spiritual masters like Jesus and Buddha understood both the soul and the mechanics of a human system. They taught inner freedom while working directly with the body’s patterns. Jesus fed people before he taught them about spiritual things. Buddha trained people to observe sensation and thought without attachment. Both recognized that the soul carries truth while the human system carries habits, and they worked at the intersection of the two. Their wisdom came from seeing the whole picture and guiding people toward the part of themselves that can choose a different path.

Gestalt therapy teaches the same principle. Sensation arrives before interpretation. My therapist, Irma, frequently reminds me that the body speaks first and the mind follows. The soul is just observing it all - likely hoping that we listen to the inherent wisdom of our bodies!

My Conclusion (as of now)

Using systems thinking, I have arrived at a hypothesis that is both systemic and spiritual: My mind does not yet know how to be content.

Contentment requires trust. It requires surrendering the perception of control. It requires accepting my worthiness for a joyful, abundant, and stress-free life.

My mind sees all of those as threats. As such, it creates internalized drama. It generates thoughts that produce a nervous system response, and the nervous system responds with enough intensity that my mind takes it as proof. Then my mind says, “See, I told you something is wrong!”

To understand and learn contentment, I need to remember that my Higher Self is the baseline. It provides the vantage point that sits outside the mental loops and nervous system responses. It sees the patterns without getting pulled into the story or the physiology. Most of all, it gives me access to the one key thing that overrides most systems: the power to choose, which becomes the only force that can interrupt an automatic cycle.

Then I need to take ownership over the choices I make. The ego may like the idea of choice, agency, and freedom, yet it will never choose these things if it comes with the cost of losing its identity. My ego prefers the familiar job of interpreting things, even when those interpretations exhaust me.

Choice must first be applied to my pre-sleep habits. Shitty sleep is likely the root cause of the perpetuation of anxiety, rather than it being an occasional thing. Let’s go back to the Spiritual Masters, who universally treated rest as sacred. Jesus stepped away from the crowd to restore his spirit before he taught again. He also said, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.” Rumi said “Put your thoughts to sleep. Do not let them cast a shadow over the moon of your heart”.

“Come” and “Put” are choices. My pre-sleep habits create the doorway into that kind of rest, and my choices in that space determine whether my system enters the night in communion or in vigilance.