For six days straight now (and counting), a female cardinal has been at war with my house.
It started with one particular window. I’d hear this persistent thunk, thunk, thunk throughout the day. At first, I thought maybe she’d fly into it by accident and learn her lesson. But no. She kept coming back, attacking the same spot over and over.
I’m a problem solver by nature, so I hung a sheet on the inside to break the reflection. Surely that would work.
It didn’t.
The thumping continued. So I escalated. I hauled out the big ladder, climbed up, and covered the entire window with a tarp. There. Problem solved.
Except the cardinal just picked another window.
And then another. Too high up even for the big window.
All day long, she flies from window to window, bumping into the glass with alarming dedication. I started worrying she’d hurt herself, so I did what any modern human does when faced with a mystery: I Googled it.
Turns out she’s trying to fight her reflection. She thinks it’s another bird invading her territory, so she’s defending what’s hers. The thing is, she’s not actually hurting herself. Cardinals are apparently notorious for doing this. But she IS spending enormous amounts of time and energy battling an enemy that doesn’t exist.
Instead of building a nest, eating, tending babies or sitting in a tree singing (which, let’s be honest, is the whole point of being a cardinal), she’s locked in combat with a ghost.
And then it hit me: I do this too.
The Problem That Won’t Stay Solved
These patterns show up everywhere once you start noticing.
Last Thursday I canceled my 8 a.m. workout because I’d had a restless night. A perfectly reasonable decision. But within an hour, my brain interrupted my makeup rest with the next thing to worry about: My trainer is probably mad. He got up early for nothing. He thinks I’m unreliable.
Never mind that he’s literally the most easy-going person on the planet. Never mind that he’s told me repeatedly to listen to my body and rest when I need it. The alarm bell rings anyway.
Cover one window, and my brain just picks another one to tackle.
The cardinal and I are running the same program. When I “solve” one worry, my brain doesn’t celebrate or relax. It immediately scans for the next threat. And if it can’t find a real one, it’ll manufacture something close enough.
Here’s what I’ve noticed: the alarm doesn’t care whether the threat is real. It just needs something to defend against.
Why We’re Wired This Way
Fun fact: our brains didn’t evolve to keep us content and happy. They evolved to keep us alive. For our ancestors, missing a real threat could be fatal. Better to have a thousand false alarms than miss the one actual danger.
So we inherited brains that are always scanning, always asking: What’s wrong here?
Scientists have a name for this: problem creep. In one study, researchers showed participants hundreds of dots and asked them to identify the blue ones. As the number of actual blue dots decreased, something weird happened. People started labeling purple dots as blue. Their brains, trained to find blue dots, couldn’t stop looking for them. When the target became scarce, the definition quietly expanded.
Even when the problem shrinks, the vigilance stays constant.
We solve hunger and start worrying about carbs. We solve loneliness and worry about text response times. We solve financial strain and stress over which car model best expresses our personality.
The cardinal isn’t broken. Her instincts are working exactly as designed. It’s just that those instincts, when applied to a modern house with reflective windows, lead her to spend her days fighting phantoms.
Same for me. My threat-detection system is functioning perfectly. It’s just that most of what it flags as urgent isn’t actually dangerous. It’s just uncertain. And to a brain designed for survival, uncertainty and danger feel identical.
What Changes When You See It
I can’t stop my brain from scanning for problems any more than I can convince the cardinal that her reflection isn’t a rival bird. But I can notice when it’s happening.
Earlier today, I caught myself mid-spiral examining a dark spot on my eyelid. Within minutes, I’d gone from “huh, that’s odd” to a full medical drama involving rare eyelid conditions and urgent care visits. But then I paused. I looked out the window and saw the cardinal attacking her reflection again, and I laughed.
I’m doing exactly the same thing.
I was fighting a ghost. Turns out it was probably just pollen allergies.. The catastrophe existed only in my head.
When I notice I’m doing this, something shifts. I don’t have to fix the “problem” or calm myself down or think my way out of it. I just recognize: my brain is attacking a ghost. And the ghost is winning. But I can see through it.
The cardinal is still out there right now as I write this. Thunk, thunk, thunk. She still hasn’t learned. She might never learn. But I can.
We’re both spending precious time and energy on battles that don’t exist. The difference is, when I catch myself doing it, I can choose to stop. I can close my eyes, feel the sensations in my body, hear the actual sounds around me instead of the alarm bells in my head.
The real world is almost always fine. It’s only the mental version that’s on fire.
The cardinal will keep defending her territory from herself. But maybe I don’t have to.
Ready to recognize your own phantom battles? Join The Freeflow Rebellion for insights on questioning the invisible rules and false alarms running your life. No wake-up calls required. Just honest observations from someone who’s always learning.
