What Kind of Person Is This Environment Practising in Me?

I notice it regularly now.

Not always in the same way. Sometimes it's subtle, sometimes more present. But at some point I started noticing what happens in my body when I scroll, and now I can't not see it.

My stomach tightens, just a little. My jaw sets. My breathing becomes shallower.

Nothing major. Nobody has attacked me. There is no crisis, no personal threat. Just small shifts. My nervous system has clearly registered something.

A post about racism in football. A corporate injustice story. A warning about AI. A comment so casually cruel it's almost funny.

I put the phone down and sit with that. Not with what I read. With what happened inside me while I was reading it. Because even though none of it was directed at me, all of it had landed somewhere in my body anyway.

We think we are consuming information. We are also rehearsing something.

I don't mean that metaphorically: every emotional response is a neural event. Something fires, gets reinforced, and the more often it fires the more easily it triggers. It spreads. It stops being a reaction to something specific.

It becomes how you meet the world.

And it isn't only our emotional responses that get rehearsed. Our ways of making sense of the world do too. The environments we spend time in don't just shape what we feel. They shape how quickly we feel finished with a question. How readily we believe we've understood another person's motives. How certain we become that our interpretation is the right one.

The scroll winds me up.

AI does the opposite.

When I bring it a conflict with a colleague, it can help me make sense of what happened. It may point out something I hadn't considered, or offer a plausible explanation for where the other person was coming from. Sometimes that insight lands physically. Something in me unclenches. The tension falls away. I feel calmer, more open. That's valuable.

But notice where that shift took place.

It happened entirely inside me. The relationship hasn't moved. The other person hasn't pushed back. They haven't surprised me. I haven't had to sit in front of them and discover that my version of events wasn't the whole story.

I'll probably walk into the next conversation less defensive than I would have otherwise. That's an improvement. But I've bypassed the discomfort where two people arrive at something together.

AI can help regulate me before I re-enter the relationship. It cannot replace what only the relationship itself can produce.

Bracing is one kind of rehearsal. So is premature resolution.

One trains the nervous system to become quicker to react. The other trains the mind to become quicker to conclude. One leaves us more vigilant. The other more certain. Different mechanisms, perhaps. But they quietly move us toward the same place: a reduced willingness to remain with another perspective long enough for it to genuinely change us.

This isn't really about social media or AI. They are simply the newest environments built around some of our oldest biology. Their sophistication lies not in transcending human nature, but in repeatedly engaging the mechanisms that helped us survive: our sensitivity to threat, belonging, uncertainty, novelty and validation.

Our environments are changing at extraordinary speed. The nervous system meeting them is still recognisably ancient.

The environments we repeatedly inhabit — our feeds, the news that flows through them, our digital workplaces, increasingly our conversations with AI — provide thousands of tiny rehearsals every week. Individually they feel insignificant. Collectively they become posture.

Not all of them rehearse the same thing. Some train vigilance, certainty, defensiveness or outrage. Others quietly invite premature closure. But they all leave traces.

Not all of it is heavy. Of course there are posts that are heartfelt, endearing, funny, touching. Moments of genuine connection.

But when I put the phone down, I notice that I'm carrying something. Not much. Just a little more than before.

It doesn't matter whether the posts were justified or unfair, true or exaggerated. What matters is what repeated exposure to that emotional and cognitive landscape is practising in me.

The word that keeps coming back to me is posture.

Not mood. Not opinion. Posture.

A mood passes and an opinion can change. But a posture is something more structural. It's a habitual way of orienting toward the world. Toward other people. Toward difference. Toward uncertainty.

The conversations may change. The posture remains.

What I feel in my body in those moments isn't a reaction to specific content. It's my nervous system rehearsing a posture. I'm fast to judge. Quicker to defend. The world becomes a little more threatening. A very light agitation creeps in. Trigger, response. Trigger, response. At high speed.

That posture doesn't stay on the phone.

It walks into the meeting with me. It sits across the table from a colleague whose thinking moves differently from mine. It quietly decides for me, in the half-second before anyone has really said anything, whether this is a conversation worth having or a position worth defending.

We don't notice it happening. Not because we are inattentive, but because it operates below the level of conscious decision. It is the thing that shapes the decision before we know we're making one.

So the question I keep returning to is not what am I reading?

But: what kind of person is this environment practising in me?

That question feels different from asking what you think about social media, or whether AI is good or bad, or how much screen time is too much.

It asks something more uncomfortable.

Not what is the world doing.

What is the world making me into?

And if the answer to that question gives you pause, if asking that question makes something in you tighten, then the next question follows naturally.

What would it mean to practise something different?

I don't mean resist these environments, or to opt out of them. But to deliberately bring something else into the room. Something that works at the same level as what's being trained as a counter-practice.

A different kind of rehearsal. One where another mind actually enters.