Susan DrummCEO Advisor & Executive Coach | Leadership Change Agent

Are You Stuck in Reaction Mode #shorts

18 Mar 2026 · 1 min

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1:19

In this short monologue, Susan Drumm explains a common "problem‑react" pattern: identifying a problem triggers fear or anxiety, which then fuels a reaction. She illustrates the cycle with a personal story about sudden weight gain caused by a thyroid issue. Unable to fit into her jeans, she reacted with anxiety and adopted an extreme carnivore diet, which temporarily reduced the problem and her anxiety. However, the diet was unsustainable, the weight returned, and the fear‑reaction loop resumed. Drumm concludes that relying on anxiety‑driven reactions creates a “one foot on the brake, one foot on the gas” situation that cannot produce lasting results, urging viewers to recognize and break the cycle.

Chapters

So often we react to problems and we get stuck in a problem-reacting model, which looks like this. You start with identifying a problem and it creates a fear, and that fear then creates a reaction. And we get stuck in this cycle of identifying problem, fear or anxiety, and reaction. But that doesn't produce sustainable results over time. This actually happened to me. All of a sudden I started gaining a lot of weight. Due to a thyroid issue I was having. And when you can't fit into your jeans anymore and none of them fit, I had a reaction, and that was definitely anxiety. Like, when is this gonna end? And from there, I took some reaction. So I decided to go on a pretty extreme diet, a carnivore diet. And when I did that, then the problem did subside. I did lose some weight, and so my anxiety went down. And then my reaction over time starts to go down because I couldn't sustain the carnivore diet. But the problem came back. My fear and anxiety came back, and then my reaction came back again. So, we just have this sort of one foot on the brake, one foot on the gas situation where you're needing anxiety to fuel your actions.