—

Terrence is a contractor. Practical man. Fixes things for a living — leaky roofs, faulty wiring, things that aren't working the way they should.

Last year, he started waking up at 3am with his heart pounding. Not from a nightmare. Just — awake, alarmed, unable to say why.

He did everything right. No phone after 9pm. Melatonin. White noise. Meditation app. Earlier bedtime. The waking kept happening.

He went to his doctor. Full workup. Blood pressure normal. Heart healthy. Labs fine.

His doctor leaned back and said: "Terrence, there is a fire. You just can't see it from here."

What he meant: Terrence's nervous system had been absorbing months of sustained alarm. Not one crisis — a steady stream of them. The news. The arguments at the dinner table. The ambient dread of not knowing what was coming next. The sense that something important was slipping away.

The body keeps score. And Terrence's body had been keeping score every single day.

The problem wasn't his sleep. The problem was that his alarm system was working perfectly.

—

We have a strange relationship with our own feelings right now.

Most of us learned somewhere along the way that the goal is to feel calm. That anxiety means something is wrong with you. That if you were stronger, or better at coping, or had the right app — the feelings would stop.

But feelings aren't a malfunction. They're a message.

Anger is a signal that something important to you is being violated. Fear is a signal that something you love might be at risk. Grief is a signal that something real has been lost. Dread is a signal that the threat is ongoing and you can't see the end.

These aren't broken responses. They're correct responses to what's actually happening.

I think of it as the smoke alarm problem. When a smoke alarm goes off in a burning building, you don't say "I need to work on my relationship with alarms." You acknowledge the smoke and you act accordingly.

What many of us have been doing — understandably — is trying to disable the alarm while the building is still on fire.

—

When I wrote Staying Strong in Unsteady Times, I wasn't writing for people who were struggling because they were weak. I was writing for people like Terrence — capable, resourceful people who had simply been absorbing a lot for a long time, and whose bodies were finally saying: enough.

Viktor Frankl, who survived the Nazi concentration camps and went on to found logotherapy, wrote that meaning isn't a luxury — it's the engine. "Those who have a 'why' to live can bear almost any 'how.'"

But before you can find the why, you have to stop treating your own body like the problem.

The 3am waking isn't broken. The smoke alarm is doing what it was built to do.

The question worth asking isn't how do I make this stop? It's: what is this trying to tell me — and what does it mean I care about?

That's a harder question. It's also a more honest one.

And it's where the real work of staying steady actually begins.

—

Staying Strong in Unsteady Times is available now.

📖 Get it on Amazon → amazon.com/dp/B0GY49XSVZ