SYMPTOMS TO HONOR, TRUTHS TO CONFRONT

There is an invisible architecture that governs the way we inhabit time. This is not about time management, productivity, or work-life balance; those are mere symptoms of a far deeper and rarely investigated question. It concerns how we build bridges between the now and what does not yet exist, between lived experience and imagined experience, between the being we are and the being we fear becoming. It is in this construction, in this intermediate space between the real and the possible, that three distinct modes of collapse reveal themselves: worry, anxiety, and stress.

Few people understand that these are not merely catalogued emotional states or physiological responses. They are ways of being-in-the-world, existential strategies, cognitive architectures that determine not only how we feel, but fundamentally how we relate to the very possibility of a future. Even more surprising: they are profoundly relational phenomena that spread through human systems like silent viruses, contaminating entire organizations, intimate bonds, and family structures.

Worry is the first movement in this dance with the nonexistent. It arises from a legitimate perception: something ahead demands attention, care, anticipation. It is the mind recognizing that the present carries seeds of possible futures, and that some of those seeds must be nurtured or prevented from germinating. So far, nothing extraordinary. Human beings have always been this strange creature capable of living simultaneously in multiple temporalities, projecting itself beyond the instant.

Yet it is precisely here that worry reveals something fascinating about our relational architecture: it is always addressed. We worry about someone, for someone, in front of someone. Even when the object appears individual – a career decision, a health issue, a personal project – a relational dimension always operates in the shadows. To worry is a way of saying: “I matter to myself because I matter to others; there is something in me that must be preserved or transformed so that certain bonds, certain possibilities of connection, remain viable.”

And it is precisely here that the first great misconception about worry lies. We treat it as an internal, private, individual phenomenon. We forget that every worry is also a declaration about the world we inhabit with others, about the expectations that structure our bonds, about the invisible contracts that keep us tied to one another. When someone worries excessively, it is rarely just a matter of “negative thoughts” – it is often the symptom of a toxic relational ecology in which self-preservation depends on the obsessive anticipation of demands, approvals, and external validations.

In organizations, this manifests in an even more perverse way. A culture of excessive worry is not an accident – it is by design. It is how dehumanized systems ensure individuals remain hypervigilant, constantly scanning for threats, performing care and dedication through visible signs of restlessness. “I’m worried about this project” becomes code for “I’m committed, I’m reliable, I deserve to be here.” Worry turns into currency, into a performance of belonging.

Then something happens when this architecture begins to collapse. When worry loses its clear object, its anchor in reality, its ability to resolve into action. That is the moment it transmutes into anxiety – and we enter territory that is far darker and far less understood.

Anxiety is not simply intensified worry. It is an ontological rupture, a fracture in the subject’s relationship with time. If worry is a bridge between present and future, anxiety is the experience of being suspended in the void of that bridge – no ground beneath the feet, no visible horizon. The future ceases to be possibility and becomes diffuse, omnipresent, unrepresentable threat. It is no longer “something bad might happen” – it is “everything is about to collapse and I don’t know what, when, or how.”

What makes anxiety particularly devastating is its self-referential nature. It feeds on itself, creates parallel realities, manufactures evidence of its own necessity. The anxious person does not merely worry about possible futures – they inhabit those futures as if they were already real, experiencing anticipated suffering as present suffering, and then suffering again for suffering, generating infinite layers of anguish upon anguish.

Here is what is almost never discussed about anxiety: it is also an illusory form of control. A desperate attempt to colonize the future through thought, to make the uncertain at least minimally predictable by exhaustively simulating every scenario. “If I think through every possible disaster, if I prepare for every imaginable catastrophe, maybe I can avoid them or at least not be caught off guard.” It is magical thinking – an attempt to negotiate with the unpredictable through obsessive anticipation.

And herein lies an uncomfortable truth: entire societies can operate under this anxious regime. Organizations where no one knows exactly what is expected of them, yet everyone knows failure is unacceptable. Families where love is conditional on performance, but the rules of that performance are never made explicit. Relationships where security depends on correctly reading ambiguous signals, anticipating unvoiced needs, and constantly striving not to disappoint expectations that were never clearly communicated.

Anxiety is always the symptom of opaque systems – systems where rules exist but are not transparent, where consequences are severe but unpredictable, where belonging is perpetually under negotiation yet the criteria remain obscure. It is no coincidence that anxiety rates explode in hyper-competitive societies, in organizations with toxic cultures, in bonds where authenticity has been sacrificed to maintain an image.

And then there is stress – the most misunderstood of the three. Usually treated as a simple physiological response, as if it were merely hormones and the nervous system reacting to external demands. Yet stress is far more than that. It is the body saying something the mind has not yet managed to articulate. It is the visceral experience of being trapped in unsustainable situations where every exit is blocked, where action has become impossible, yet flight is too.

Stress is not about excess demands – it is about the impossibility of an adequate response. You can have a packed schedule and feel energized, productive, even happy. But if you are trapped in a context where what is demanded of you contradicts who you are, where every action betrays an essential part of yourself, where you must fragment yourself to survive – that is stress. Not because of volume, but because of incoherence. Not because of quantity, but because of the existential violence of being in constant contradiction with oneself.

And here we arrive at the core question no one dares to ask: chronic stress is not individual failure. It is systemic diagnosis. It is the body making visible what social, organizational, and relational structures try to keep invisible – the unsustainability of certain ways of life, the violence of certain expectations, the dehumanization of certain arrangements.

When an executive develops hypertension not because he works too much, but because he must perform values he despises in a culture that violates everything he believes in – that is stress as a symptom of existential incoherence. When a mother collapses not because she has children, but because she must single-handedly sustain a structure that should be collective while performing gratitude for being allowed to “have it all” – that is stress as an indictment of a system that lies about itself.

What is rarely understood is that these three states – worry, anxiety, and stress – are not isolated. They form a continuum, a progression, an architecture of deterioration. We begin with legitimate worries that, in dysfunctional relational and organizational contexts, find no resolution. Those unresolved worries accumulate, are amplified by opaque systems and contradictory demands, and transmute into anxiety – the future ceases to be navigable and becomes a diffuse threat. And when anxiety settles in, when we permanently inhabit that objectless state of alert, the body collapses: chronic stress, the failure of adaptive systems, the exhaustion of internal resources.

The question that should truly keep us awake, however, is this: why have we normalized this progression? Why do we build lives, organizations, entire societies structured upon this architecture of collapse? Why do we treat as “personal management” something that is, in reality, a question of systemic design?

The answer is uncomfortable: because dysfunctional systems depend on chronically worried, anxious, and stressed individuals. People in this state are more controllable, more productive in the short term, more willing to accept the unacceptable, less capable of questioning, organizing collectively, or imagining alternatives. Constant worry keeps the focus on survival, not thriving. Anxiety fragments, isolates, paralyzes. Stress exhausts any energy that might be directed toward transformation.

Toxic organizations do not create these conditions by accident – they create them by design, even if unconsciously. Worried employees work longer hours. Anxious employees do not demand rights. Stressed employees have no energy left to seek alternatives. It is a perverse form of control disguised as “high performance,” “excellence,” “commitment.”

And in intimate relationships? Bonds structured around this triad are not accidents either. They are often reproductions of learned patterns, intergenerational inheritances of dysfunctional ways of loving. Relationships where one must constantly worry about the other’s mood, remain anxious about the bond’s stability, and stressed by the impossibility of being authentic without risking abandonment. That is not love – it is emotional imprisonment masquerading as intimacy.

So, what is to be done? The usual answer would be: regulation techniques, mindfulness, therapy, exercise. And yes, all of that can help. But it would be brutal naivety to believe that structural problems can be solved with individual adjustments. It would be like treating an epidemic by medicating individuals while ignoring the contaminated water everyone drinks.

True transformation demands something far more radical: redesigning the systems that produce these conditions. Creating organizations where transparency replaces opacity, where expectations are explicit and negotiable, where error is part of the process and not a death sentence. Building bonds where authenticity is possible, where needs can be expressed without punishment, where conflict is seen as an opportunity for joint growth rather than a threat to the relationship.

It requires developing emotional and systemic literacy that allows us to distinguish when worry serves genuine purposes and when it is being instrumentalized by dysfunctional systems. To recognize when anxiety is ours and when we are absorbing the collective anxiety of toxic environments. To understand when stress signals that we need to change something in ourselves and when it is a denunciation that the context we inhabit is unsustainable.

But perhaps the most important thing is to cultivate the courage to name what is happening. To stop individualizing systemic problems. To refuse the narrative that “we don’t know how to handle pressure” when the truth is that the pressure itself is absurd. To abandon the idea that we need to become more resilient when the truth is that we need less violent structures.

Because in the end, worry, anxiety, and stress are not merely personal experiences – they are also relational and organizational diagnoses. They are ways in which body and mind denounce the unsustainability of certain arrangements, the violence of certain expectations, the dehumanization of certain cultures.

And perhaps it is time we began listening to these denunciations not as symptoms to be suppressed, but as truths to be honored. Not as individual failures to be corrected, but as evidence that we urgently need to redesign the ways we live, work, and relate to one another.

For the invisible architecture of collapse remains invisible only as long as we agree not to look at it. The moment we decide to truly see what is happening, everything changes. And real change always begins with the courageous refusal to accept as normal what is, in truth, unbearable.

**Author’s note**
Some time ago I read Simone Cunha’s excellent article “Understanding the Difference Between Worry, Anxiety, and Stress.” The clinical distinction she offers is precise, pedagogical, and extremely useful. And that is exactly why it left me profoundly restless. Because I felt there was a much vaster territory still to be explored – not beyond the clinic, but beneath it: in relationships, in systems, in the very way we inhabit time and the other. This text was born from that fertile restlessness. It does not aim to correct or replace the original article, but to open another door – a door that Simone’s initial clarity gave me the courage to push. Thank you, Simone, for turning on the light. Here is what I saw when I stepped into the next room.

Reference: “Entenda melhor a diferença entre preocupação, ansiedade e estresse” – Simone Cunha (UOL VivaBem, 2020)
Link: https://www.uol.com.br/vivabem/noticias/redacao/2020/09/08/entenda-melhor-a-diferenca-entre-preocupacao-ansiedade-e-estresse.htm

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