Your Body Is Keeping Score
Series: Nowhere & Everywhere — What context switching is costing your mind, your body, your relationships, and your life
If you’re just joining this series, you can start at the beginning with Post 1 — “I’m Everywhere and Nowhere” or catch up on Post 2 — “The Fragmented Mind”.
One morning in August 2024, I woke up and couldn’t move.
Not in the dramatic, emergency-room sense. But my back had locked up so completely overnight that getting out of bed required a slow, deliberate negotiation with my own body — a process that made it immediately clear that something had been building for a long time, and had finally decided it was done waiting for me to notice.
I noticed.
What I didn’t fully realize at the time was the connection between what I was carrying mentally and what my body had decided to do with it. That was a different job, a different company. I knew I was stressed. I didn’t understand yet that stress doesn’t stay in your mind — it moves in. It takes up residence in your neck, your lower back, the place behind your eyes that starts to pound by Thursday afternoon.
And here’s the part that should embarrass me, but mostly just makes me human: I didn’t really change anything.
When November, 2025 rolled around — new company, new role, three teams, twelve hours of standing meetings — I found myself in the same place. The neck tightness arriving on Tuesdays. The headaches by Wednesday. The back pain that showed up mid-week like a standing appointment nobody scheduled. The exhaustion that a full night of sleep — on the nights I could actually wind down — never quite touched.
My body had already sent this memo that August. I had read it, set it down, and walked back into the same patterns that wrote it.
That’s not weakness. That’s what we do. We acknowledge the signal and then keep moving — because stopping feels impossible, and because nobody told us the bill was still accumulating.
It was. It is.
Bessel van der Kolk spent decades studying trauma — how overwhelming experiences get stored not just in memory, but in the body itself. His book The Body Keeps the Score changed the way clinicians and ordinary people alike understand the relationship between what we experience and what our bodies do with it.
I want to be careful here: context switching is not trauma. I’m not drawing that equation.
But van der Kolk’s central argument goes far beyond any single diagnosis — the body stores what the mind refuses to acknowledge. It doesn’t file overwhelming experiences neatly away. It holds them. And it keeps holding them until they are processed, expressed, or released.
That framework applies with uncomfortable precision to the way many of us are living right now.
There’s a related concept worth naming here, one that van der Kolk and the broader trauma field have drawn on heavily: the window of tolerance, a term coined by psychiatrist and neuroscientist Dr. Dan Siegel. It describes the zone in which the nervous system can function well — the range inside which we can think clearly, connect with others, regulate our emotions, and make good decisions. When we’re pushed outside that window — through stress, overwhelm, or relentless demand without recovery — the nervous system shifts into a state of low-grade hyperarousal. Not crisis. Not emergency. Just... never quite settled. Always slightly braced for the next thing.
That’s not a feeling I recognized immediately as a nervous system response. I recognized it as Tuesday. And Wednesday. And every morning I woke up already behind.
The body doesn’t differentiate between the source of the overwhelm. It doesn’t know you’re stressed because of three back-to-back meetings instead of something more dramatic. It just knows the threat signal hasn’t stopped. And it responds accordingly — logging every unresolved demand, every unfinished thought, every moment of being pulled before you were ready.
Van der Kolk called it keeping the score. My body had been keeping meticulous records.
Gabor Maté approaches the body from a different angle than van der Kolk — but he arrives at the same uncomfortable truth.
In When the Body Says No, Maté explores the relationship between chronic stress, emotional suppression, and physical illness. His central argument is this: when we consistently override the body’s signals — when we say yes to every demand, swallow the no that would protect us, and keep moving because stopping feels impossible — the body finds its own way to stop us.
The mechanism isn’t dramatic. It’s gradual. It’s the accumulated weight of years of self-override, of treating the body’s warnings as inconveniences to be managed rather than information to be respected.
What struck me reading Maté was how precisely he described the profile of someone at risk. Not someone weak, or undisciplined, or lacking resilience — but someone conscientious. Someone who takes their responsibilities seriously, who doesn’t want to let people down, who believes that pushing through is simply what you do when people are counting on you.
Three teams. Twelve hours of standing meetings. An AI mandate coming from above and political resistance coming from below. A role that expanded before the capacity to hold it did.
I didn’t say no to any of it. Not because I wasn’t paying attention — but because saying no felt like failing the people who needed me to say yes.
Maté would recognize that pattern immediately. And he would tell you, gently but clearly, that the body keeps a different accounting than the one we show to the world. It records every override. Every swallowed boundary. Every morning we got up when what we needed was to stay still.
August 2024 was the body’s invoice. I got another one in November 2025.
So what does all of this actually look like in a body? Not in a research paper — in a real human being trying to get through a real week?
For me, it follows a pattern so consistent it almost has a schedule.
By Tuesday, the neck tightness arrives. Not painful exactly — just present. A low-grade holding, like my body is bracing for something it already knows is coming. My shoulders follow by Wednesday, climbing upward toward my ears in a posture I don’t notice until someone asks why I look tense.
The headaches show up Thursday. They’re not migraines. They’re more like a persistent pressure — the kind that lives behind the eyes and makes everything feel slightly harder to process than it should. The kind that tells you the cognitive account is overdrawn.
And then there’s the sleep.
I go to bed exhausted. Genuinely, deeply tired in a way that should make falling asleep effortless. Instead, my mind keeps running. Meeting replays. Unresolved decisions. The thing I forgot to follow up on. The AI conversation that didn’t land the way I hoped. The nervous system, still firing, still braced, still convinced there’s something that needs attending to. Wired but tired is the phrase I’ve heard others use, and it’s exactly right — the gas and the brake pressed simultaneously, going nowhere.
And when I do sleep, I don’t always wake up restored. Sometimes the morning arrives and the tiredness is still there, waiting. Like it never left. Like the body processed the rest as just another thing it had to get through.
Siegel’s window of tolerance. Maté’s accumulated overrides. This is what they look like from the inside — not as clinical concepts, but as Tuesday neck tension and Thursday headaches and 2am brain that won’t stop running the day’s tab.
Your body isn’t being dramatic. It’s being precise. Every symptom is data. The question is whether we’re willing to stop long enough to read it.
That morning in August 2024, I didn’t think about nervous systems or windows of tolerance or accumulated overrides. I just lay there, unable to move, thinking about everything I had to do that day and how my body had apparently decided to remove the decision from my hands.
At the time I called it a back problem. Looking back, it was a communication problem. My body had been sending clear, consistent messages for months — the neck tension, the headaches, the exhaustion that sleep couldn’t touch, the nights where my mind ran the day’s unfinished business long after I’d stopped being useful to it. I had received every one of those messages and filed them under deal with later.
The body doesn’t do later indefinitely.
What van der Kolk, Siegel, and Maté both understand — and what I wish someone had handed me as a practical manual rather than something I had to piece together in retrospect — is that the body is not being difficult. It is being honest. It is doing exactly what it was designed to do: register what the mind refuses to acknowledge, and eventually find a way to make itself heard.
Your symptoms are not inconveniences. They are information.
The tension in your shoulders, the headaches that arrive on schedule, the sleep that doesn’t restore you — your body has been keeping an exacting record of every override, every swallowed boundary, every morning you got up when what you needed was to stay still.
The question isn’t whether your body is keeping score. It is. The question is whether you’re ready to look at the ledger.
We’ve talked about the mind. We’ve talked about the body. But there’s a cost we haven’t named yet — one that doesn’t show up in a scan or a research study. It shows up in the eyes of the people sitting across from you.
That’s where we go next.