Strong Enough to Shatter: The Hidden Cost of Enduring

The Quiet Rebellion of the Human Body

People are “too fragile”—they need to “toughen up!” 

"Why do we suddenly have to deal with people’s emotions? 

Why can't peopel stop being so soft and always struggling.

All words I’ve heard recently—spoken by leaders in many organizations who can’t understand how we got here. How did we get to the point where people are struggling so much that we have to deal with all their suppressed shit, elevated emotions, and broken beliefs?

Why do we have to do so much to:

• “support” people’s well-being, 
• “care” about their emotions, 
• “engage” them to work harder, or
• provide “purpose” and meaning in their work?

What happened to grit and grind, resolve and resilience, push, persist and persevere? Just endure and overcome stress, and you will experience success?!?

The Strength That Broke Me (And the Truth That Saved Me)

When I hear those critcizms and judgments of leaders, I wonder whether I'm one of the people they are talking about. I hear their critical and judgmental voices in my own head all the time:

• “What’s wrong with you?” “Why are you reacting like this?”
• “Why not just numb and not feel?” “Why can’t you just push through harder?”
• “Why are you so much more emotional?”
• “What happened to your drive and determination? Your toughness and tenacity?”

I used to be so strong. I used to be such an achiever, able to push through any pain. I could handle just about anything. 

• Lawschool studying 12 hours a day & 7 days a week. 
• For the bar exam, I endured 18-20-hour days of studying. 
• When I had my son, I fed him around the clock attending a leadership meeting to discuss Reduction in Force just six weeks after he was born. 
• When I had my twins, I nursed them while on leadership calls and pumped while leading trainings.
• During the Pandemic, I had a 4 year old, twin 6 month olds, two working parents, responsibility for HR, IT, & Legal, and navigated alll the changes plus anohter Reduction in Force.

I’d been able to “make it all work” before. Why do I now find myself struggling, tipping over the edge of the abyss so easily again and again? Why do such small things seem to send me into numbing, arguing, or hiding away from it all?

I used to be so strong, able to push through any pain. I could handle just about anything. I could suffer and survive it all. But then something changed everything, and it happened to us all!

The Judgment We Cast to Avoid What We Carry

When I hear these judgments—“too sensitive,” “too emotional,” “not resilient enough”—I’ve started to wonder: What if these statements aren’t reflections of truth, but reflections of avoidance?

What if judgment is just another survival state—a shield we use to keep ourselves from having to feel our own unprocessed pain?

It’s easier to criticize others for their struggles than to acknowledge that we, too, might be carrying grief, burnout, or fear we haven’t made space to face.

Judging someone else’s fragility lets us pretend we’re still strong. But more often, it reveals a fear of our own vulnerability. Because to admit that people are suffering might mean admitting that we are, too.

An Analogy of Extreme Challenge

What happens if someone who has never trained before tries to participate in a triathlon? Even worse—what if, in this triathlon, quitting due to inability or injury is not an option? The only alternative to finishing is death.

Without adequate training, the body is ill-prepared to deal with the sudden demands placed on it. If, in order to survive, it must persevere, it will suppress pain and biological needs. If death is the only alternative, we push beyond our limits—but there are huge consequences to our bodies.

Forced to complete a triathlon without preparation and with no option to quit would result in:

1. Nervous system overload – intense fight/flight survival state from start to finish.
2. Cardiovascular and muscular breakdown – exhaustion, cramps, risk of organ failure.
3. Cognitive collapse – confusion, hallucinations, impaired decision-making.
4. Emotional dysregulation – waves of panic, despair, emotional shutdown.
5. Long-term trauma – nervous system dysregulation, physical injury, PTSD-like effects.

The experience of the forced triathlon would devastate and destroy the human body. The physical muscles and bones might even end up injured or permanently damaged. 

Full physical recovery, if even possible, would take years to rebuild the strength. Not to mention the emotional and psychological effects of such serious abuse.

The Pandemic: A Triathlon-Absent Training

The pandemic was our forced triathlon. The only way to not participate was by voluntarily or involuntarily choosing death. Our bodies and brains had no choice but to endure at all costs, including the long-term impacts to our body.

No one was prepared for the pandemic. But we endured it. We gritted our teeth, gave our best, and got through it. We had no choice.

No one had put in the requisite training to condition our bodies and brains to the massive amount of change and stress we endured throughout the pandemic.

Even those who dismissed its seriousness were still impacted by shortages, social distancing, and stay-at-home orders due to the limitations placed upon us by businesses, schools and other institutions closing.

Whether we acknowledge it or not, the years of the pandemic came with tremendous change in how we live, work, and interact with each other. The stress of such massive change alone would have been significant for our bodies and brains to navigate, but add to it the many compounding stressors, and it becomes much bigger than surviving a forced triathlon.

Those of us still here had no choice but to survive it. We survived it by silencing our emotions and suppressing our shock, stress, and traumas to “just keep swimming.”

Our wise bodies recognized the threat and quickly shifted into chronic survival mode. Our nervous systems stuck in survival states (fight, flight, freeze, fawn) and on-alert for constant potential threats. 

• This raised cortisol levels, suppressed our immune systems, and caused shallow breathing and muscle tension.
• In survival, our bodies aren’t sure what resources they will have so they shift into energy conservation mode—limiting movement, causing fatigue, sleep issues, and muscle loss. 
• We also sought out comfort from dopamine hits to regulate stress—scrolling, snacking, drinking, binge-watching.
• To get through our days, we suppressed our emotions to stay functional and react to potential threats. A disconnected heart or one not at its best creates emotional detachment, reduced empathy, irritability, or explosive emotions that are now surfacing.
• Finally, to deal with uncertainty and isolation, many dissociated from physical sensations (pain, emotion, intuition). Disconnected from their bodies and one another, everyone becoming increasingly isolated and lonely.

How We Survived

Our bodies survive by relying upon past patterns and they can be seen everywhere during it, after it, and even right now. Which one were you during the pandemic? Which ones have you continued to rely upon since then? Can you identify your own patterns of protection?

No one avoided this experience.

The body doesn’t consciously choose to shift into survival states. Our autonomic nervous systems automatically and unconsciously chooses the state most likely to help us survive based on all its past experiences.

If you’re like me, maybe you can even identify multiple states you’ve found or continue to find yourself in. 

It’s this automatic choice our bodies make to shift us into survival that both starts and sustains the cycle of stress and burnout.

For many, the patterns or neural pathways created during the pandemic became very strong. As a result, they continue to plague our lives on a daily or weekly basis.

When Resilience Becomes Repression 

You might be tempted to think, “But it’s over now. We made it...people shouldn’t still be struggling.” But the truth is, the very things that helped us survive might now be causing us to struggle and suffer.

1. Hypervigilance became the norm: Constant scanning for danger now shows up as anxiety, insomnia, or difficulty relaxing, even when safe.
2. Overuse of digital coping: Online escape became a habit, reducing real-life presence, connection, and nervous system regulation.
3. Avoidance of feeling or processing: Emotions pushed aside during the crisis are now stuck in the body, surfacing as tension, illness, or sudden overwhelm.
4. Chronic disconnection from others: Social distancing rewired us to see others as potential threats, leading to isolation, mistrust, or difficulty reconnecting.
5. Normalization of burnout: What was once a crisis state became a baseline way of being—now showing up as low capacity, constant exhaustion, and a sense of “not being myself.”

The truth is only the toughest and truly talented human beings are willing to do what it takes to transform from surviving to thriving. It requires a consistent conscious and coherent effort to regulate, rewire, and recover from our distressing, disturbing, or traumatic experiences.

Reflection

• What survival states showed up during the height of the pandemic for you? Which ones keep showing up for you today?
• How did they impact you then, and how are they impacting you now?
• What would you be willing to courageously take action on to recover from the damage caused by your experience?
• If you find yourself frustrated by others’ sensitivity or emotional responses—pause. What might their struggle be trying to show you? What have you not allowed yourself to feel?

The Battle of Our Bodies

If you survived the triathlon, you don’t just decide to do another one a few days or weeks later. Without rest and repair, muscles will not recover; they can’t fully heal let alone support a second survival situation.

Before we can compete at full strength again, we must fully recover. Our bodies will suffer until we give them the space and time to recover. But we never had time…

There was no time to bring our bodies back into balance. We went from one stressful challenge to the next with barely a breath in between them.

When have we truly made space for recovery, let alone fully recovered from our experience of the pandemic?

Our bodies are sounding the battle cry. They are screaming in pain and pleading for us to finally pay attention—not to fix or force, but to feel, to listen, to care.

Our bodies are in full-blown rebellion, sending us signals that keep getting louder and harder to ignore. Their battle cries begging us to listen, signals we often ignore until they roar.

• Tight jaws, racing hearts, clenched fists—pleas for protection, not punishment.
• Fatigue that no rest can fix; anxiety that won’t quit—signs we're not safe or seen.
• Tightness in our shoulders, a pit in the stomach, or a lump in our throat—all telling truths our minds try not to avoid.
• Chronic pain, sleepless nights, emotional reactions—the body’s language for what the heart refuses to feel.
• The whispers of a nervous system swamped, a heart hardened, a gut unable to digest.

But we keep silencing them with productivity, perfection, and pretending everything is fine. (Even when we instinctively know it’s not!)

Not only are our bodies sending a clear message, but alarms are blaring from everywhere for all to hear. The messages are clear: 

• An epidemic of emptiness—loneliness, burnout, and disconnection, even in crowded rooms.
• Hearts, minds, and bodies at war—anxiety, depression, and suicide climb as we bury pain beneath busyness and bravado.
• The silence of suppressed screams—addiction, distraction, and digital numbing mask the pain we’re too afraid to name.
• Violence is unprocessed pain made public—when healing is denied, destruction becomes the language.
• A culture of coping, not connecting—we scroll, consume, and strive, but rarely feel seen, safe, or truly alive.
• Workplaces are machines rather than evolving ecosystems with people in pain proving their productivity—where meaning is replaced by metrics and burnout becomes a badge.
• A fractured fraying world—political polarization, social fragmentation, and digital echo chambers drown out truth, empathy, and compassion.
• Madness in our markets—unstable economies mirror the instability within overworked, undervalued, and chronically out of sync.
• Bodies breaking—chronic illness, fatigue, and inflammation, signals of a system stretched capacity collapsing.
• A planet in pain—just as our bodies overheat with stress and inflammation, so too does the Earth—disregarded, depleted, and driven beyond limits.

These are not isolated issues. They are collective symptoms.

Not flaws in the system, but signals from it. And beneath them all, the human body is pleading: Feel me. Hear me. Heal me.

Conclusion

Judgment is often pain in disguise. When we stop criticizing and start listening—to others and to ourselves—we unlock the possibility of healing for everyone. Many are struggling to recognize that today’s challenges are actually the result of experiences we had years ago.

The truth is… People aren’t “too sensitive.”

They’re carrying the weight of unresolved survival. They completed a triathlon totally unprepared to do so, and then, went right from it to a marathon, a few sprints, and a bike race.

What’s happening is not weakness, but wisdom—emotions encoded in our patterns and pathways, trying to lead us back to balance.

What looks like fragility is really a sign of strength—the body trying to finally feel what it couldn’t during the storm.

Healing doesn’t begin with answers. It begins with awareness, and the courage to act gently in response. Regulating your nervous system. Pausing to reflect. Asking for help. Saying no when you used to say yes. Each small step is a crack in the armor—and an opening for recovery.

It’s time to stop punishing our pain with productivity and pretending everything is fine. It’s time to listen—to the bodies that endured the storm and the hearts that never got to heal. 

The world doesn’t need tougher people. It needs wiser ones. More compassionate ones. More connected ones.

It starts with choosing to see our sensitivity not as a flaw—but as a pathway home. We survived. But now we are called to do something even more courageous—To feel what we avoided. To heal what we endured. And to become whole again.

We don’t need to toughen up—we need to regulate, rewire, and recover.