The Art of Grit

(10 minutes)

I’ve long been fascinated by the mechanics of anxiety—the quiet way it steals into the body before the mind even catches on. It begins not as a thought, but as a sensation: a tightening behind the ribs, a shallow breath, a pulse that suddenly finds reason to race. For years I mistook this for something purely emotional, a byproduct of stress or overthinking. It’s only later I learned that anxiety has less to do with thoughts than with chemistry.

Our nervous system, ever loyal, takes its cues from the past and its orders from the amygdala, that small almond-shaped alarm bell buried deep in the brain. Once triggered, it sets off a cascade of hormones—cortisol, adrenaline—designed to mobilize us for survival. It’s an elegant mechanism when a tiger’s involved, less so when it’s an email.

What’s remarkable—and a little tragic—is how good the body is at obeying the wrong master. It cannot distinguish between an immediate threat and an imagined one. The result is that we end up living tomorrow’s dangers today, spending energy that was meant to be stored for future use. A kind of biological overdraft, if you will. The mind worries; the body pays.

It’s easy to see anxiety as an enemy, but in truth it’s a misplaced form of loyalty. The body is only trying to protect us, to keep us safe from harm. It just happens to operate on outdated instructions. When the heart races at the sight of an unopened message or the thought of a conversation that hasn’t yet happened, that’s the same ancient system that once saved us from predators. We’ve simply given it new material to work with.

The Body’s Ledger

Physiologically, anxiety is a masterpiece of design. The sympathetic nervous system—the branch responsible for “fight or flight”—activates in milliseconds. Adrenal glands release adrenaline and cortisol into the bloodstream, sharpening focus and heightening alertness. Blood flow is redirected from the digestive system to the limbs. Pupils dilate, preparing the eyes to detect movement. Even the tiny muscles around our hair follicles contract, a leftover reflex from when we needed to look bigger to our predators.

The whole process is meant to be temporary—a quick, efficient surge to help us survive. But in the modern world, the threats are often abstract, constant, and unresolvable. You can’t fight a deadline. You can’t run from an uncertain future. The system fires again and again with nowhere to go.

Over time, this wears down the body’s internal balance. Cortisol, the stress hormone, suppresses immune function and slows repair processes. Sleep becomes shallow; digestion, inconsistent. The body remains on alert long after the mind has moved on, leaving behind a kind of residue—fatigue that sleep doesn’t fix, restlessness that meditation struggles to calm.

Anxiety, then, is not just a psychological event. It’s a physiological tax. The body keeps a meticulous ledger of our fears, and the debt accumulates quietly over time.

The Mind’s Theater

Of course, biology alone doesn’t explain why anxiety feels so personal. The mind, ever the dramatist, gives it texture. It invents scenes, writes scripts, and plays them on loop. Neuroscientists call this the “default mode network”—the part of the brain that activates when we’re not focused on an external task. It’s the space where imagination and rumination share a border with fear.

Anxiety thrives here because uncertainty gives it infinite room to roam. It doesn’t need facts; it just needs possibilities. The mind projects forward, simulating what could go wrong, while the body obediently responds as if it already has.

In this way, anxiety collapses time. We live future moments in the present tense, emotionally and biologically. The heart quickens, the breath shortens, the body braces—all in response to a life that hasn’t yet unfolded.

This is perhaps the cruelest trick of anxiety: it robs us of the present by convincing us that peace can only exist in the future. But the future, by definition, never arrives.

A Misunderstanding of Care

I sometimes think anxiety is the body’s way of saying, I care about what happens to you. It’s a form of misplaced devotion. The nervous system is simply overenthusiastic in its attempt to keep us safe. There’s something touching about that, if you think about it—a loyalty so deep it misfires.

When we treat anxiety solely as an adversary, we miss the chance to see it for what it is: protection gone awry. It’s not a monster under the bed; it’s the guard dog who never learned when to stand down. And like any well-meaning guardian, it can be retrained—not through punishment or suppression, but through reassurance.

Small acts of grounding—steady breathing, movement, deliberate pauses—tell the body, you can rest now. Over time, the body learns that not every raised voice or unanswered text signals danger. Safety, like fear, is teachable.

Borrowing Tomorrow’s Energy

There’s a curious relationship between anxiety and energy. When we’re anxious, we’re flooded with adrenaline, which feels like power—but it’s a borrowed kind of power, drawn from reserves meant for the future. It’s the physiological equivalent of running an engine in neutral. The revving feels intense, but we’re not going anywhere.

This explains the peculiar exhaustion that follows prolonged anxiety. The body spends hours in a state of readiness for events that never come, and when they don’t, the energy has nowhere to return. It’s been burned off in anticipation.

To live anxiously, then, is to live in a perpetual prelude—to spend tomorrow’s strength surviving today’s imagination. And while this may sound poetic, it’s also profoundly biological. The body can’t sustain it indefinitely. Sooner or later, something asks to be paid back: sleep, patience, joy.

The Gentle Art of Returning

What’s left, then, is the practice of return. Not the kind of return that requires grand effort, but one that happens in small, patient gestures—the noticing of breath, the feeling of feet on the ground, the quiet acknowledgment of the moment as it is.

It’s not a cure; it’s a conversation.

With each pause, the nervous system is reminded that safety isn’t a destination, it’s a rhythm. The more we learn to inhabit that rhythm, the less the body feels compelled to run ahead of us.

There’s something profoundly human in this, something both humbling and hopeful. Anxiety may be an ancient inheritance, but awareness is our evolution. Every time we meet our fear with curiosity instead of judgment, we rewrite the body’s instructions ever so slightly. Over time, that adds up to peace—not the absence of fear, but the presence of understanding.

A Toast to the Nervous System

If I were to raise a glass to anything, it might be to the nervous system itself—faithful, misguided, and endlessly adaptive. It has carried us through danger, heartbreak, and change. It has learned, unlearned, and learned again. Its only flaw, perhaps, is that it loves us too much.

So here’s to the chemistry that makes us human, to the biology that bends under the weight of thought, and to the quiet practice of reminding ourselves that we are safe, even when the body forgets.

Understanding anxiety won’t always dissolve it. But it can transform the way we hold it—less as an intruder, more as an overzealous friend who simply needs reassurance.

And that, I’ve come to believe, is enough to steady the spirit.

It may not raise the dead, as the Corpse Reviver once promised, but it can revive something quieter—our sense of ease, of presence, of being at home in our own skin. And that, for most of us, is miracle enough.