Your Brain Is Running A Group Chat Without You (And It’s Chaos)
You are not one person.
You are a committee.
Your brain is basically a chaotic group chat where everyone is on 5% battery, half of them are feral raccoons, and one guy just wants to go to bed at 9:30. If you’ve ever wondered why you can’t “just focus,” “just be normal,” or “just send that email,” congratulations: you’ve accidentally installed a full cast of characters in your skull.
Let’s meet them.
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The CEO, The Intern, And The Goblin: Your Mental Cast
Inside your head, there is:
- A CEO voice who says things like, “We’re waking up at 5 a.m. and changing our life.”
- An unpaid intern voice who has to actually do that.
- A chaos goblin who, at 3 a.m., whispers, “What if we Google ‘do octopus have dreams’ right now.”
The CEO schedules big plans: workout routines, study sessions, life goals, tax organization “this weekend for sure.” The intern is the one dragging your body through the actual task while holding a metaphorical iced coffee and a sense of dread.
Meanwhile, the goblin is in the corner shouting, “What if we start a podcast?” and “We should shave our head, it’ll be symbolic.”
Scientists would call these “conflicting cognitive systems.”
We call them “the reason we are lying on the floor eating cereal from the box.”
The funny part? This chaos is *normal*. Your brain has different systems for planning, reward, and habit. They’re all talking at once, like a family group chat where your aunt is sending minion memes during a serious conversation.
**Share bait thought:**
Somewhere out there, your brain’s CEO is making a 10-year plan while your goblin is microwaving leftover fries and saying, “What if we become a mushroom influencer instead?”
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The Procrastination Tab Zoo (Your Browser Is A Crime Scene)
Look at your browser. Actually, don’t—you might cry.
You’ve got:
- 1 tab: actual important task
- 2 tabs: “how to be productive”
- 19 tabs: chaos (Wikipedia rabbit holes, obscure recipes, three playlists, and a random PDF from 2021)
Your brain loves opening mental tabs the same way your browser loves freezing at 37 tabs and pretending it’s fine.
Neurologically, this is your attention system ping-ponging between:
- “This is urgent”
- “This is fun”
- “This is new and shiny”
- “This is garbage but my anxiety won’t let me close it”
Your brain is trying to optimize for dopamine like a tiny casino manager in there, asking, “What gives us a little hit of joy *right now*?” That’s why:
- You can’t start your essay
- But you *can* spend 40 minutes rearranging your desktop icons “for clarity”
Imagine if thoughts were actual tabs floating over your head:
- “Do taxes”
- “Learn Japanese”
- “Remember that thing you said in 2014 and cringe again”
**Share bait thought:**
If your brain were a browser, the “Are you still watching?” pop-up would be replaced with “Are you okay, bestie?”
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The Social Simulator That Won’t Shut Up
Your brain runs an internal “social simulator” that replays conversations like a director’s cut no one asked for.
You say, “You too!” to the waiter who said “Enjoy your meal,” and your brain is like, “Oh awesome, we’ll be re-watching this humiliation every night for the next 6 years.”
From an evolutionary standpoint, this is your brain trying to learn social rules and avoid getting kicked out of the tribe. From a modern standpoint, it’s your brain going:
- “They hate us.”
- “We were weird.”
- “We’re moving to another country.”
But here’s the twist: other people are *way* too busy replaying their own perceived disasters to obsess over yours. Everyone’s internal group chat is screaming at them 24/7.
So in reality:
- You: thinking about that awkward high-five from 2018
- Them: thinking about that time they mispronounced “quinoa” in public
**Share bait thought:**
If we could see each other’s internal cringe highlight reels, we’d immediately be 40% kinder and 60% funnier.
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The Anxiety Intern Who Thinks Everything Is A Saber-Toothed Tiger
Your brain has an over-caffeinated intern whose only job is to shout, “WHAT IF THIS GOES TERRIBLY WRONG?” about literally everything.
Modern situation: “Send email.”
Anxiety intern interpretation: “This is a career-ending move. Also everyone will hate you and you’ll accidentally attach your grocery list instead of your resume.”
Evolution made your brain *very* good at spotting danger, but it hasn’t fully updated the app from “saber-toothed tiger” to “slightly passive-aggressive Slack message.”
So:
- Missed call? Must be bad news.
- “We need to talk”? Definitely a horror movie.
- Vague text: “hey.” -> Brain: “We are going to jail.”
This is your amygdala (fear center) and prefrontal cortex (logic HQ) playing tug-of-war while you stand in the middle holding a phone and sweating.
The comedy is that your brain is constantly running “worst case scenario” simulations that never actually happen. Yet it still commits to the bit every time.
**Share bait thought:**
Your anxiety is basically a Netflix writer pitching, “Okay but what if everything goes catastrophically wrong in the most dramatic way possible?” about sending one email.
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The Tiny Gremlin Who Monologues In The Shower
You know that version of you who appears in the shower and suddenly:
- Wins every imaginary argument
- Has the perfect comeback
- Is charming, insightful, and weirdly fluent in fake TED Talk language
That’s your “default mode network” kicking in—your brain’s background setting when you’re not focused on a specific task. It’s the same system that:
- Revisits old memories
- Fantasizes about future scenarios
- Writes entire fake interviews where you’re famous for… something
Your body: conditioning shampoo.
Your brain: “And then I would say, ‘That’s why I never gave up on my dreams, Jimmy Fallon.’”
This mode is also where creativity comes from. That’s why your best ideas happen:
- In the shower
- On a walk
- On the toilet (we don’t have to lie here)
Your brain finally gets bored of doomscrolling and starts improv theater instead.
**Share bait thought:**
If the government could record shower thoughts, we’d all have at least one unhinged 45-minute special on Netflix by now.
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Conclusion
Your brain is not a neatly organized office run by a single rational adult. It’s:
- A group chat with no admin
- A circus with no ringmaster
- A browser with 46 tabs open, 12 frozen, and music playing from somewhere
And somehow, in the middle of all that chaos, you:
- Show up
- Try again
- Make jokes about it on the internet
You’re not broken; you’re just running a very weird, very advanced piece of wet hardware that still thinks it lives in a cave but also has Wi-Fi.
So the next time your mental group chat starts yelling in all caps, just remember:
You’re not the chaos.
You’re the one holding the phone, watching it happen, and occasionally hitting “mute.”
And then, obviously, screenshotting it and sending it to your friends.
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Sources
- [National Institute of Mental Health – Brain Basics](https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/educational-resources/brain-basics) – Overview of how different brain regions handle emotion, thinking, and behavior
- [Harvard Medical School – Understanding the Stress Response](https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/understanding-the-stress-response) – Explains how our “fight or flight” wiring still reacts to modern, non-lethal stressors
- [NCBI – Default Mode Network and Self-Generated Thought](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4335538/) – Research on the brain network active during mind-wandering and daydreaming
- [American Psychological Association – The Science of Procrastination](https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2010/04/procrastination) – Why we put things off even when we know it’s bad for us
- [University of California, Berkeley – Memory and Emotion](https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_emotion_affects_memory) – How emotional experiences get replayed and remembered more intensely