Your Nervous System Isn't Broken — It's Responding to a Broken News Cycle

I've noticed a pattern in sessions lately that I think is worth talking about. The news cycle and political climate are weighing heavily on people. Clients are coming in worried, scared for their future, and wondering where to turn for safety. Many feel alone in it, like they're carrying something too big to put into words, or afraid that if they start talking about it they won't be able to stop. Some feel misunderstood by the people closest to them, struggling to understand why family or friends seem unbothered, and wondering what's wrong with them for caring so deeply. And underneath it all, there's often a profound sense of helplessness. There is a steady feeling of grief not just for themselves, but for others who are more directly in harm's way. Wanting to do something, anything, and not knowing where to start. While I don't have a magic wand to fix what's broken in the world, I can offer something real: a space to understand what's happening in your nervous system, and tools to help you find your footing again.

This Isn't Just Stress. It's Survival.

Your nervous system was designed to protect you. When it detects danger, whether real or perceived, it shifts into survival mode. You might know these responses as fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. In the context of political stress though, they don't always look the way you'd expect.

This isn't a flaw in your design. It's a feature. The nervous system evolved over thousands of years with one primary job: to keep you alive. Long before headlines and social media, humans faced threats that required immediate physical action. Our ancestors had to run from the predator, fight off the danger, freeze so they wouldn't be seen, and/or appease the threat to survive it. The nervous system learned to respond before the thinking brain even had time to weigh in. Speed was survival.

At the center of all of this is the vagus nerve. This is the longest nerve in the body, running from your brainstem all the way down through your heart, lungs, and gut. It is the main pathway of your parasympathetic nervous system, sometimes called the 'rest and digest' system, which is the counterbalance to those survival responses. When the vagus nerve is well-toned and responsive, it acts like a brake on the stress response. It helps you come back down after activation, helping you to feel safe in your body, and connect with the people around you. But chronic stress wears on the vagal tone over time and the brake becomes less responsive. The result is a longer recovery time and the things that used to help, like a good night's sleep, a walk outside, a conversation with a friend can start to feel like they're not quite enough anymore. This is why so many people right now feel like they're doing everything right and still can't seem to settle.

And that vagus nerve, along with all of that ancient wiring, is still running inside you today. It doesn't know that you can't outrun a policy or fight a news cycle. It only knows that danger has been detected, and it is going to do everything in its power to protect you, every single time. What often follows are physical sensations. Your heart rate increases, muscles tighten, and your attention narrows. The body throws every resource it has at the perceived threat. When this happens your hormones also surge, and functions the body considers non-urgent in a crisis, like digestion and deep sleep, get pushed aside. Survival takes priority over everything else. In a true emergency, that trade-off makes sense. You don't need to digest your lunch if you're running for your life. But when the threat is ongoing and the body never gets the signal to stand down, those suppressed functions start to break down. Sleep becomes fragmented or elusive and the gut, which is deeply connected to the nervous system, begins to struggle. Without adequate sleep and digestive support, the body's ability to regulate stress hormones, repair tissue, and maintain emotional balance becomes compromised. The very systems you need to cope are the ones being sacrificed to keep you in survival mode.

Fight might look like rage that rises faster than you can catch it. You might find yourself snapping at your partner, getting into arguments online, feeling a fury that has nowhere useful to go. Flight might look like compulsive busyness, the need to stay constantly moving or distracted, mindless online shopping or the urge to escape into anything that quiets the noise for a moment. Freeze might look like scrolling for hours without actually absorbing anything, feeling paralyzed about what to do or who to call or how to help. And fawn is the one people talk about least, but it seems to come up quite often in therapy. You might find yourself making yourself smaller, people-pleasing, going quiet in conversations where you used to speak up, because some part of you is trying to stay safe by staying small.

This is where it gets exhausting. The nervous system was designed for acute threat. Something that spikes, resolves, and then allows the body to return to baseline. But political stress doesn't resolve. There's no moment where the danger passes and the body gets to exhale. Instead, the activation becomes the baseline. You stop noticing how tense you are because tense has become your new normal. You stop recognizing the hypervigilance because scanning for the next bad thing has just become how you move through the world. The system that was meant to protect you is now running in the background constantly, quietly draining everything it has. It just stays activated. Day after day. Story after story.

Why You Can't Just "Log Off"

One of the most common pieces of advice floating around right now is to limit your news intake. Take a break. Step away from social media. And while there's truth in that because chronic exposure to distressing content does keep the nervous system in a state of low-grade activation, it still misses something very important.

For many people, especially those whose safety, rights, or identity are directly implicated in what's happening politically, logging off doesn't feel like self-care. To some, it may feel like abandonment. To others, privilege. Or perhaps they just feel like looking away isn't something they can afford to do.

There's also a particular shame that comes with the idea of disconnecting. Some people feel that staying informed is a moral obligation. Looking away is perceived as a form of complicity, a luxury afforded only to those who aren't directly affected. And for marginalized communities, that feeling is often grounded in reality. When policies directly threaten your safety, your family, or your rights, 'just take a social media break' can feel tone-deaf at best and harmful at worst.

But there's another side to this too. Some avoid the news entirely, change the subject when it comes up, and focus only on what's immediately in front of them. This isn't necessarily laziness or indifference, nor am I suggesting that it is. Often though, it's the nervous system's freeze or flight response doing what it knows how to do. The mind decides that if it doesn't look directly at the thing, maybe it won't have to feel it. The problem is that the body already knows. The anxiety is already there, humming underneath, even when the news is off.

So what is the right thing to do? There's no universal right answer I can give you, and anyone who tells you otherwise isn't accounting for your nervous system, your identity, or what's actually at stake for you personally. The answer, I believe, isn't about finding the perfect balance of how much news to consume. It's about resourcing your nervous system so that whatever you choose to engage with, you can do it from a more regulated place. When you tend to your nervous system with intention, you build enough capacity to feel, to process, and to keep showing up.

That starts in the body.

The Window of Tolerance and Why It Keeps Shrinking

In therapy we often talk about a concept called the window of tolerance. This is the zone in which we can process difficult emotions without either shutting down (hypoarousal) or becoming overwhelmed (hyperarousal).

Think of your window of tolerance like a river. When the river is flowing well, the banks are intact, the current is steady, and it can hold a lot. Rain comes, the water rises, and the river absorbs it without flooding. That's a well-resourced nervous system. It can take in hard things, feel them fully, and return to flow.

When life is relatively stable, that window tends to be wide enough to hold hard things. We can sit with discomfort, feel our feelings, and come back to center. But when the river has been running high for too long, enduring storm after storm with no time to recede, the banks start to erode. The capacity to hold everything decreases. What used to be manageable now spills over. A small rain becomes a flood. A minor irritation becomes a breakdown. A sad headline becomes a spiral.

That's what chronic political stress does to your window of tolerance. The river is overflowing and your banks are wearing down. And once the banks are compromised, even small inputs can feel like too much. Things that wouldn't have knocked you off balance six months ago now send you spiraling. You're not weaker. Your system is just more depleted.

You might notice yourself swinging between the two edges: flooded with emotion and overwhelm one moment (hyperarousal), completely numb and checked out the next (hypoarousal). Both are the nervous system doing its job. Both are signs the river has been running too high for too long.

What Actually Helps: Working With the Body, Not Against It

Because political stress lives in the nervous system, it responds best to nervous system-based tools rather than just cognitive reframing or positive thinking. Instead of just trying to mentally process the trauma, you can use body-based practices to help your nervous system recalibrate and return to a state of equilibrium.

Orienting. When the nervous system is activated, it narrows attention onto the perceived threat. One of the first things we practice in somatic work is called orienting. It's deceptively simple: slowly and intentionally letting your eyes move around the room, taking in what's actually there. The window. The plant on the shelf. The coffee cup. Your hands. Noticing what is present, what is safe, what is real right now. This sends a small but powerful signal to the nervous system that the immediate environment is okay, and that can be enough to begin interrupting the threat response.

Pendulation. Chronic stress can make it feel like once you're in the hard feeling, you're stuck there. Pendulation is the practice of gently moving your attention between something difficult and something that feels more neutral or resourced. Think of it like the natural rhythm of a wave seeing it rise and then fall. You're not bypassing the hard thing. You're learning that you can visit it and come back.

In practice this might look like: bringing your attention to something that feels heavy. This might be a headline, a fear, a feeling in your chest. You focus on it for a moment, following it within your body, and then deliberately shifting toward something that feels okay. The warmth of a blanket. The sound of rain. Your dog's weight against your leg. Then, when you're ready, return to the discomfort. Back and forth, gently. Each time you make that return from activated to settled, you're building evidence for your nervous system that the feeling won't swallow you whole and that there is always somewhere safe to land. This is how the nervous system learns that it can tolerate hard things without being consumed by them. The wave rises and it falls.

A note on doing this alone: pendulation sounds simple, and in many ways it is. But when the nervous system is deeply activated, moving toward the hard thing, even briefly, can feel like too much. Part of what I do as a somatic therapist is watch your nervous system as you move through this process, noticing the subtle shifts in your breath, your posture, the color in your face, the moment your eyes go distant. You might not notice those things yourself, especially when you're in it. Having a trained therapist guide this means you're not navigating the wave alone. Someone is there to help you find the resource when you can't locate it on your own, and to track your window so you don't have to.

Titration. In chemistry, titration is the process of adding a substance drop by drop slowly and deliberately, in small enough amounts that the system can absorb it without being overwhelmed. The same principle applies to your nervous system.

When we're dysregulated, the instinct is often to go all in and read every article, follow every thread, watch every press briefing until we feel like we understand what's happening. But the nervous system doesn't process information well when it's flooded. You're not actually taking it in. You're just accumulating activation.

Titration looks like intentional, small doses. Check the news once, with a time limit. Read one article instead of twelve. Notice what happens in your body before you open the app and after. Give yourself time to return to baseline between exposures. If needed, remind yourself this isn't because the world doesn't deserve your attention, but because a regulated nervous system can actually do something with what it takes in. A flooded one cannot. When you give your nervous system time to return to baseline between exposures, you're actually rebuilding capacity and widening that river bank, drop by drop.

This isn't avoidance. It's a strategy.

Movement and discharge. Survival responses are meant to complete. When your ancestors ran from a predator, the running itself discharged the threat energy and the body got to finish what it started, allowing the nervous system to return to baseline. But when the threat is a headline, a policy, a slow-moving crisis you can't outrun or fight, that energy has nowhere to go. It stays stuck in the body, coiled and waiting.

This is why you might feel physically restless after reading the news. You may notice your leg bouncing, or an urge to pace. You may notice that you just can't sit still but also can't seem to do anything useful. Your body is actually trying to complete a response that never got to finish.

Movement helps. Not goal-directed, productive, achievement-oriented movement, or a workout you have to log or steps you have to count. Just movement. Shake your hands out. Roll your shoulders. Take a walk without your phone. Or my personal favorite, dance in your kitchen like nobody is watching. The goal is to let your body do something with what it's been holding.

You might feel silly. Do it anyway. The nervous system doesn't care about dignity. It cares about completion.

Grounding through the senses. When the nervous system is pulled into the past through memory, or into the future through worry, the senses are one of the fastest pathways back to the present moment. Not because the present is always comfortable, but because it is real. And real is something the nervous system can work with. This is how we can anchor ourselves and find our way back.

It might look like feeling the weight of your body in the chair beneath you. The temperature of the air on your skin. The sound of cars passing by, trees rustling outside, birds singing, or the simple hum of your refrigerator. It could be the smell of your coffee or the texture of the fabric under your hands. Nothing extraordinary. Just what's actually here.

You don't have to feel calm to do this. You don't have to feel anything in particular. You're simply giving your nervous system something concrete to orient to that exists outside the spiral. It helps to remind you that you are here and in the present. And right now, at this moment, you are okay.

Start with one sense. Just one. And notice what shifts.

Holding Both Things at Once

I want to be clear that none of this is about bypassing what's real. The political landscape is genuinely distressing to many people. The fear, the anger, the grief are all very appropriate responses to what's actually happening. There is a tension that runs through all of this that I want to name directly because someone will read this article and think that this feels like I am asking you to calm down about things you shouldn't be calm about. That tending to my nervous system means looking away. It doesn't. I am here to validate that your fear is real. Your anger is appropriate and the grief makes complete sense. Your nervous system isn't wrong for responding the way it has been. It is doing exactly what it was designed to do in the face of genuine threat.

But here's what I know from sitting with people in this work: a dysregulated nervous system cannot sustain the long game. Burnout, shutdown and chronic activation don't make us more effective advocates, more present parents, more connected partners. They make us more reactive, more isolated, and less able to access the clarity and creativity we need to actually respond to what's happening.

A regulated nervous system allows us to feel the full weight of what is happening with the ability to choose what to do next. In fact, some of the most sustained advocates, caregivers, and community members are the ones who have learned to tend to themselves first. Regulation isn't the opposite of action. It's what makes action sustainable. It allows us to stay informed without being consumed and even holds enough space for grief and action at the same time.

You are allowed to tend to yourself in hard times. In fact, I'd argue it's one of the most necessary things you can do for yourself, for the people you love, and for the world that needs you in it.

So I'll leave you with this: what would become possible for you if your nervous system had just a little more room to breathe?