When Your Body’s Alarm System Won’t Turn Off

Aug 23
7 min read

Mental Awareness Monday | Inflammation

You know the feeling when something in your body seems just a little off. You wake up tired even though you slept. Your joints feel stiffer than they used to. A workout takes longer to recover from. Maybe your energy dips for no obvious reason, or you simply don’t feel as resilient as you remember feeling a few years ago.

None of those things automatically means something is wrong. Bodies change. Schedules get demanding. Sleep gets interrupted. Life piles up. But underneath many of the things we notice—and plenty we never feel at all—is one of the body’s oldest protective systems doing exactly what it was designed to do: inflammation.

We usually hear that word as if it describes something harmful. We buy foods marketed as “anti-inflammatory.” We read about ways to “fight inflammation.” We hear chronic inflammation connected with heart disease, diabetes and aging. It can start to sound as though inflammation itself is the enemy.

But imagine what would happen if your body couldn’t create it.

The Alarm Is There for a Reason

Cut your finger and your body responds almost immediately. Blood flow changes. Immune cells move toward the injured area. Chemical signals begin coordinating protection and repair. Catch a virus and another version of that response begins as your immune system recognizes that something doesn’t belong and mobilizes against it.

That inflammation is your body protecting you. It evolved as part of our defense against injury and infection. In a healthy acute response, the body detects a problem, activates inflammatory processes to deal with it, begins repair and eventually brings that response back down.¹

Think of the smoke detector hanging in your kitchen. When smoke appears, you want the alarm to sound. An alarm that never reacts to danger would be useless. Now imagine dinner is finished, the pan has cooled, the windows are open and the smoke is gone—but the alarm keeps ringing.

Suddenly, a system designed to protect the house has become a problem of its own. Something similar can happen inside us. A healthy inflammatory system doesn’t simply need to recognize when something is wrong. It also needs to recognize when the emergency has passed and begin resolving the response. That changes the way we should think about inflammation from the beginning: what matters is not simply whether the alarm sounds, but whether the body can regulate it.

When Protection Doesn’t Completely Stand Down

Sometimes an inflammatory response continues because the original threat remains. In other situations, the systems regulating inflammation may become disrupted, allowing low-level inflammatory activity to persist without the obvious swelling, heat or pain we usually associate with an injury.¹ This longer-lasting state is what we generally mean when we talk about chronic inflammation.

And it can be remarkably quiet. A sprained ankle announces itself. It swells, hurts and gives you a pretty good idea of where the problem is. Low-grade chronic inflammation may not give you anything nearly that obvious. Instead, inflammatory signals can remain active in the background over long periods.

Scientists have even identified a pattern of persistent, low-grade inflammation that tends to increase as we grow older. It has been given the slightly strange but memorable name inflammaging.² That does not mean getting older automatically makes you unhealthy, or that every ache after 50 should be blamed on inflammation. Aging is enormously complex, and researchers are still working to understand how these systems interact.

Research does suggest, however, that chronic inflammation is intertwined with many of the biological changes associated with aging.¹⁻³ That gives us a more useful way to think about getting older. Age does not simply add years to the body; it changes the environment in which the body has to protect, repair and regulate itself.

Your Immune System Talks to Your Brain

There is another reason inflammation belongs in a Mental Monday conversation: your immune system and your brain are not operating independently. They communicate, and scientists have studied this relationship for decades through something known as sickness behavior. When you develop an infection, inflammatory signals produced by the immune system can influence the brain and contribute to familiar responses such as fatigue, sleepiness, reduced motivation, changes in appetite and a desire to withdraw and rest.⁴

Think about the last time you had the flu. You probably did not simply notice physical symptoms. You felt different. The couch suddenly seemed more appealing than everything on your calendar, your normal enthusiasm disappeared and even activities you usually enjoy felt like too much effort.

That response may actually serve a purpose. When the body is fighting an infection, encouraging rest and conserving energy can support recovery. What feels like a miserable lack of motivation can be part of a coordinated biological response designed to change your behavior while your body deals with a threat.

This does not mean fatigue, low motivation or brain fog proves someone has chronic inflammation. Those experiences have many possible causes and deserve medical attention when they persist or interfere with daily life. What it does reveal is how closely our physical and mental experiences are connected. The boundary between what we casually call “physical health” and “mental health” was never as clean as it sometimes appears.

Why Would the Alarm Keep Ringing?

There usually isn’t one switch. Researchers have connected persistent inflammatory activity with a complicated collection of influences that can include aging cells, changes in immune regulation, excess visceral body fat, metabolic health, smoking, infections, changes in the gut microbiome and other biological stressors.¹⁻³ Sleep and psychological stress may matter too, adding another layer to the relationship between our daily lives and internal physiology.

It is tempting to look for the villain. Is it sugar? Stress? Poor sleep? Body fat? Getting older? Much of the wellness world encourages exactly that kind of thinking because a single enemy is easy to understand—and even easier to sell a solution for.

Your body is more sophisticated than that. Inflammation is influenced by multiple systems responding to the environment created through years of living. One dinner does not create that environment. Neither does one bad night of sleep, one missed workout or one stressful week.

Patterns, however, begin to tell a different story. What happens repeatedly can shape the conditions in which those protective systems operate, and fortunately, repeated patterns are something we can influence. We’ll explore two important parts of that conversation later this week through movement on Wednesday and food on Friday.

For today, simply seeing the larger picture changes the question. Instead of searching for the one thing that “causes inflammation,” we can become more curious about the environment our bodies are being asked to respond to every day.

The Goal Was Never to Silence the Alarm

There is something reassuring about understanding inflammation this way. Your body is not simply wearing down while you stand helplessly on the sidelines. It is constantly sensing, responding, repairing, adapting and protecting you, often without you having any idea that the work is happening.

Sometimes those systems become less well regulated. Sometimes signals linger longer than they should. Some of those changes become more common as the years accumulate. Yet inflammation remains essential because a body incapable of mounting an inflammatory response would lose one of its most important defenses.

So perhaps “fighting inflammation” has never been the best way to think about this. A smoke detector isn’t healthier because we remove its batteries. We want it sensitive enough to recognize genuine danger, responsive enough to sound when necessary and capable of becoming quiet again when the smoke has cleared.

Tomorrow morning, you may notice how you slept, how your body feels getting out of bed, how quickly you recover from yesterday or how much energy you bring into the day. None of those sensations alone tells you what your inflammatory system is doing. But perhaps you’ll see the body underneath those experiences a little differently—a body constantly deciding whether it needs to defend, repair, adapt or simply stand down.

The alarm was never the enemy. Understanding why it exists, what keeps it ringing and what helps it become quiet again gives us a far more useful place to begin.

Did You Catch It? (Answer Below)

What is the healthiest way to think about inflammation?

A. The less inflammation your body produces, the healthier you are

B. Inflammation is mostly a problem that develops as we get older

C. Inflammation is a protective response that should activate when needed and settle when the threat has passed

D. Feeling tired, stiff or run-down usually means inflammation is elevated

What Is Your Body Responding To?

For the next week, choose one moment each day to check in with yourself. It might be when you first get out of bed, during an afternoon energy dip, after a stressful day, following a workout or simply when you realize you don’t feel quite like yourself.

Don’t try to fix anything. Just get curious about the previous 24 hours.

How did you sleep? Have you been sitting most of the day or moving regularly? Has life been unusually stressful? How have you been eating? Did you exercise or recover from exercise? Has your normal routine changed?

You don’t need to track it, score it or write anything down unless you want to. The challenge is simply to spend a few seconds noticing the bigger picture.

What to Notice

See whether any patterns begin appearing between how you feel and what the previous day looked like. You may notice something after two days, or you may notice nothing obvious at all. Both are useful.

Pay particular attention to combinations. Maybe one short night doesn’t seem to affect you much, but several do. Perhaps a stressful day feels different when you’ve also been sitting for hours. Maybe there are days when you feel surprisingly good and become curious about what was different.

Resist the urge to label any of these observations as “inflammation.” Your body is far too complicated for that. You’re simply becoming more aware of the environment your body is responding to.

What You Might Discover

We often experience our bodies one moment at a time: I’m tired today. I’m stiff this morning. I feel great today. This week, see what happens when you widen the lens. The alarm-system idea becomes much more interesting when you begin noticing that your body isn’t responding only to what happened five minutes ago—it’s continually adapting to the patterns of how you live.

You don’t have to diagnose the alarm. Just start noticing what might be asking it to respond.

Did You Catch It Answer:

C. Inflammation is an important part of the body’s defense and repair system. The goal isn’t to prevent the alarm from ever sounding—it’s to have a system capable of responding when needed and settling again when the job is done.

References:

Furman D, Campisi J, Verdin E, et al. Chronic inflammation in the etiology of disease across the life span. Nat Med.2019;25(12):1822-1832. doi:10.1038/s41591-019-0675-0.
Franceschi C, Garagnani P, Parini P, Giuliani C, Santoro A. Inflammaging: a new immune-metabolic viewpoint for age-related diseases. Nat Rev Endocrinol. 2018;14(10):576-590. doi:10.1038/s41574-018-0059-4.
Cossarizza A. Inflammaging: experimental insights and translational advances. Eur J Immunol. 2026;56(7):e70239. doi:10.1002/eji.70239.
Dantzer R, O’Connor JC, Freund GG, Johnson RW, Kelley KW. From inflammation to sickness and depression: when the immune system subjugates the brain. Nat Rev Neurosci. 2008;9(1):46-56. doi:10.1038/nrn2297.