Imagine trying to function day after day without proper rest, regular food, or a safe retreat. Photo / 123rf
Most of us think self-control is character.
But all of us manage impulses privately.
We know how quickly behaviour can slip when we’re tired, stressed, overwhelmed, or distracted.
We snap at people we care about. We lose patience. We act in ways that don’t fully reflect who we want to be.
Most of the time, regulation wins. But sometimes impulse overrides intention, not because we suddenly become bad people, but because our capacity to regulate ourselves is lower in that moment.
Take nose-picking, for example. It’s widely considered socially unacceptable, but the impulse itself is a normal response to irritation.
What matters is whether we have the capacity and awareness to manage impulse appropriately.
The conditions that support self-control – safety, rest, food, privacy, and stability – are not luxuries. They make regulation possible.
When those things are missing, behaviour begins to shift.
Psychologists call this regulation: our ability to pause, think, and respond intentionally rather than impulsively.
Under stress, exhaustion, fear, trauma, or instability, that capacity weakens.
We often treat those moments purely as moral failures when they are also capacity failures.
The difference is that most of us have our worst moments in private, buffered from public view.
We go home, close the door, rest, recover, and reset.
Perhaps one of the greatest differences between people with stable housing and people experiencing homelessness is not morality, but privacy.
Now imagine dysregulation isn’t occasional, but constant, public, and unavoidable.
Homelessness – and the antisocial behaviour that can sometimes come along with it – does not simply come from the absence of housing.
Homelessness removes many of the conditions people rely on to stay regulated and emotionally steady.
Imagine trying to function day after day without proper rest, regular food, or a safe retreat.
Imagine sleeping rough through a Whanganui winter while staying partially awake to protect yourself or your belongings because sleep itself creates vulnerability.
Then imagine being expected the next morning to attend appointments calmly, make long-term decisions, regulate emotions under scrutiny, and navigate complex systems successfully.
Hunger alone changes how people think and behave.
It shortens patience, narrows focus, and makes everything feel more immediate. Most of us have experienced being “hangry”.
Add fear, judgment, and conflict on top of chronic exhaustion and instability, and the nervous system rarely gets the chance to settle.
Under those conditions, the brain shifts away from long-term thinking toward immediate survival.
A nervous system in that state is not prioritising social expectations or appearances, but safety.
Many of the behaviours people associate with homelessness are often the predictable effects of prolonged stress, trauma, exhaustion, and survival mode.
None of this removes the very real impact that public distress, addiction, untreated trauma, or disruptive behaviour can have on the wider community.
People are right to care about safety, public spaces, and the wellbeing of their town, particularly at a time when many people are already carrying more stress, less margin, and less capacity under ongoing cost-of-living pressures.
I often see the tension between compassion, accountability, and community frustration firsthand.
Understanding behaviour is not the same as excusing harm.
But if we want safer communities, we also need to understand what produces instability in the first place.
The Royal Commission into Abuse in Care found that many survivors later experienced homelessness, addiction, severe mental distress, institutionalisation, and contact with the justice system.
Not because they were inherently dysfunctional people, but because prolonged trauma and institutional harm altered their ability to feel safe, regulated, and connected.
For many people, those experiences also intersect with poverty, family violence, mental distress, unstable housing, and generational disadvantage long before homelessness becomes visible.
Under prolonged stress, human behaviour shifts toward impulse, relief, and short-term survival.
The difference is not who becomes dysregulated. It’s who has somewhere to do it unseen.
This is also where addiction is often misunderstood. Alcohol and drugs do not resolve distress; they provide temporary relief while worsening instability.
People reach for substances because the brain looks for relief from overwhelming distress.
Gambling, compulsive behaviours, and withdrawal can serve the same function.
Coping mechanisms rarely disappear unless the underlying distress is addressed.
Homelessness is often the visible edge of prolonged instability long before someone ends up sleeping rough.
Over time, that instability reshapes more than behaviour.
It erodes agency, confidence, and belief that things can improve.
When people spend years navigating systems while exhausted, unsafe, and dysregulated, engagement itself can begin to feel pointless.
Psychologists sometimes describe this as a form of learned helplessness: long-term survival within unstable systems gradually replaces autonomy with survival patterns, making change feel increasingly out of reach.
From the outside, that withdrawal is often interpreted as refusing help or unwillingness.
But many people disengage because they no longer expect things to improve.
Over time, worsening distress leads to deeper hardship and greater social cost.
Understanding behaviour does not remove responsibility for harm, but it changes how we respond to it.
We often respond to visible distress with exclusion, enforcement, or stricter rules, assuming consequences alone will improve behaviour.
But those responses rely on capacities that have already been eroded.
We are asking for better behaviour without creating the conditions that make regulation possible.
Research consistently shows that stable housing improves mental health, engagement, and long-term outcomes.
In my experience, many people experiencing homelessness show significant resilience under immense pressure.
Compassion is not the opposite of accountability. In many cases, it makes accountability achievable.
Because behaviour improves after stabilisation, not before.
Stable housing, safety, and human dignity are not rewards for good behaviour.
They are some of the conditions that make it possible.
If we want safer communities, we need to create the conditions that make regulation possible, not simply punish people after those capacities have already been eroded.
Perhaps harm reduction is not about fixing people, but fixing the systems that break them.
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