Your mind knows you’re safe. Your body hasn’t caught up.
It starts with a sound you have never heard before, coming from your phone … and from every phone around you, in the same second. Not a text. Not an app. A flat, official alarm that overrides whatever you were doing and will not be ignored. In the UAE it is called the National Early Warning System. It is the alert the government can push to every citizen and resident in the country at once. The last time my phone made that exact sound was during the pandemic, the curfew warnings. So before I had read a single word, my body had already braced. I didn’t know what this was, so I wasn’t afraid, yet I was on guard. Then I read it: Due to the current situation and potential missile threats, immediately seek a safe place in the closest secure building. I had to read it again. That first time, I was at home, and I came undone … pacing the room, heart beating out of my chest, in full panic mode. My cats, Chiara and Scuro, had felt it before I did, already bolting for cover under the bed. I wanted to hide with them.
A few weeks into this, I was in a hotel cafe in Abu Dhabi. I had just sat down, opened my laptop, about to order my flat white. Then I felt it … the anxiety moving through the air, a kind of collective locomotion, as the people around me, most of them tourists, were ushered toward the basement after yet another alert. The server leaned in to tell me there was a shelter downstairs. A shelter. In Abu Dhabi. Do hotels have shelters? The disbelief landed before anything else, because this is one of the safest places I have ever lived … a city I’d read was ranked among the safest in the world. And here we were, being moved to a basement turned into a shelter.
What someone outside this part of the world needs to understand is what we were being informed, in real time, through the country’s official channels. The booms we were hearing did not mean missiles were falling on us. We were walked through the defense system protecting us … an interception system built in many layers, designed to meet a threat far out and far up, long before it could reach the ground. So the sound in the sky was not danger arriving. It was the sound of protection. It was danger being stopped, high above our heads, on our behalf. That was the paradigm shift this safe country handed us: to hear protection in a sound that every instinct reads as danger.
So I decided to trust it. The system, the defense, the message on my phone, the country that had earned that trust. I decided not to go down to the basement. I stayed in my seat, sipping my flat white, laptop open, and got to work.
But deciding something with your mind and believing it in your body are two different things. As I sat there trying to focus on the task in front of me, everything inside me was already bolting out of the room … and it had no idea where to run.
Photo by Sean Witzke on Unsplash
The body is slower than the mind
The mind updates quickly. It reads the news, hears the explanation, files the situation under “handled.” The body works on a different tune. It meticulously keeps the score.
That phrase belongs to Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, whose book The Body Keeps the Score has become the reference point for how threat lives in the body long after the mind has moved on. The nervous system is not interested in your reasoning. It is interested in survival. When a missile alert notification, or a window shaking in its frame, registers as danger, the body floods before the thinking mind can get a word in. The racing heart, the held breath, the urge to run … these are not a failure of composure. They are the system doing exactly what it was built to do.
For the high-functioning woman, this gap is especially disorienting. She is used to her mind running the show. She has built a life on competence, on thinking her way through. So when her body overrides all of it … when she is safe on paper and still bracing at 2am … she decides something is wrong with her. Nothing is wrong with her. Her nervous system is simply doing its job.
The body also learns to adapt
Here is the other half, the part that gives me hope.
That first alert at home had left me pacing and panicked. Weeks later, in the cafe, I could stay in my seat. And later still, in a near-empty cafe, the alert went off again and two men in a meeting nearby did not even look up. Their conversation was not interrupted at all. Everyone just silenced their phones and carried on. What had been terror had become, somehow … just a Tuesday.
The nervous system habituates. Faced with a threat that repeats in a predictable pattern, it begins to down-regulate. We watched this happen on a global scale during the pandemic … the early terror around every statistic and every cough, and then, months later, a collective shrug. The danger had not necessarily changed. Our capacity to live alongside it had.
I felt it in my own body months later. Long after the alerts had stopped, a notification came through on that same channel, in that same tone. It was deleted within minutes, and a second message followed telling us to disregard the previous message. And the most interesting thing happened inside me: almost nothing. A flicker of “oh, is this starting again?” and then … calm. The signal that once flooded me had lost its grip. The body that keeps the score can maybe, given enough safety, revise it too.
What it does to the heart
None of this happened cleanly. Underneath the body learning to settle, something else was cracking open.
I cried more in those weeks than I had in years. Not from fear … from gratitude, the kind that arrives so suddenly and so full it has nowhere to go but out. An Eid message from the country’s president, a few ordinary words about resilience and solidarity, undid me completely. And alongside the gratitude came its shadow, guilt, because I knew that elsewhere, not far at all, other people were living the same fear without the same protection … my own home country among them, and the children of places I could not stop thinking about. One night near the end of March it rained, which almost never happens here in spring. It felt as though the sky, like the rest of us, was weeping.
A regulated nervous system is not a numb one. The goal was never to stop feeling. It was to feel all of it … the fear, the gratitude, the grief … without being run by it.
Why some of us settle and some of us don’t
So why does one person settle while another stays locked on high alert? Why does the same event leave one woman shaken for an afternoon and another changed for years?
The research keeps pointing to the same answer: the foundation you were built on. In The Body Keeps the Score, Van der Kolk describes a study by his colleague Glenn Saxe of children hospitalized for severe burns, in which the development of PTSD could be predicted by how safe the children felt with their mothers. The security of that attachment even predicted how much morphine was needed to manage their pain … “the more secure the attachment, the less painkiller was needed.”
Another colleague, Claude Chemtob, studied 112 children in New York who had directly witnessed the attacks of September 11th. The children whose mothers later developed PTSD or depression were six times more likely to have serious emotional problems, and eleven times more likely to become aggressive. The same catastrophe. Wildly different outcomes … shaped not by the event itself, but by the security of the world each child returned to.
Van der Kolk distills it into one sentence: “If you have no internal sense of security, it is difficult to distinguish between safety and danger.”
Read it again. The ability to know, in your body, that you are safe is not something we are born already able to do. It is built … or it is not … in the earliest relationships with our primary caregivers, long before we had any say. Some of us reach adulthood with a nervous system that is trusting. Some of us reach it still scanning the room.
The threat that never habituates
In the middle of all of it … the alerts, the noise, the body on guard … I went to visit my parents. I had worked hard to find some solid ground inside myself first. I wanted to bring a little of that calm to them because this whole situation left them unsettled of course.
Within the first few minutes, a short exchange about something completely innocent, something entirely unrelated, and then … kaboom. I was pulled straight back into an old, familiar, stinking place … the one my body has been keeping the score of far longer than any alert. The pull of the old pattern rose while I was driving home: apologize more, fix it, it is your fault. And for once, something in me went quiet and said: no, actually it isn’t. Not this time. I interrupted the pattern.
But here is the truth I drove home with. I was more afraid of stepping on a landmine in my parents’ house than of anything flying overhead. The threat of the missiles habituated. The mother wounds never did.
And here is the cruel logic of it. A missile, you can see. It is dangerous and everyone agrees that it is … there is nothing to argue about, no confusion, no betrayal. But our parents, our primary caregivers, are supposed to be the safest people we have. They are the ones meant to mean love. So when the threat comes from them, from the very source that is supposed to mean safety, the body learns something far more disorienting than fear. It learns that danger can wear the face of love. That is the danger the nervous system never fully stands down from, because it was never allowed to make sense in the first place.
Some interceptions are invisible
The interceptions overhead were never mine to build. The protection was provided … I only had to decide to trust it.
The other kind of protection, the internal one, is different. If your nervous system did not get its sense of safety in the beginning, the work of adulthood is to build it now. This is slow, body-level work … not insight, not understanding, not one more thing you figure out with your very capable mind. It is teaching a nervous system that has been bracing for a lifetime that the original threat, the real one, is finally over.
I work with women who are safe by every external measure … successful, stable, surrounded by good things … and still bracing. Still scanning. Still mistaking the absence of danger for a safety they cannot feel. If you recognize yourself in that gap, the distance between knowing you are safe and feeling it, that gap is not a flaw in you. It is a nervous system still waiting for an update it never received.
Some interceptions are invisible. Some you have to build yourself.
If this is the kind of internal work calling to you, we can begin with a private conversation here
