Terrence was not the kind of man who talked about his feelings.
He was a contractor — practical, competent, the kind of person who showed up, did the work, and fixed what was broken. When something went wrong in his life, he found the source of the problem, addressed it, and moved on.
So when he started waking up at 3 a.m. — heart pounding, mind racing, no particular reason he could identify — he did what he always did. He tried to fix it.
He cut out the news after 9 p.m. He exercised more. He went to bed earlier. He tried deep breathing, journaling, a white noise machine. Some of it helped a little. None of it made the alarm stop.
Terrence finally went to his doctor, expecting something clinical. A sleep disorder, maybe. A vitamin deficiency. Something he could treat and be done with.
His doctor surprised him.
"There is a fire," the doctor said. "You just can't see it."
I've spent a lot of years listening to people describe what they're feeling — and watching them apologize for it. I shouldn't feel this way. I know it's not rational. I just need to push through.
Here's what I've come to believe, after decades of work in counseling and coaching: your feelings are not the problem. They are information.
Think about a smoke alarm. When it goes off, you don't question whether it's overreacting. You look for the fire. The alarm isn't broken because it's loud — it's doing exactly what it was designed to do.
What Terrence was experiencing — the 3 a.m. wake-ups, the pounding heart, the inability to calm down through sheer willpower — was his nervous system doing exactly the same thing. It had absorbed months of sustained alarm: a steady stream of destabilizing news, unpredictable crises, threats to institutions he'd taken for granted. And it was doing what nervous systems do. It was refusing to stand down.
That's not weakness. That's accurate perception.
Aaron Antonovsky, the sociologist who studied how people maintain health under extreme stress, asked a question most researchers weren't asking: not what makes people sick, but what keeps them healthy when everything is working against them? One of his answers: the world needs to make sense to us. When comprehensibility breaks down — when we can't predict what comes next, when the rules change daily, when we can't trust what we're told — our nervous system goes on sustained alert. That alert is appropriate.
The crisis isn't in your head. The crisis is real.
Which means the path forward isn't about silencing your feelings. It's about learning to work with them — treating them as information rather than failure, and finding practices that address the underlying fire rather than just muffling the alarm.
That's what Staying Strong in Unsteady Times is about. Not toxic positivity. Not the empty reassurance that everything will be fine. A real framework — grounded in decades of research on how people survive, and sometimes thrive, under extraordinary pressure.
If Terrence's story sounds familiar, you're not alone. And you're not broken.
The situation is.