A hunter-gatherer in the Paleolithic era encountered roughly 1,000 unique pieces of information in an entire day. The landscape, the weather, the movements of animals, the faces of the 50-150 people in their band. Their nervous system evolved to process exactly this volume.
You process that much information before you finish your morning coffee.
The Allostatic Load
This is not a metaphor or an exaggeration. The average person encounters between 6,000 and 10,000 advertisements alone per day, not counting emails, notifications, news updates, social media, and the ambient information density of modern environments. Your nervous system is running software built for 10,000 BC on a 2026 workload.
The result is what researchers call allostatic load — the cumulative wear and tear on your body from chronic stress activation. Your cortisol never fully drops because there is always another input. Your sympathetic nervous system (fight-or-flight) stays partially engaged because the modern environment keeps sending signals that something requires your attention.
This is not a character flaw. This is a hardware limitation being pushed past its specifications.
The Naturalistic Approach
Milton Erickson understood that the mind has a natural tendency toward homeostasis — toward balance — if given the conditions to find it. The problem is that modern life rarely provides those conditions. So the work becomes creating them deliberately.
One thing Erickson practiced himself, despite being confined to a wheelchair for much of his life, was what he called the naturalistic approach — using what was already present in the environment to induce trance states. He would watch the play of light on leaves, follow the rhythm of his own breathing, notice the temperature of air on skin. These are not activities. They are speeds — the speed of wind, of breath, of light.
Try This Right Now
You can access this right now. Look at the nearest window. Watch something that moves at a pace your nervous system actually recognizes — clouds, wind in trees, shadows shifting. Thirty seconds of watching something move at nature's speed begins to recalibrate your internal clock.
The session Returning to Human Pace with Dr. Hartwell is a 28-minute recalibration — an extended invitation to let your nervous system remember the speed it was designed for.