And Here’s What Your Nervous System Is Really Telling You
If you’ve been on social media in the last couple of weeks, chances are you’ve come across the viral Hyrox moment: an elite athlete who kept competing and won, despite her body clearly telling her to stop. (Here is one of many articles about the competition) I’m not going to weigh in on whether the event should have intervened or what should happen to her title. That’s not my lane, and honestly, it’s not the interesting question.
What struck me, as a holistic therapist who spends my days untangling multigenerational trauma patterns, was something else entirely: why did so much of the internet respond with awe instead of alarm?
We Have a Culture Problem With “Pushing Through”
Scroll through the comments on almost any viral athletic moment, and you’ll see it: “that’s what champions are made of,” “respect,” “this is what dedication looks like.” We’ve built an entire culture around celebrating people who ignore their body’s most basic signals in pursuit of a finish line, a personal record, a title.
And look, resilience is real. Discipline is real. But somewhere along the way, we stopped being able to tell the difference between resilience and self-abandonment. We started treating “I will not stop no matter what my body tells me” as the highest form of strength, instead of asking whether that’s actually strength at all or something closer to a nervous system that’s forgotten how to say no.
What Psychology Actually Says About Pushing Through Pain
There’s a decent body of research that complicates the “just push through” narrative most of us grew up absorbing.
Grit Was Never Meant to Mean “Ignore Your Body”
Psychologist Angela Duckworth’s well-known research on grit, perseverance toward long-term goals, gets cited constantly in fitness and hustle-culture spaces. But even Duckworth has been clear that grit was never meant to describe ignoring your body’s warning signs; it describes sustained effort toward meaningful goals, not enduring harm for applause.
What Overtraining Syndrome Teaches Us About Limits
Physiologically, sports scientists have long studied overtraining syndrome, a state in which the body, under chronic, excessive stress without adequate recovery, starts to break down rather than adapt. The hallmark signs include hormonal disruption, immune suppression, and impaired ability to regulate basic bodily functions. In other words: when you override your limits often enough, your body stops asking politely and starts shutting things down for you.
The Nervous System Science: Polyvagal Theory Explained
Then there’s the nervous system piece, which is where my own work lives. Polyvagal theory (developed by Dr. Stephen Porges) describes how our autonomic nervous system shifts between states of safety, mobilization (fight-or-flight), and shutdown when it perceives a threat it can’t escape. Someone who is pushing their body past every internal alarm bell isn’t accessing some elevated state of willpower. Often, they’re in a sympathetic overdrive state so intense that basic interoceptive signals (the body’s internal “something is wrong” messages) get overridden entirely. That’s not superhuman. That’s a nervous system in crisis.
Where This Pattern Actually Comes From (The Multigenerational Piece)?
Here’s the multigenerational piece: most of us weren’t born believing that pushing through pain equals worth. We learned it.
Maybe it was a parent who only praised you when you won, pushed through an injury, or didn’t complain. Maybe it was a household where rest was treated as laziness, or where needs were something you were made to feel guilty for having. Maybe it was a culture, sports, work, even parenting, that only ever clapped for the version of you that didn’t stop.
Over time, that turns into a nervous system that equates slowing down with danger. The danger of disappointing someone, of losing your value, of being seen as weak. So of course we cheer when we see someone else do it. It confirms the story so many of us are already carrying: that worth is earned through endurance, not through listening to yourself.
Why Knowing Your Limit Is the Real Strength?
Real resilience isn’t the absence of limits. It’s the wisdom to recognize when you’ve reached one, and the security to honor it without shame. Stepping aside, tapping out, saying “this is enough for today” is not the opposite of strength. It’s what strength looks like when it isn’t performing for an audience.
The applause our culture gives to people who ignore their limits is, in a strange way, a symptom of collective nervous system dysregulation. We’ve normalized override for so long that regulation, actual, healthy regulation, can look like quitting from the outside, even when it’s the opposite.
5 Ways to Practice Honoring Your Limits (Instead of Overriding Them)
1. Learn Your Own Early Warning Signs
Before you hit total depletion, your body usually gives you smaller signals first: tightness, shallow breathing, irritability, a racing heart, a sense of dread. Start noticing those instead of waiting for the big, undeniable ones.
2. Separate “Hard” From “Harmful”
Discomfort and growth often go together, but ask yourself honestly: is this pushing me toward something, or am I ignoring a signal that something is actually wrong?
3. Practice Stopping in Low-Stakes Moments
If the only time you ever stop is when your body forces you to, you’ll never build the muscle of choosing to stop on your own terms. Practice it in small, everyday moments: leaving the workout at 90%, ending a task before total exhaustion.
4. Notice Who You Feel Guilty Disappointing When You Rest
This is often where the old pattern lives. Ask yourself whose voice shows up when you imagine stepping back, a coach, a parent, an old belief about your worth?
5. Redefine What “Strong” Means to You, On Purpose
Sit down and actually write out what strength looks like when it isn’t about endurance or applause. Let it include boundaries, rest, and self-awareness — then start practicing that definition, not the inherited one.
The Bottom Line
We don’t need another conversation about whether one athlete should have been stopped. We need a bigger conversation about why so many of us have been trained to see self-override as the highest form of strength, and why, until we heal that pattern in ourselves, we’ll keep clapping for it in others.
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