RUST IN THE MACHINE
What Chronic Stress Does To People, Culture, Etc.
This piece explores psychiatry, science, and lived experience. It is not medical advice, and it cannot replace care tailored to an individual person.
Last Friday, a patient asked me what chronic cortisol actually does to a person. Not in abstract. Not in a textbook way. She wanted to know what it feels like over time.
I told her it’s like adding layers of rust to a machine. The gears still turn. The engine still runs. But everything becomes less smooth, less supported, more brittle. The system compensates. Then overcompensates. Eventually the strain becomes normal.
Cortisol itself is not the villain. It mobilizes energy. It sharpens attention. It keeps you alive. The problem is duration. The stress response was built for acute physical threat, not for persistent psychological anticipation¹.
Roughly one in five adults meets criteria for an anxiety disorder in a given year². About one in three reports insufficient sleep³. The U.S. Surgeon General has described loneliness as carrying health risks comparable to smoking fifteen cigarettes a day⁴.
• Adults meeting criteria for anxiety in a given year: about 20%²
• Adults reporting chronic insufficient sleep: about 33%³
• Health risk associated with persistent loneliness: comparable to major medical risk factors⁴
That is not fringe. That is baseline.
As Robert Sapolsky has written, the human stress response was designed for short bursts of crisis, not for chronic rumination¹. When it remains elevated, it alters immune function, cardiovascular tone, memory, and mood.
Rust does not announce itself. It accumulates. And when enough individuals are running on cortisol, culture begins to reflect it.
Ambiguity feels dangerous.
Nuance feels inefficient.
Certainty feels stabilizing.
When Alarm Becomes Culture
We like to imagine belief systems emerging from philosophy. Often they emerge from physiology. Experimental research shows that reminders of mortality increase attachment to existing worldviews and increase punitive reactions toward perceived moral violators⁵⁶.
• Mortality reminders increase worldview defense in controlled experiments⁵
• Mortality salience associated with greater ideological rigidity in meta-analyses⁶
As Ernest Becker wrote, “The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else”⁷.
Add chronic stress to mortality anxiety and narrowing accelerates. Certainty feels like oxygen in a room that feels thin.
As Yogi Berra said, “It gets late early out there.” He meant baseball. He also described mortality awareness. Once the clock becomes visible, urgency compresses thought.
Compressed thinking prefers simple stories.
Trust Compounds
One variable has quietly determined the rest: trust. Neuroscientist Paul Zak, in his TED talk on trust and oxytocin, argued that oxytocin increases our willingness to trust others without direct evidence⁸. In laboratory settings, elevated oxytocin levels were associated with increased cooperative behavior.
The idea was seductive. Trust might not just be cultural. It might be chemical. I prescribe oxytocin off label.
Years ago, I thought it might meaningfully help patients on the autism spectrum who struggle with interpersonal navigation. If oxytocin modulates affiliative behavior, perhaps enhancing it would reduce friction. In a small group of about ten patients over time, roughly half with autism and half without, the results were uneven.
One autistic woman insists it changes everything. Without it, she says, social situations feel impenetrable. With it, edges soften. Rooms feel less hostile. She describes it as removing a layer of internal rust.
One man with a strong narcissistic personality structure reports that his wife refuses to engage with him if he does not take it. He requests refills reliably. Whether that reflects neurochemistry, relational conditioning, or both remains unclear.
Another neurotypical patient reports that interpersonal interactions simply feel easier. Less effortful. Three out of ten report meaningful benefit. One of those three has autism. Most report feeling nothing at all.
• Patients reporting clear interpersonal benefit: 3 out of 10
• Patients on the autism spectrum among responders: 1
• Patients reporting no noticeable effect: most
Biology matters. It is also uneven.
Oxytocin does not install empathy. It does not dissolve distrust accumulated over years. It does not repair eroded institutions. At best, it may lower the threshold for affiliative behavior in some individuals.
Later research has shown that oxytocin can increase bonding within groups while heightening defensiveness toward perceived outsiders⁹. Chemistry amplifies existing structure. It does not redesign it. If the structure is rusted, amplification magnifies rust.
Trust at scale cannot be sprayed intranasally. It has to be built.
The Slow Work
What reduces fear rarely looks dramatic. It looks like sleep that is protected. Food that is reliable. Healthcare that is accessible before crisis. Schools that function. Communities where people know each other’s names.
Restorative sleep improves emotional regulation and cognitive flexibility¹⁰. Early mental health intervention reduces long-term burden and cost¹¹. Social connection predicts improved physical and psychological outcomes⁴.
• Sleep loss linked to increased emotional reactivity¹⁰
• Early intervention reduces long-term psychiatric disability and cost¹¹
• Social isolation correlates with depression and mortality⁴
None of this trends. All of it reduces rust.
As Maria Bamford once said about psychiatric treatment, “It’s like wearing glasses for my brain.” Most stabilization is corrective lens work. It clarifies rather than dazzles.
Hope Is Maintenance
Public trust in major institutions has declined in recent decades¹². Exposure to outrage-amplifying media increases perceived threat and polarization¹³. As Hannah Arendt observed, internally coherent narratives gain power when shared reality fractures¹⁴.
Rust spreads quickly. Maintenance takes patience. Hope is not denial of fear. It is regulation of it. There will always be someone selling upgrades. There will always be someone selling forever. Human beings will always wrestle with mortality.
What can change is baseline threat.
If chronic stress narrows cognition¹, lowering stress widens it. If loneliness fuels susceptibility to extreme narratives⁴, connection inoculates against them. If sleep deprivation amplifies volatility¹⁰, sleep is civic infrastructure.
• Prevention rarely trends
• Stability compounds slowly
• Fear scales quickly
The distance between lithium and lizard people was never intelligence. It was stress. It was access. It was who reached the frightened brain first. Building without fear means reaching that brain earlier.
Earlier than the algorithm.
Earlier than the preacher of certainty.
Earlier than the influencer with the ring light.
As Yogi Berra said, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” We are at a fork. One path scales fear because fear monetizes well. The other compounds stability because stability requires maintenance.
Hope is not a mood. It is maintenance. And maintenance is how societies endure.
NOTES & SOURCES
Sapolsky RM. Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers.
National Institute of Mental Health. Prevalence of Any Anxiety Disorder Among Adults.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Short Sleep Duration Among U.S. Adults.
U.S. Surgeon General. Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation. 2023.
Rosenblatt A et al. “Evidence for Terror Management Theory.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 1989.
Burke BL et al. “Mortality Salience and Political Attitudes: A Meta-Analysis.” Political Psychology. 2013.
Becker E. The Denial of Death.
Zak PJ. Trust, Morality — and Oxytocin? TED Talk, 2011.
De Dreu CKW et al. “Oxytocin Promotes Human Ethnocentrism.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 2011.
Walker MP. Why We Sleep.
World Health Organization. Early Intervention and Cost-Effectiveness in Mental Health.
Pew Research Center. Trends in Public Trust in Government and Institutions.
Research in political psychology on outrage exposure and perceived threat amplification.
Arendt H. The Origins of Totalitarianism.Thank you for reading until the end. Please hit the like button. Leave a comment. I read them. Share this with someone who thinks certainty is the only antidote to chaos. Subscribe if you want to see where this goes next.