The Curve You Can't See

Why "I should be fine by now" is the wrong question.

In Remembering What's Hidden, there's a chapter where my main character, Ruth, ends up wide awake at two in the morning, reading a hundred-year-old research study she has no business being awake for. By the time she closes the laptop, something in her has genuinely shifted—not because she's found a solution, but because she's finally found a name for what her body has been doing to her for years.

I wanted to pull that chapter out into daylight, because the science behind it is one of the most useful things I know, and almost nobody's ever explained it to them.

The curve

In 1908, researchers Robert Yerkes and John Dodson published an experiment that eventually gave us one of psychology's most familiar ideas: more pressure isn't always better. What began as a study of learning under different levels of stimulation became the basis for what we now often picture as an upside-down U.

Generally speaking: too little pressure, and performance suffers—nothing's urgent enough to sharpen you. Too much, and performance collapses—you're too overwhelmed to think clearly. Somewhere in the middle is the zone: your clearest thinking, your best work, the version of you that feels most alive and most capable.

Most of us know this instinctively. A deadline can focus you. A crisis can also break you. The question is where you actually live on that curve, most days.

The part nobody tells you

But there's another piece the curve can't show you.

That simple upside-down U is a snapshot. Real life isn't.

We don't experience one stressor, return neatly to zero, and then wait for the next one. Sometimes one season of pressure runs straight into another. The body keeps adapting because that's what it is remarkably good at doing.

But adaptation has a cost. Researchers use the term allostatic load to describe some of the cumulative wear that can come from repeated or prolonged stress. In ordinary language: yesterday's pressure can affect the body you're bringing into today.

Which means you may not be overreacting to today's stressor. Today's stressor may simply not be the whole story.

This is why "I should be fine by now" is so often the wrong question. You may be handling the stressor completely competently and still be carrying the stress—because those are two different things, and solving one doesn't automatically finish the other.

Stressor vs. stress

This distinction is the one that changed the most for me, and for Ruth in the book:

A stressor is the thing causing the pressure. The email. The deadline. The diagnosis. The conflict.

Stress is what your body does in response to it—the full biological event. Cortisol. Adrenaline. A heart that's already running before you've decided to be afraid.

You can solve the stressor entirely—send the email, survive the deadline, resolve the conflict—and your body can still be sitting there mid-response, not yet caught up to the fact that the threat has passed.

That's the nowhere-to-go feeling. You handled it. You're still not okay. Both of those can be true at once.

What actually tells the body it's safe

The body doesn't always respond immediately just because your mind knows the problem is over. Sometimes it helps to give it physical evidence that the demand has changed: movement, slower breathing, rest, connection, or something as simple as intentionally tensing and releasing muscle groups in sequence.

That's what Ruth does on her kitchen floor at three in the morning. It's called progressive muscle relaxation, and research supports it as a way of helping the body move toward a more relaxed state.

She isn't solving another problem. For once, she's helping her body notice that there isn't one to solve.

You are not weak for still feeling wound up after the crisis has passed. You may simply be living in a body that has carried sustained demand for a long time without enough recovery.

That's not a character flaw. That's a body that's been adapting.

Where are you on it?

I'd ask you the same question I'd ask a coaching client, and the one Ruth ends up asking herself: when you solve something—a real problem, something that's been pressing on you—do you actually feel better right away, in your body? Or does the pressure just move somewhere else, still looking for an exit?

If the answer is the second one, you're not imagining it. And there's a way back down.