you don't have to panic to care
Right now, there’s real fear in the air about politics, democracy, and the future of the United States. Some people are naming this moment the “fall of America into fascism.” Others are urging constant vigilance, nonstop engagement, and total awareness at all times.
The fear is completely understandable, and to some extent, necessary. However, it’s being delivered and passed on without care for the nervous systems receiving it.
Alarm and panic travel fast. If it’s delivered with certainty and urgency, it gets rewarded. The result of being on the receiving end of this is a low-grade (or not-so-low-grade) panic that seeps into our daily life.
This panic can make it feel irresponsible to rest, disengage, or focus on your family or home. It can make it feel as if you’re not constantly informed, you’re complicit. If you’re calm, you’re naive. If you’re tending to your life, you’re ignoring the world or not caring enough.
Living and feeling like this is simply not sustainable.
The Noise Is the Problem
Everywhere you look, someone is explaining how to live better, parent better, think better, regulate better, and resist better. Advice is thrown at us from the moment we open our eyes in the morning until we close them at night, from all sorts of media, but especially our phones and devices.
In most cases, it’s not maliciously given. Often, the person on the other end wants to help. The problem is that it’s constant, contradicting, overwhelming, and oftentimes, irrelevant to your actual life.
I’ve been reading D.W. Winnicott’s writing and broadcasting, and he once argued against broadcasting any advice “on the air.” He wanted people to receive guidance, but he knew that advice without context often does more harm than good, because most of it wouldn’t apply to the people listening.
Instead of helping, advice without context and relationships can undermine confidence, instinct, and trust in yourself.
The thing is, he was writing in a world that was a whole lot quieter than ours. Advice nowadays is literally all around us, coming at us in reels, threads, hot takes, unpopular opinions, think pieces, warnings, and so much more. It finds you even during your most vulnerable moments and tells you what you should be doing.
No wonder so many of us feel like we’re always falling short.
The Noise Turns Into Quiet, but Insidious, Guilt
For me, the problem is that this advice piles up in my head without me even noticing. I’m somehow absorbing and internalizing all the different “shoulds” that are out there, and turning them into guilt that then tries to eat me alive.
Guilt for not doing enough. For not reacting “correctly.” For needing rest. For wanting a slower, smaller life when everything feels so big.
I can be doing everything right, sitting with my child, fully present, and feel like I’m failing someone somewhere else.
I’m starting to realize that this has been conditioned into me. With so many voices telling me how to live, choosing not to listen can feel like ignorance or a moral failure.
There’s a Different Kind of Resistance
This doesn’t apply to everyone. You know what’s best for you. But if you’ve made it reading this far, chances are you are feeling overwhelmed and guilty, like you’re not doing enough, and perhaps paralyzed by fear.
You can’t think your way out of being overwhelmed. You can’t consume more advice to find clarity, and you can’t outsource your inner life to people online who sound confident but don’t know you, your body, your family, your situation, or your limits.
What can help is learning how to pause. Not forever, or to the point of being in denial, but just long enough to be able to hear yourself again. There’s a difference between intentional pausing and mindfulness and closing yourself off to learning, receiving feedback, or bettering yourself and your family.
Ways to Reconnect With Yourself During Chaotic Times
These are not rules. They’re not pieces of advice (how hypocritical would that be right now?). Take them as invitations or even as permission to slow down and consider your needs.
1. Lower input
It’s okay to focus on what is actually within your reach. This could be your body, your home, your family, and your community. This doesn’t make you disengaged or someone who doesn’t care. What it does is help ground you and provide grounding for those around you as well, which is much-needed at this time.
2. Decide that advice can be optional
If something makes you feel frantic, ashamed, or small, you’re allowed to set it down. What seems to get attention right now on social media and algorithms are things that are delivered confidently or things that are controversial. You are not required to internalize everything you come across.
3. Reclaim time to just “be.”
Right now, it’s overwhelming and easy to think that if we aren’t being productive, creating meaning, or optimizing the moment, we’re failing. But the moments that feel unremarkable, quiet, or ordinary are so important because that is actually where we can recover and ground ourselves, and where we can bond with our families as well.
4. Build small, real things
Cook something simple. Rearrange a corner of your space. Sit on the floor with your kids. Make something with your hands. This can help anchor you in reality when everything else feels abstract and overwhelming. Earlier today, this felt like too much for me to even do, so instead, I lay on the ground and let my toddler jump on me. Now, I’m writing this. Progress.
5. Trust yourself
Every day is different. The only person who knows you best is you. It can be easy to search for an online framework that solves the problem you are facing, but we go back to the problem D.W. Winnicott spoke about so many years ago. That online framework wasn’t built just for you. It doesn’t know everything you do. It doesn’t have the context of your life. At some point, you have to take the pieces you need and let the rest go.
You’re Allowed to Live Your Life and Find Joy
It can feel like a betrayal to continue living and to find happiness during times of high anxiety and loud headlines. But this is how people endure and keep going.
You can care about the world and care about your family. You can be informed and take breaks from the headlines. You can step back from the chatter online and still hold onto your values.
Sometimes the most radical thing you can do is turn down the volume on everything else, look around you at your life, and remember who you are without all the voices around you trying to tell you who to be.