How to Build a Life System That Doesn't Easily Collapse
Author: Morris, originally published on X, February 5, 2026. Translated and shared with attribution.
What most people truly fear isn’t failure.
It’s waking up one day to realize: without experiencing any earth-shattering blow, they’ve become increasingly unable to maintain stability in daily life.
Emotions become more easily triggered. Decision-making starts to lag. The body often feels exhausted. There’s always this indescribable chaos in the mind. You know exactly what you should do, yet you can’t seem to take that first step. So you start doubting yourself: Am I not disciplined enough? Not working hard enough? Not strong enough?
But the truth is often more hidden.
Most people’s “breakdown” isn’t a capability problem—it’s their internal system gradually losing stability through long-term depletion.
The Prefrontal Cortex: The Brain’s Command Center
We live in an environment of high noise, high stimulation, and high decision density. Every day we face massive amounts of information, choices, and emotional feedback. Without a sufficiently robust internal system, people can easily be worn down without even realizing it.
To understand this, we must start with something often overlooked yet critically important—the prefrontal cortex.
The prefrontal cortex isn’t responsible for specific skills, but for higher-order functions. It helps us prioritize, suppress short-term impulses, make long-term plans, and choose actions that benefit our future even when the present feels uncomfortable. You could say it’s the “command center” of the brain.
The problem is that the prefrontal cortex is an extremely expensive resource.
It’s not designed for high-frequency, low-value consumption.
Many people spend their prefrontal cortex daily on trivial matters: What should I wear? Should I reply to this message? Was that comment directed at me? Should I scroll a bit more? These things individually seem harmless, but they continuously drain your judgment capacity.
This is why you’ll notice that people who maintain long-term stability often lead “simple” lives. Their wardrobe, sleep schedule, and work routines are highly standardized—not because they lack variety, but because they deliberately minimize unnecessary decisions. They understand clearly that judgment should be reserved for what truly matters.
Meanwhile, many behaviors that appear efficient—multitasking—are actually chronically depleting the prefrontal cortex. Working while responding to messages while scrolling content forces the brain into constant context-switching. The result: emotions become more irritable, attention harder to focus, and at the end of the day, nothing feels accomplished.
Protecting the prefrontal cortex isn’t about becoming more restrained—it’s about reducing meaningless consumption.
Mental Resilience: The Deeper Ability Beyond Understanding
Even so, many people encounter the same problem:
I’ve figured everything out, but I just can’t follow through.
This shows that merely “understanding” isn’t enough to sustain life’s long-term operation.
What truly blocks people is another, more fundamental ability—mental resilience (心力).
Mental resilience isn’t passion, nor is it a burst of willpower.
It’s more like stability: the ability to keep your attention on the right things even when there’s no immediate feedback, uncertain outcomes, or discomfort.
People with insufficient mental resilience aren’t necessarily not working hard—they’re easily led by their feelings. Once emotions fluctuate, plans get interrupted. Once results aren’t visible, they start doubting the direction. Once they encounter resistance, they tend toward complete abandonment.
People with strong mental resilience share one very consistent trait: they place extreme importance on “honoring small commitments.” They don’t chase grand goals. Instead, they repeatedly prove to themselves—what I said I would do, I can do.
Even if it’s just ten minutes a day, even if it’s completing one tiny action—as long as you deliver, you accumulate a sense of trust in your subconscious. This trust is the true source of mental resilience.
The Cyclical Relationship Between Prefrontal Cortex and Mental Resilience
The prefrontal cortex and mental resilience aren’t two parallel lines.
Between them exists a critical cyclical relationship.
When mental resilience is insufficient, emotions frequently hijack the prefrontal cortex, forcing it to constantly intervene, explain, suppress, and correct. The prefrontal cortex becomes overloaded, judgment quality declines, and decisions become wavering. Once decisions become chaotic, execution becomes more difficult, which further weakens mental resilience.
This is why many people get more confused the harder they try.
Truly stable people don’t let the prefrontal cortex micromanage everything. Instead, they let mental resilience handle more of the “safety net” work, allowing the prefrontal cortex to step in only at critical moments.
The Body: The Often Underestimated Foundation
However, even when both the prefrontal cortex and mental resilience are functioning normally, if the foundational support is insufficient, the system will still malfunction. This involves a factor often underestimated yet extremely real—the body.
Chronic sleep deprivation, prolonged sitting, blood sugar fluctuations, and disrupted breathing rhythms directly increase the cost of emotional regulation and self-control. In this state, people easily become impulsive, irritable, and pessimistic, yet mistakenly believe these are psychological problems.
In fact, many moments of “mental breakdown” are fundamentally the body giving out.
A person’s physical condition determines how high a price they must pay when facing pressure. If the price is too high, even the strongest prefrontal cortex and mental resilience will be dragged down.
Sense of Meaning: The Final Piece of the System
Even so, the system still lacks one final piece.
That is the sense of meaning.
The sense of meaning isn’t a grand mission or slogan. It’s a very simple question: What kind of life are the things I’m doing now actually serving?
When this question has no answer, people fall into a hidden form of internal friction. The prefrontal cortex constantly weighs options. Mental resilience gets drained on “why should I persist.” You might not feel pain, but you gradually feel empty.
The true function of meaning is to reduce internal debate. It makes many choices no longer agonizing from the start.
A Complete Life Operating System
When the body provides energy, the prefrontal cortex handles direction, mental resilience maintains momentum, and the sense of meaning ensures you don’t veer off course—you have a relatively complete system that can run long-term.
This system doesn’t guarantee smooth sailing through life.
What it truly does is ensure that when storms come, you won’t be capsized, won’t lose your course, and certainly won’t destroy yourself with your own hands.
From this perspective, so-called maturity isn’t about always rising upward—it’s about staying steady most of the time.
The moment you start thinking about the prefrontal cortex, mental resilience, body, and meaning, you’ve actually stopped caring about “how to win.”
You’re caring about something more important—how to keep this life running, continuously, all the way through.