Terrence was a contractor. Practical man. The kind of guy who coached his kids’ baseball team for twelve years without once yelling at an umpire. People around him would have called him steady.
Then something shifted. He started waking at 3am with his heart pounding. Not from nightmares — just awake, heart going, nothing in particular to explain it. He tried everything he knew how to try. Melatonin. No screens after 8pm. Earlier bedtimes. He cut caffeine down to almost nothing. Weeks of this. Nothing helped.
When he finally described the full picture to his doctor, he was braced to hear something was physically wrong. Instead, his doctor said something he wasn’t expecting:
“There is a fire. You just can’t see it.”
His nervous system had been absorbing months of sustained alarm. Real events, real uncertainty, real threats arriving faster than the previous ones had time to fade. And his body had done exactly what bodies are designed to do — it activated. It went on alert. The problem wasn’t that something was wrong with him. The problem was that his system had been running at high alert for so long it didn’t know how to stand down.
We’re taught to think about stress as something that happens in a moment. Something activates, we breathe through it, we return to baseline. Most of what we know about managing stress is built on that assumption.
But what happens when the stress isn’t a moment? What happens when it’s a continuous background — new crises arriving before the old ones resolve, the baseline of “normal” shifting somewhere unrecognizable, week after week?
Your tools were designed for a different kind of situation.
That’s what Lisa’s therapist, Dr. Chen, told her. Lisa had solid coping strategies that had worked for twenty years — yoga, long walks, breathing exercises. Then they stopped working, and she started wondering what was wrong with her. Dr. Chen said it plainly: “Your tools were designed for normal stress in normal times. What you’re experiencing isn’t normal stress.”
That reframe is important. Not because it removes your responsibility to take care of yourself, but because it points you toward the right question. Instead of “what’s wrong with me?” the question becomes: what do I actually need right now, given what’s actually happening?
Aaron Antonovsky, a psychologist who spent years studying Holocaust survivors, asked a different question than most researchers: not what made people sick under extreme stress, but what kept people healthy. What he found was that resilience under sustained pressure depends on three things: a sense that the world still makes some kind of sense, a belief that you have resources to cope, and a feeling that the struggle is worth something.
Right now, all three are under sustained pressure at the same time. That’s not a personal failure. That’s a description of the environment.
Staying Strong in Unsteady Times is my attempt to offer something more honest than “practice gratitude and take deep breaths” — though those things matter. It’s about understanding what’s actually happening to you, why your usual tools may not be enough, and what sustainable resilience looks like when the situation is genuinely hard.
Terrence eventually found his way through. It started not with a new technique, but with understanding what his body was trying to tell him.
That’s always where it starts.
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