The Rabbit and the Ostrich: How Hyper Awareness Increases Stress | #96
Hyper awareness can quietly increase stress, especially for people with trauma or chronic exhaustion. In this Daily Dose of Dawn, Dawn Super explores hypervigilance and hypovigilance—how they show up in real life, why they develop, and what helped her reduce stress without shutting down.
Watch the Video Here or Read the Script below
The Rabbit and the Ostrich.
This is the Daily Dose of Dawn at dawn, number 96. Videos designed to expand your thinking.
Today’s video is for people who’ve had a heavy past and are either hyper aware of every single little detail of their life and everyone else’s—or people who miss everything. Social cues, their own needs, forgetting to pick up bread.
Welcome back to the Happy Matters Collective. If you’re joining us for the first time, thank you for being here.
First, I want to say I am an intuitive empowering coach. I am not a mental health professional or a physician or medical professional in any way. All of my content is about what I experienced in my own life and what I’ve seen and learned from books and other people’s personal experiences.
Anything you hear on my channel is not to be construed as medical advice. It’s meant to be listened to and put through the YOU filter to see how you can apply it in your own life. Talk to whomever you feel comfortable talking to about the topic.
So why do we want to learn this?
Because there’s so much about life to know. The perfect example of this is beating yourself up for eleven years because you’re so tired—and then finding out you have narcolepsy.
Often we hear something and we’re like, “Oh, that’s me.” And then we look at it and it solves a puzzle we’ve been dealing with. The only way that happens is if you bring it into your awareness. That’s why listening to videos like this is so important.
The rabbit and the ostrich are hypervigilance and hypovigilance. I’m only introducing you to the most basic concept of these words. If something tickles your ear, it’s on you to go dig into it.
Here’s how this came into my awareness.
I was a rabbit from a very young age. I noticed everything. I thought it was the Nancy Drew chapter books I loved to read. I thought it was because I wanted to be a detective when I grew up.
What it actually was was a scared little girl trying to manage everything to avoid bad stuff happening.
Noticing when things are out of place, need to be cleaned, or are almost gone. Where the yelling comes from. Noticing moods, certain phrases, where everyone is in the room and how they feel. It’s exhausting.
On top of narcolepsy, analyzing everything that you see and hear.
I have ridiculous pattern recognition skills and they served me greatly once I was able to label the patterns as repetitive or toxic.
The day I heard the word hypervigilance, I read the common traits:
Constant feeling of being on edge.
Being easily startled.
Scanning for threats.
Difficulty relaxing or sleeping.
Irritability.
Poor concentration.
Overanalyzing people’s behavior or tone.
These stem from a heightened state of alertness and a persistent sense that something bad might happen. It’s often linked to trauma or anxiety.
I was like… whoa. Is there a picture of me in there too? 😂
What’s really wild is that a couple of those are also symptoms of narcolepsy. 🤷♀️
So what did I do about it?
With the new information, I started listening to content about hypervigilance. I have this weird thing with narcolepsy that I call studyitis. When I try to learn something intentionally, it triggers a sleep episode. I think it’s a performance anxiety or fear-of-failure thing.
So I built a workaround. I learn passively—listening to videos or audiobooks about the topics I want to understand.
One of the first things I did was stop commenting on all the things I noticed.
Someone left the fridge open again. Is it going to do me any good to point it out? No. Close the fridge and move on.
As a hypervigilant person, you have to pick your battles. Every battle increases cortisol and reinforces hypervigilance.
After not commenting, I started letting myself not notice as much. This is where my “no drama llama” practice came in handy. I keep it on the fridge—because the things you notice often lead to drama.
The opposite of the rabbit is the ostrich: hypovigilance. It’s a word I literally just learned last week, and it helped explain a few things about one of my clients that I’m now better equipped to help.
Life never stops giving us lessons, so don’t be afraid to dig in.
Hypovigilance traits involve reduced alertness, focus, and responsiveness. Difficulty concentrating. Poor memory. Slow reactions. Fatigue. Lack of motivation. Trouble staying on task.
A lot of those are also symptoms of narcolepsy.
I’ll be bringing this to my group eventually. I don’t have much more to say about it yet—I just learned about it. If it sounds like you, if you struggle to start things, finish things, or focus, and you have trauma in your past—give it a search.
Listen to videos about it. Not to diagnose yourself—but if someone used strategies that helped them with this and you try them and they work, then you’re healing.
That’s the goal. To move through lessons so you don’t stay stuck in a classroom.
If this kind of stuff interests you—and if you’re still here, it does—go deeper with knowing yourself next below.
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