By K J Foxhall 
A man ran in front of my car, risked his life, just to get a bus?
I am happy to say that my reflexes are still good. I think the man who darted blindly into moving traffic, narrowly missing the bonnet of my car is probably grateful too. His goal wasn’t to escape a burning building or flee a physical attacker; he was sprinting to catch a bus.
To a bystander, the calculation of his decision is baffling. If he had missed the bus, the next one was scheduled to arrive in less than nine minutes. Why would a rational human being risk a catastrophic injury, or worse, just to save 540 seconds?
The answer is that in that split second, he wasn’t acting as a rational human being. He was operating under the influence of chronic urgency, a modern psychological state where our ‘always-on’ culture chemically hijacks our ancient neural circuitry.
To understand why a minor delay feels like a fight for survival, we have to look under the bonnet of the human brain (excuse the pun).
The limbic system and the ‘amygdala hijack’
When someone makes a rash, potentially fatal decision to save a few minutes, their brain is experiencing a severe misinterpretation of reality. This is driven heavily by the limbic system, the ancient, emotional core of the brain responsible for our behavioral and survival responses.
At the center of this system sits the amygdala, that almond-shaped cluster of neurons that acts as the brain’s alarm bell. In our evolutionary past, the amygdala was calibrated to detect immediate physical threats, like a predator rustling in the bushes. When triggered, it floods the body with adrenaline and cortisol, initiating an instantaneous ‘fight or flight’ response.
However, in our hyper-connected world, the amygdala gets confused. It struggles to differentiate between a literal sabertooth tiger and the prospect of being late to the office. When that man saw the bus pull into the bus stop, his brain perceived ‘missing it’ as a profound threat to his schedule, his status, and his day. His amygdala sounded the alarm, bypassing logical thought and driving a purely reactive physical response (basically ‘run’).
Psychologists refer to this as an ‘amygdala hijack’ which is a phenomenon where the primitive emotional brain completely overpowers the rational brain.
Why does the voice of reason go offline?
Ideally, the brain’s logical centre should step in during these moments and say, ‘Wait, a car is coming, and nine minutes is barely enough time to drink a cup of coffee’ (well, unless you are me).
That voice of reason belongs to the prefrontal cortex ‘PFC’, (which we will be discussing very soon). The prefrontal cortex is the brain’s executive control centre located just behind the forehead. It is responsible for complex planning, risk assessment, and impulse control.
Under normal circumstances, it acts as a braking system, calming the amygdala down when a perceived threat isn’t actually life-threatening. But there is a structural catch here, chronic stress and urgency impair the prefrontal cortex.
When we are constantly ‘switched on,’ juggling smartphone notifications, back-to-back meetings, and the relentless pace of modern life, our baseline cortisol levels remain elevated. This chronic stress weakens the neural connections to the prefrontal cortex while strengthening the fast-track connections to the amygdala.
In the fraction of a second it took for that man to step into the road, his prefrontal cortex simply couldn’t boot up fast enough to hit the brakes.
Chasing the dopamine commute
Modern life has wired us for instant gratification. We expect high-speed internet, on-demand food delivery, our shopping to be with us the next day and immediate text message replies.
When we are forced to wait, our brains register it as a deprivation. Conversely, ‘beating the clock’ triggers the brain’s reward centre (specifically the striatum), which relies heavily on the neurotransmitter dopamine.
The Risk: Dodging traffic and ignoring safety.
The Reward: Squeezing through the bus doors just as they close, resulting in a sudden, satisfying surge of dopamine.
Over time, we subconsciously gamify our lives. We become addicted to the micro-thrills of rushing, cutting things close, and ‘winning’ against the clock. Though on the flipside it is not sustainable to do this all the time and many of us become bored after several years of this practice.
The man running into the street wasn’t just avoiding a wait; on a neurochemical level, he was chasing a hit, and he probably didn’t know it. Standing safely on the curb offers zero neurological reward to a brain addicted to urgency. In fact, it can feel uncomfortably like failure.
The urgency illusion: We have created a society that moves at the speed of light, but we are navigating it using brains that evolved thousands of years ago, so hopefully you can now see the dilemma.
Unplugging the urgency machine
The man who risked his life for a bus is not an anomaly. He is a symptom of a culture suffering from ‘hurry sickness’, a persistent, underlying anxiety that we are constantly falling behind. We equate speed with success and view waiting as a waste of life.
Overcoming this requires conscious, deliberate friction to re-engage the prefrontal cortex. It requires us to notice the rising panic of a missed bus, take a deep breath to physically quiet the amygdala, and recognise a fundamental truth that the modern world will not collapse if we simply stand still, look around, and wait nine minutes for the next one.
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A further note and editors comment:
Years ago I wrote an article about why are are always switched on and an adaptation can be found here.
Not much has changed in the 25 years I have been commuting to and from London, the attitude just varies slightly.
When discussing why our brains are constantly in overdrive, here is the biological role these structures play:
The limbic system: the emotional command centre
The limbic system is a group of interconnected structures deep within the brain that regulates emotions, memories, and survival instincts.
Its role in ‘urgency’: It is responsible for processing emotional responses to our environment. In modern life, constant stimuli like notifications, rapid-fire news, and multitasking are processed by the limbic system, keeping our emotional and arousal states artificially elevated.
The amygdala: the brain’s alarm bell
Its role in ‘urgency’: It acts as the brain’s threat-detection center. When it perceives danger, it bypasses the logical, reasoning part of our brain (the prefrontal cortex) and instantly triggers a ‘fight-or-flight’ response, flooding the body with adrenaline and cortisol.
Why we are ‘always switched on’
Our brain evolved to react this way to immediate physical threats (like a predator). Today, the amygdala cannot easily distinguish between a physical threat and a psychological stressor, like a looming deadline, a stressful email, or constant phone alerts. These modern stressors are non-stop, the amygdala fires continuously.
When the amygdala doesn’t get a signal that the ‘threat’ has passed, the nervous system never returns to its resting state. This biological loophole is the primary reason we often feel constantly switched on, hyper-vigilant, and trapped in a state of urgency.