What happens in our bodies when the world doesn’t make sense: A different way to think about stress

These days many of us walk around with a low-grade hum of unease that we can’t quite name. It shows up as queasiness in the stomach, shallow breathing, restless sleep, the urge to check the phone one more time before bed. We’re tired, but it’s not the satisfying tiredness that comes from a long walk or a hard day’s work. It’s something subtler, and more depleting.

This sense of perpetual unease seems to show up on individual and collective levels. Our communities feel less stable than they used to. Our country feels divided in ways that are hard to repair. The world delivers a fresh political, economic, environmental, or humanitarian crisis almost daily, and unlike any previous generation, we have access to all of it in real time, every hour of every day.

We want to stay informed. We believe that being informed is part of being a responsible citizen, a thoughtful neighbor, an engaged member of society. And that’s understandable. But what we consistently underestimate is how much this constant drip-drip of uncertainty and bad news takes a toll on our health and well-being.

Why our nervous system can’t tell the difference

Our nervous system didn’t evolve for the information age. It evolved for a very different kind of threat: a predator in the grass, a sudden storm, a rival from a neighboring tribe. The threat appears, the body mobilizes, and one way or another, the threat passes. Then the body recovers, and life continues.

What our nervous system was not designed for is the modern abstract, unresolvable, and perpetually refreshing threat landscape. When you read about political upheaval in your own country, or watch footage of conflict thousands of miles away, your body doesn’t fully distinguish between that and the predator in the grass. It releases cortisol and adrenaline. It puts you on alert. The problem is, the alert never fully switches off, because the news cycle never ends and the crises never resolve.

The physical effects of this chronic state of alertness and disquiet are real. Ongoing activation of the sympathetic nervous system raises blood pressure, disrupts digestion, weakens immunity, and interferes with sleep. Over time, the brain begins to expect bad news, scanning even quiet moments for danger. And eventually, many people swing to the opposite extreme — a kind of emotional numbness, scrolling past tragedy without feeling much at all. This isn’t callousness. It’s the nervous system protecting itself from overload. But it comes at a cost.

A different question to ask

For decades, the dominant approach to health has been built around one question: what makes people sick? It’s a reasonable question, but it may not be the most useful one.

In the late 1970s, an American-Israeli medical sociologist named Aaron Antonovsky began asking a different question. Studying the health of women who had survived the Holocaust, he noticed something that confounded his expectations: some of these women, despite having endured almost unimaginable trauma, were in remarkably good health — physically and psychologically. Others, with comparable histories, were not. What explained the difference?

It wasn’t the absence of hardship — they had all suffered greatly. It wasn’t luck or genetics alone. There was something else in the way these women related to the world and to their own lives.

Antonovsky called his framework salutogenesis — from the Latin salus (health) and the Greek genesis (origin). Rather than asking what causes disease, he asked: what are the origins of health? What keeps people well, even when life is hard? At the center of his answer was a concept he called the Sense of Coherence.

The three pillars of staying well

The Sense of Coherence isn’t happiness, and it isn’t the absence of difficulty. It’s a fundamental orientation toward life as something that — even when it’s painful — is comprehensible, manageable, and meaningful. Antonovsky broke it down into three components:

Comprehensibility — the sense that what is happening to you and around you can be understood. That the world, however difficult, is not pure chaos. That things have causes, patterns, and explanations.
Manageability — the sense that you have what you need to cope. Not that life is easy or that you can control everything, but that you have enough inner and outer resources to meet what comes.
Meaningfulness — the sense that engaging with life is worth your energy. That your struggles and your efforts matter. That you are an active participant in your own story, not just a passive recipient of whatever happens.

When these three are strong, stress is something you navigate. When they are weak or eroded, stress becomes something that overwhelms you.

And here’s what makes this so relevant to the moment we’re living in: a world of relentless instability and an unending news cycle systematically attacks all three. It attacks comprehensibility, because nothing seems to make sense anymore — the rules change, experts disagree, truth itself feels contested. It attacks manageability, because the problems are enormous and our individual power over them feels vanishingly small. And it attacks meaningfulness, because when everything feels broken, it’s easy to slide into the quiet despair of believing that nothing we do really matters.

This is the predictable human response to a sustained assault on the conditions that make psychological well-being possible.

What we can do

The good news is that the Sense of Coherence isn’t fixed. Antonovsky believed it could be strengthened throughout life, especially through how we navigate the stressors that come our way. In fact, he wrote that some amount of unpredictable experience is essential for a strong Sense of Coherence, because each time we successfully meet a challenge, we add to our internal repertoire of resources.

In the posts that follow, we’ll look at each of the three pillars in turn — comprehensibility, manageability, and meaningfulness — and explore what it actually looks like to tend to them. We’ll talk about specific practices for the body, the breath, and the mind. We’ll talk about what to do with the news, with our communities, and with our own habits of attention.

Staying well in a difficult world isn’t about pretending the difficulty isn’t there. It isn’t about optimism as a performance, or wellness as an escape. It’s about building something inside yourself that’s real enough, and strong enough, to hold. And your yoga practice can become a big part of that process. As my teacher Gary Kraftsow used to say: “Yoga is not about mastering difficult postures; it’s about building resilience. When s**t hits the fan — will you be ready?” Our yoga practice helps us prepare for that moment (and many others that come after).

Next time, we’ll start with the first pillar — comprehensibility — and look at why making sense of things is a biological need, not a luxury. Tune in!

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