When the Body Cannot Tell the Difference

The human body does not know what the word global means. It knows only near and far, safe and threatened, held and exposed.

Our nervous system evolved to meet danger that was immediate and local: a predator at the edge of the clearing, a hostile encounter, a sudden loss within the tribe. In those moments, the body could act. Muscles tightened for flight or defense. The heart surged. Breath sharpened. And when the danger passed, the system slowly returned to rest.

But the modern world asks something unprecedented of the human organism.

We are now invited—often compelled—to witness suffering everywhere, all the time. Wars unfold in real time on glowing screens. Injustice arrives as a daily feed. Images of harm, cruelty, and rupture appear without warning and without resolution. We are shown what is breaking, but not how to mend it.

And the body does not know this is elsewhere.

To the nervous system, repeated exposure to threat signals—no matter their origin—registers as happening now. The amygdala does not distinguish between a danger outside the door and one inside a screen. The hypothalamus releases stress hormones just the same. Muscles brace. Inflammation rises. Energy drains. Vigilance becomes the background state.

The body asks a simple question:

Is there danger, and can I act?

When the answer becomes: Yes, there is danger. No, I cannot act. The system does not shut down. It stays on. This is not panic. It is vigilance without release.

For many, this vigilance does not feel dramatic. There is no terror, no racing thoughts, no obvious fear. Instead, it shows up quietly: as aching muscles and bones, as fatigue that sleep does not resolve, as a sense of being “on edge” without knowing why, as a low-burning inflammation that feels like the body itself is aflame.

Often, beneath it all, there is sorrow.

Not personal sorrow in the usual sense, but something deeper and wider—a grief that belongs to the collective field. A sorrow for what is being lost, violated, distorted, or ignored. A sorrow that has no clear place to go.

For sensitive and empathic people, this effect is magnified. The very qualities that allow us to feel compassion, to sense truth, to respond to suffering, also make us more permeable. Without boundaries, empathy becomes physiological burden. We do not merely witness pain; our bodies begin to carry it.

And because there is no obvious action that brings relief—no tending the wound, no restoring balance—the body keeps holding the alarm.

This is not weakness. It is not pathology. It is a sane response to sustained exposure without containment. The nervous system was never meant to process the entire world at once.

What it needs is rhythm. Witnessing must be followed by withdrawal. Exposure must be followed by rest. Attention must be followed by silence.

Without these cycles, even truth becomes toxic—not because it is false, but because it is unrelieved. There is a quiet wisdom in recognizing this. It does not require turning away from the world, nor denying what is happening. It asks only that we stop confusing constant vigilance with moral responsibility.

Caring does not require bleeding.

Sometimes the most faithful act is to set the world down for a while—to let the body remember what safety feels like, to allow sorrow to be held rather than amplified, to return to the simple, radical truth that no single nervous system was meant to carry everything.

The body cannot tell the difference between a threat to the world and a threat to the self when exposure is constant. But we can.

And in remembering that difference, we offer the body—and perhaps the world as well—a chance to breathe again.

Nigel Lott teaandzen.org

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