The Compounding Tax
Why awareness is the only edge you have when everything else is compromised
There’s a siren. You drop what you’re doing. You move. You wait. The all-clear comes and you go back to your desk, or your bed, or your conversation.
It feels like you lost ten minutes. You lost an hour.
Here's what actually happens: the siren triggers a cortisol and adrenaline spike - your body's threat response doing exactly what it's designed to do. But those hormones don't just switch off when the threat passes. Cortisol peaks about 20–30 minutes after the stressor and can take anywhere from one to several hours to return to baseline - longer if the stressor is followed by rumination or poor sleep. Adrenaline's effects can persist for up to an hour after the threat subsides, even when there's no longer any real danger. Your heart rate stays elevated. Your focus is shot. If you were sleeping, you're not going back to sleep anytime soon. If you were in the middle of deep work, that thread is gone. You're starting over, except now you're starting over with a nervous system that's still buzzing.
The one exception, interestingly, is exercise. If a siren catches you mid-run or mid-ride, the adrenaline and cortisol actually feed the effort. Your body was already in that mode. But for everything else - working, sleeping, thinking, just being a person — it’s a tax.
And taxes compound.
The Math Nobody Does
One siren costs you an hour. Some days there are five. Some days there’s one. Over three and a half weeks, even the conservative math is staggering. If you’re losing one to five hours a day to sirens, shelter time, and the biological aftermath, you’re running a massive deficit against your normal capacity.
But this isn’t just about lost hours. It’s about what happens to a person who’s been running a deficit for weeks. You don’t just lose time - you lose the buffer. The margin that lets you be patient. The reserve that lets you think clearly. The bandwidth that lets you be kind.
And then there’s sleep. Or the absence of it.
After enough nights of being jolted awake at midnight, your brain starts doing its own math. If there have been sirens around midnight every night this week, why go to sleep at 11? Why fall asleep just to be ripped out of it an hour later? It’s almost easier to just stay up and wait. At least then you’re not dealing with the shock of being woken from deep sleep on top of everything else. The problem, of course, is that this logic - while rational in the moment - creates yet another deficit. Now you’re sleep-deprived and stress-depleted. The compounding accelerates.
This is where the real compounding starts.
The Social Cascade
Here’s the part that nobody talks about, because it’s invisible and it’s everywhere:
When everyone is depleted, everyone needs more grace. And nobody has any to give.
Think about it. You’re on edge. Your tolerance is low. Your ability to give someone space - to not take something personally, to let a comment slide, to assume good intent - that ability runs on the same reserves that the sirens have been draining. So right when every person around you needs more patience and understanding, you have less of it to offer. And they have less to offer you.
The result is a sharp uptick in interpersonal conflict. Couples fight more. Coworkers snap at each other. Friends have falling-outs over things that wouldn’t have registered two months ago. And every one of those conflicts is itself exhausting, which further depletes the reserves, which makes the next conflict more likely. It’s a vicious cycle layered on top of the original stress.
Then there’s the risk-assessment problem.
Everyone processes threat differently. Some people go to the shelter every time. Some don’t go at all. Some take their time. Some leave the area entirely through whatever routes are available - and others think that’s reckless. There’s no objectively correct answer for every person in every situation, but that doesn’t stop people from judging each other’s choices.
And it cuts both ways. It’s not just that you question other people’s calculus - when you see someone responding to the same situation completely differently than you, you start questioning your own. Should I be going to the shelter? Am I being reckless? Or am I the rational one and everyone else is panicking? There’s no exact right answer, and the moving target doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Every time you see someone else make a different choice, your own confidence in your approach wobbles a little.
It’s less “your negligence directly affects me” than it was during COVID, but the dynamic is similar: when survival decisions become visible, people can’t help but measure others - and themselves - against every other calculus they see. And because everyone’s tolerance is already depleted, these disagreements don’t stay academic. They become personal. Between friends, neighbors, coworkers. People who’d normally extend benefit of the doubt are suddenly in real conflict over decisions that are genuinely hard and genuinely personal.
The Decision-Making Tax
This one hits close to home. My job is making decisions - specifically, investment decisions. Evaluating founders, sizing opportunities, committing capital. These are consequential, often irreversible choices.
And the research is clear: stress degrades decision quality - particularly in tasks involving uncertainty, which is essentially a description of my entire job.
I have the personal data to back this up. Some of the worst decisions I’ve made - the investments I’d most like to undo - were made during periods of high stress. Not because I didn’t do the work, but because my judgment was compromised in ways I couldn’t see at the time. The analytical capacity was there, but the calibration was off.
The lesson I keep re-learning: when you’re under sustained duress, the non-decision is usually the smart decision. As one of my friend says, “there will always be more deals.” The market isn’t going anywhere. The pressure to act feels urgent, but it’s the cortisol talking, not the opportunity. Knowing when to take your hands off the wheel is itself a form of good judgment - maybe the most important form, when your system is running a deficit.
It all goes back to self-awareness.
The Release Valve (and Its Trap)
I heard somewhere that anxiety is pent-up energy. I don't know if that's clinically precise, but it resonates with what I've experienced. And the research supports the mechanism: exercise directly reduces the body's stress hormones, including adrenaline and cortisol, while simultaneously triggering endorphin production. Vigorous exercise actually dampens the cortisol response to subsequent stressors in a dose-dependent way - meaning the harder you go, the more resilient your stress system becomes afterward.
When the background stress is constant and you can’t control the source, the energy has to go somewhere. And the most effective thing I’ve found is to move. Running. Biking. Lifting. Tennis. Whatever your thing is. It metabolizes the anxiety in a way that nothing else does. The runner’s high - that wave of clarity and calm after a hard effort - hits different right now. The contrast between how you feel before and after is sharper than normal, because the baseline you’re starting from is lower.
But there’s a trap here, and I’ve walked right into it. When exercise is your primary release valve and the pressure is constant, you push harder and more often. And at some point, you find your limit. You tip from “exercise is helping me cope” into “exercise is now another stressor on an already taxed system.” Exhaustion layered on depletion. The thing that was helping starts hurting.
It’s a fine line, and I’m still figuring out where it is.
The Power of Hobbies
Exercise is active - it metabolizes stress through effort. But there’s another kind of relief that works through absorption rather than exertion: hobbies.
A hobby that genuinely captivates you is one of the most underrated tools for navigating sustained stress. It gives your mind somewhere to go that isn’t the situation. Not in a denial way - you’re not pretending things are fine. You’re giving your nervous system a genuine break by engaging in something that demands enough focus to crowd out the background noise, but doesn’t carry any of the stakes.
For me right now, it’s watches. There’s something about the mechanical complexity, the history, the design details - it pulls me into a completely different headspace. An hour reading about movements or comparing references and I realize my shoulders have dropped, my breathing has slowed, and I haven’t thought about sirens once.
And there’s a social dimension that matters more than I expected. Watch communities are scattered around the world - forums, groups, collectors - and they’re completely disconnected from what’s going on in my backyard. When I’m in those conversations, nobody’s talking about sirens or shelters. It would even be inappropriate to bring it up. And that’s exactly what I need. Engagement with other people without the stress. Connection that isn’t filtered through the situation. It reminds you that there’s a whole world out there operating normally, and that you’re still a person with interests and curiosity beyond whatever is happening outside your window.
It’s not escapism. It’s a positive distraction that brings you naturally into something outside the day-to-day - and that distance, even if temporary, is genuinely restorative.
The key is that it has to be something you’re actually interested in, not something you’re doing because you think you should. Forced relaxation doesn’t work. Genuine curiosity does.
Permission to Just... Not
Sometimes the answer isn’t a framework. Sometimes it’s a glass of wine. Or four.
Sometimes it’s a mindless video, or a low-key evening with friends where nobody talks about what’s going on. Sometimes the most productive thing you can do is nothing. Just let your system settle. Stop trying to optimize and just exist for a few hours.
I’ve found that giving myself permission to do this - without the voice in my head calculating the opportunity cost - is itself a skill that takes practice. Especially when you’re wired to be productive and intentional about your time. There’s a real tension between “I should be making the most of this” and “my nervous system literally cannot handle one more thing right now.” Learning to read which state you’re in, and responding accordingly, matters.
The Meta-Point
Awareness is the edge - maybe the only one you have when everything else is compromised.
When you know that a siren costs you an hour, not ten minutes, you stop being frustrated with yourself for not bouncing back faster. When you understand that your short fuse isn’t a character flaw but a biological consequence of weeks of elevated cortisol, you can catch yourself before a small disagreement becomes a real conflict. When you recognize that everyone around you is running the same deficit, you can find a little extra grace - even when your reserves are low.
When you see that exercise is a release valve but also a potential trap, you can dose it more carefully. When you accept that a hobby or a glass of wine and a dumb show is actually what recovery looks like, you stop feeling guilty about it. When you recognize that your judgment is compromised, you give yourself permission to not decide - and understand that restraint is the decision.
None of this fixes the underlying situation. You can’t optimize your way out of real danger. But you can understand the layers - physical, biological, emotional, social, professional - well enough to stop compounding the damage with avoidable mistakes.
That, to me, feels like a worthy investment.
Be sure to check out my podcast at verytrue.fm to hear more.
Great article, Alex! Shared it with my young adult and teenage kids whom I think will benefit from this mindset.