Uncommonly Remarkable is a health and wellness show focused on understanding how the body works and how everyday choices shape long-term health. The show is published in two formats: authored monologues that explore core ideas around health, resilience, and human biology, and In Conversation episodes featuring long-form discussions with clinicians, scientists, and founders. Rather than chasing trends, the show focuses on systems, signals, and long-term trajectory. Hosted by Artis Beatty.
This is an authored monologue from Uncommonly Remarkable.
Gratitude is usually treated as a mindset shift — but the body experiences it first. Chronic stress, dissatisfaction, and vigilance create a real physiological cost over time, even when we don’t feel “burned out.”
In this episode, I explain why gratitude isn’t abstract or emotional fluff, but a biological signal that influences the nervous system, recovery, and long-term health.
This is Uncommonly Remarkable. Thanks for listening.
Uncommonly Remarkable℠ is a health and wellness show focused on understanding how the body works and how everyday choices shape long-term health.
I’m Artis Beatty, a doctor of optometry and Chief Medical Officer at MyEyeDr. While my professional background informs how I think, the perspectives shared here are my own.
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The cost we rarely count. One of the things I keep coming back to, more than I realize, is that my body isn't responding only to what is happening around me, but to what I believe is happening as I move through the day. That distinction sounds subtle, but it carries a real physiological cost. And once I noticed it in myself, I started to see it everywhere. Our nervous systems aren't especially good at separating external reality from internal interpretation. They respond to meaning, expectation, anticipation, and threat. Whether that threat is real, imagined, or simply rehearsed often enough that it feels real. We see this clearly in obvious moments, like a loud noise at night, a sudden scare, a close call, heart rate rises, blood pressure increases, stress hormones surge, and attention narrows. All of that can happen before we have any confirmation that danger is actually present. But where this becomes more interesting and more consequential is in the ordinary moments we don't label as stress at all. The rushed morning, the unread email, the conversation we replay on the drive home, the assumption we make about someone else's intent, the background worry we carry without ever naming it. None of these moments feel dramatic, but they are cumulative. And I don't think we do a very good job accounting for the physiological cost of living in that state hour after hour, day after day. Over time, our bodies start to treat those interpretations as instructions. Our blood pressure doesn't spike just once, it trends upward. Our sleep doesn't break one night, it becomes lighter, more fragmented. Our muscles don't tense briefly, they stay guarded. Our stress hormones don't surge occasionally, they linger. Eventually we start to feel off, not acutely ill, not clearly broken, just not quite right. We do what makes sense. We get evaluated, we run tests, we rule out the dangerous things, and that step matters. It always does. But when the tests come back normal, there's often a quiet confusion that follows because the symptoms are real, even if the explanation is elusive. What I've been thinking about more is whether in many cases the body isn't malfunctioning at all, whether it's responding exactly as designed to the environment we're placing it in. An environment shaped not just by what happens to us, but by how we interpret it. That's where gratitude has become interesting to me, not as positivity, not as optimism, and certainly not as denial, but as regulation. Gratitude used intentionally changes what our nervous system is rehearsing. When we're stuck in traffic, nothing about our frustration improves the traffic itself. But that frustration does something very specific to our bodies. Our blood pressure rises, our muscle tension increases, our stress chemistry ramps up, and when we shift, even slightly and recognize that we're safe, that we're breathing, that we have time we didn't expect to have, that our bodies can soften instead of brace, something different happens. Our blood pressure comes down, our muscle tension eases, our stress hormones settle. Not because the situation changed, but because our interpretation did. The same is true when we give people or situations the benefit of the doubt. We are remarkably quick to fill in missing information with negative stories. Most of us do it automatically, and every time we do, our bodies respond as if that story were fact. When we pause long enough to acknowledge that we may not know the full context, we interrupt that loop, not for their benefit, but for ours, because the physiological cost of judgment, resentment, and chronic vigilance is paid internally. This isn't about pretending everything is fine, it's not about suppressing legitimate concerns, it's about recognizing that our bodies live downstream from our thoughts and that not every thought deserves to be rehearsed physiologically. Medicine still matters, medication still has a role, acute care saves lives, but there is a layer beneath all of that, a layer of participation that no system can outsource for us. Our breathing, our interpretations, our pauses, our ability to signal safety to our own nervous systems. We don't have to change everything. We don't have to eliminate stress. We don't have to get it right all the time, but we do underestimate the cost of everyday internal strain and we underestimate how much leverage we actually have to reduce it. If this way of thinking resonates, there is an opportunity to spend more time with a genuinely remarkable physician who has thought deeply about the physiological cost of everyday life.
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Julius Torelli joins me in Uncommonly Remarkable in Conversation, where these ideas are explored with greater depth and lived perspective. This is uncommonly remarkable. Thanks for listening.
