Why your brain is so tired right now: Comprehensibility and the time of monsters

I love flying back home to Portland from other places. As the plane leaves the cloud cover, I can immediately recognize the familiar sights: here is the Mountain Hood, here is the Columbia river, here is my neighborhood. It is so comforting to see the familiar sights that signal that I am home.

This is just one simple example of our brains at work: the brain expects to see something, sees it, and takes comfort in the fact that its expectations (or predictions) were correct. The human brain is, at its core, a prediction machine. It doesn’t just react to what is happening in the moment. It is constantly scanning for patterns — what usually comes next, what fits, what doesn’t — and quietly running thousands of predictions per second about what is about to happen. Most of them you never notice, because they turn out to be right.

When you reach for a cup of coffee, your brain has already predicted the weight, the temperature, the distance, the resistance of the handle. When you turn the corner onto your own street, your brain has already predicted what the houses will look like. This is why life mostly feels smooth — not because it actually is, but because your brain is doing enormous amounts of invisible work to keep it that way.

This prediction system is what allows the nervous system to settle. When predictions hold, the body relaxes. The parasympathetic branch (the part that handles rest, digestion, repair) gets to do its work. We feel safe enough to think clearly, sleep well, digest our food, and recover.

When predictions fail (when something unexpected happens) the body mobilizes. Heart rate goes up, attention sharpens, stress hormones release. This is appropriate and useful in short bursts. The problem comes when predictions keep failing, over and over, with no time to recalibrate in between. The nervous system never gets to settle. It stays in a low-grade vigilance, waiting for the next unwelcome surprise. This is why comprehensibility (as defined by Aaron Antonovsky as the sense that what is happening around us can be understood) is a fundamental factor that keeps our nervous systems regulated.

What our moment is doing to the prediction machine

This is where the current moment becomes a problem — not just politically or socially, but biologically.

The world right now is producing an unusual volume of prediction errors. Political institutions that felt solid are behaving in ways we haven’t seen before. Economic patterns that held for decades have stopped holding. Social norms are shifting faster than most of us can absorb. Information arrives in such volume and at such speed that we cannot finish digesting one event before three more have happened. Truth itself feels contested in ways that make it hard to know what to predict from. And let’s not even mention the potential impact of the ongoing race to perfect AI, which is bound to upend the world as we know it.

Our nervous systems were not designed for this. This is why so many of us feel chronically tired in a way that sleep doesn’t fix. Our brains are doing far more work than they were built for, running prediction after prediction in a world that keeps breaking them, with no time to rest in between.

A useful frame from an unexpected place

How do we wrap our heads around this? One way to frame it is to look to an Italian political theorist named Antonio Gramsci, who spent the last eleven years of his life writing in one of Mussolini’s prisons in the 1930s. From there, he wrote what became known as the Prison Notebooks — a sprawling, brilliant body of work on history, culture, and power. One of his insightful observations was:

“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

The word he used — interregnum — is Latin for “between reigns.” It refers to those periods in history when one order has lost its authority but the next has not yet taken shape. The old patterns no longer predict, and the new patterns haven’t formed yet. Things feel chaotic because they are chaotic — but the chaos has a recognizable structure. It is the structure of transition.

This statement was later paraphrased by the philosopher Slavoj Žižek as:

“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”

We are living in the time of monsters. We are between worlds and the transition between the old way and the new way is noisy, messy, and terrifying. At times like these, all sorts of unsavory creatures tend to crawl out of their dark holes and attempt to impose their will on others. What Gramsci tells us, though, is that this is not the end of the world and it is not a sign that everything is broken forever. It is a sign that we are in a particular kind of historical moment — one that humans have been through before, and survived. New orders do eventually emerge. The monsters do eventually retreat. It just takes time, and it is messy.

Morbid symptoms in the body

Gramsci used the phrase morbid symptoms to describe what shows up in society during these between-times: the unrest, the polarization, the reactionary movements, the breakdown of trust. The metaphor turns out to be accurate at the body level too. When the nervous system keeps failing in its predictions, the symptoms show up in the body. Disrupted sleep. Tight shoulders. Clenched jaws. Digestive issues. Headaches. A low back that aches for no obvious reason. A breath that has somehow become shallow without our noticing. These are not random complaints. They are the body’s own morbid symptoms, surfacing in response to a world that has stopped making sense.

Most of us treat these as separate problems to solve. The back pain is a back problem. The insomnia is a sleep problem. The headaches are a head problem. But often they are all the same problem, wearing different costumes. They are what happens when the nervous system has been running too many failed predictions for too long without rest.

Where this leads

The Sense of Coherence is not built by waiting for the world to make sense again. It is built by tending patiently and consistently to the body that is doing its best to hold us through a moment of disorder.

This is where yoga, breath work, and other body-based practices stop being optional wellness add-ons and start being something more important. They are not about escaping the world. They are about giving the nervous system small, regular windows of successful prediction — moments when the breath does what we asked it to, when the body holds a pose we knew it could hold, when we move through a familiar sequence and arrive at a familiar place. Each of these is a tiny vote of confidence that the world, at least here, at least now, is something we can understand. And the nervous system listens. Comprehensibility can start in the body and then expand into the mind. It can be built one breath at a time.

Next week, we’ll look at one of the most common places these morbid symptoms show up, the lower back, and why it carries so much of what our minds cannot fully process. Tune in!