The Courage to Care

Why the brain is wired to care deeply, even when the world tells us not to.

For as long as I can remember, I was a kid who cared about everything.

I cared about what other kids thought of how I looked and dressed, and about the weird Eastern European lunches my parents packed for me that were very far from cool. I remember caring about the “stinky” girl the cool kids made fun of, even though when it came time to pick teams they would choose her before me, joking that at least she had cool Nike clothes.

I cared about getting top grades and being valedictorian at my grade school. I cared about the boys I had crushes on and what they thought of me, even though to them I was invisible at best and the weird nerdy loner with an accent at worst.

I cared about every chess tournament I played and desperately wanted to win and be the best.

And through all of it, I remember the consequences of caring.

There was a lot of bullying. Both verbal and physical. A lot of loneliness. Changing schools. Moving cities. Having very few friends. Being called more names than I can count.

I was always the outsider who cared desperately about fitting in but could never quite crack the code.

Somewhere along the lonely years, the many tears, and the hard-fought battles with both myself and my parents to be anything other than who I was, I came to a quiet conclusion.

Maybe the problem was that I cared too much.

Maybe caring itself was the problem.

And with a still developing brain and very little confidence, I decided the solution was simple:

Stop caring.

Over the years I began building walls around myself. A kind of emotional fortification, much like the Bastion in the city of Timișoara where I was born and later returned for my first years of medical school, a thick defensive wall that once protected the Austro-Hungarian fortress.

My version served a different purpose: not to keep the world out, but to keep the world from seeing how much I cared and appear indifferent.

And it worked, sort of. Almost as well as running too fast and convincing myself I didn’t need to build an aerobic base, something that also worked for a while, until it very much didn’t. But that’s a story for another post.

What I didn’t realize at the time was the cost of those walls.

It wasn’t until years later, when I reached a certain level of maturity and gained confidence in my own skin, believing in myself and accepting the full quirky weirdo that I am, including the slight but life long accent, sad song obsession, near-permanent state of melancholy, and loner tendencies, that I realized what a disservice that had been.

I had convinced myself that caring, something so fundamentally part of who I am, was wrong. That it was something I needed to suppress instead of embrace.

And it got me thinking.

Why do we live in a society that makes caring seem so uncool?

You see it constantly in sports. Athletes often downplay how important a race or goal really is to them. They shrug it off. They say things like, “I’m just happy to be here,” or “It doesn’t really matter.”

Part of that is humility.

But part of it is something else.

Psychologists call it self-handicapping: a defense mechanism where people intentionally lower expectations or pretend something matters less in order to protect themselves from the emotional impact of failure.

If you say you didn’t care that much, then losing doesn’t feel like it says something about you.

“Well, I didn’t really try that hard.”

“Well, it wasn’t that important to me.”

But the outcome doesn’t actually change.

If you finish a race in a certain time and place, that result exists whether you cared deeply or pretended not to.

The only thing that changes is how honestly you show up to the effort.

And strangely enough, pretending not to care can actually drain the very energy you need to pursue the thing in the first place.

Because caring isn’t just emotional.

It’s biological.

When you truly care about something, a goal, a person, a dream, your brain enters a state of high engagement.

The brain’s reward system activates. Dopamine is released through pathways connecting the ventral tegmental area (VTA) and the nucleus accumbens. This is the system responsible for motivation and pursuit.

Dopamine doesn’t just create pleasure. It creates drive. It signals to your brain that something matters and is worth investing time, effort, and energy into.

Interestingly, the brain separates “wanting” from “liking.” Wanting is the motivational system that pushes you toward difficult goals even when they are uncomfortable.

And uncertainty, the possibility of success or failure, actually increases dopamine activity, making the pursuit more energizing.

Caring also activates the brain’s emotional centers. The limbic system assigns significance to the thing you care about. Oxytocin strengthens bonds and attachment. The insula tracks the bodily sensations that come with emotional investment, the warmth, the nerves, the anticipation.

Even the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for planning and long-term decision making, becomes more focused when something truly matters to you.

In other words, caring is not weakness. It’s engagement. It’s the brain aligning emotion, motivation, and focus toward something meaningful. Pretending not to care doesn’t protect you. It just disconnects you from the very systems that make meaningful pursuit possible.

I’m still learning (or maybe unlearning) how to undo that old defense.

The hardest part is definitely with people. That’s where the walls were first built. But when it comes to my goals and dreams, it’s always been easier. I’ve always been someone who throws herself fully into the things she wants to achieve, endlessly chasing big goals with a kind of stubborn belief that they might just be possible, even when they seem improbable to everyone else. It feels almost like a need, something coded into my DNA that needs a goal to obsess over and pursue.

This year I decided to fully pour myself into the running goals I’ve slowly been dreaming up since I first started running, not just chasing short-term results but the long arc of what I might be capable of.

I’m still a little scared of speaking those dreams out into the world.

But I’m committed to caring about them.

And about the process of getting there.

Because it turns out the thing I once believed was the problem was actually the thing that makes everything worth pursuing in the first place.

And sometimes I think about that little girl who learned far too early that caring wasn’t cool. I wish she could know that the part of me I spent so many years trying to hide was actually the coolest part all along.