“You can’t argue your way out of a survival response. The body doesn’t care about your excuses; it only cares if it’s under attack.” -Anonymous
To my fellow Israelis:
You haven’t been in a battle zone. You haven’t lost anyone close to you. You’re not a hostage family. Your house and car haven’t been hit by shrapnel. You tell yourself: It’s not that bad. Others have it so much worse.
And yet – you’re exhausted in a way sleep doesn’t fix. You snap at people you love. You feel a low-grade dread that follows you through ordinary moments. You can’t quite relax, even when things are quiet.
So you do what many of us do. You minimize. You compare. You push through.
But here’s what I want you to understand: that voice telling you it’s not that bad may be one of the most quietly harmful things happening inside you right now.
The Comparison Trap
In a country living through what Israel is living through, there is always someone whose pain appears greater: The bereaved family, the wounded soldier, the person who lost their home and all their possessions, the person still waiting to know if their loved one is alive.
When we measure our own suffering against theirs, we conclude we have no right to struggle. We silence ourselves before anyone else can. We decide our pain doesn’t qualify.
This is called minimization, and while it often feels like humility or perspective, it is actually a way of abandoning yourself.
Suffering is not a competition with a limited number of spots. Someone else’s profound pain does not cancel out yours. These truths can – and must – coexist.
Ongoing Stress
We tend to think of trauma as a single, dramatic event. But chronic, ongoing stress – the kind that comes from living in a sustained state of uncertainty, threat, and grief – does something different. It accumulates.
Your nervous system does not distinguish between “legitimate” fear and fear you’ve decided you shouldn’t be feeling. It simply responds. And when the threat never fully lifts, when the tension is never fully resolved, the body and mind pay a price that doesn’t show up all at once.
It shows up as:
- Trouble falling asleep, or waking at 3 a.m. with your mind already racing.
- Irritability that surprises even you.
- Difficulty concentrating or making decisions.
- A flattening of pleasure, things that used to matter feel distant.
- Physical symptoms: headaches, tension, digestive issues, fatigue.
- A creeping sense of numbness, disconnection, or just going through the motions.
None of these feel dramatic. That’s exactly why they go unaddressed. There’s no single moment you can point to and say: that’s when it happened. It’s the slow accumulation of carrying too much for too long, without permission to put it down.
The Cost of Minimizing
When we tell ourselves our stress doesn’t count, we don’t make it disappear. We just stop tending to it.
Unacknowledged stress doesn’t stay quiet. It finds other exits. It comes out in how we speak to our children at the end of a hard day, in the walls we build around our hearts, in the subtle withdrawal from connection and meaning. It settles into the body as chronic tension. It erodes our capacity for joy without our realizing what’s been lost.
There’s also something else worth naming: when we consistently dismiss our own experience, we train ourselves to distrust our inner world. Over time, we lose the ability to recognize what we actually feel, or to believe that what we feel matters.
This is not resilience. It is self-abandonment dressed up as strength.
Acknowledging Your Stress
Acknowledging your stress is not the same as falling apart. It is not self-pity. It is not weakness.
It is simply saying: This is hard, and I am human, and what I feel is real.
That acknowledgment – genuine, compassionate, without the immediate footnote of “but others have it worse” – is not the end of coping. It is the beginning of it. You cannot tend to something you refuse to see.
In practice, this might look like:
- Pausing when you notice that low, unnamed weight and asking: What is this, actually?
- Letting yourself speak honestly with someone you trust, without minimizing as you speak.
- Recognizing physical symptoms as information, not inconvenience.
- Allowing yourself to rest without first earning it through suffering.
None of this means ignoring the reality around you. There is genuine, catastrophic pain in this country right now, and acknowledging your own stress doesn’t erase your awareness of that.
Real perspective is not my pain is nothing compared to theirs. Real perspective is we are all carrying something, and none of us should carry it alone.
The bereaved mother and the person lying awake with dread at 2 am are not in competition. Both deserve care. Both deserve to be seen.
When to Reach Out
If you recognize yourself in these words – if the exhaustion, the irritability, the numbness feel familiar – please know that what you’re experiencing has a name, and it is treatable. You do not need to wait until things get worse. You do not need to earn the right to ask for help.
Therapy is not only for crisis. It is for the slow, heavy weight of ongoing stress that no one around you can quite see. It is for the person who is functioning, but barely. It is for the person who has been telling themselves it’s not that bad – and is tired of needing to.
You deserve support. Not because your pain is the worst. But because you are a person, and you are struggling, and that is enough.