Some months ago, I found myself lying in bed at nearly three in the morning, endlessly scrolling through my newsfeed.

My jaw was tight. My breathing was shallow. My body had that familiar buzzing sensation I’ve come to associate with a nervous system pushed beyond capacity.

Every headline seemed to confirm the same thing: more political chaos, more authoritarian creep, more climate devastation, more instability, more collective unraveling.

And yet, I couldn’t stop scrolling.

What struck me most wasn’t the doomscrolling itself. It was the thought that suddenly appeared underneath it: How am I still here?

I’ve spent years immersed in trauma healing, somatic work, nervous system education, contemplative practice, and collective healing spaces. I’ve worked with people navigating anxiety, dissociation, collapse, grief, and nervous system dysregulation. Part of me believed, at least unconsciously, that all of this work should have somehow protected me from ending up here, in a place that felt like immobilization.

Somewhere deep down, I think I believed that enough healing work would eventually create a kind of internal stability that could withstand almost anything.

Instead, I found myself caught in the same cycles so many other people were experiencing: compulsively consuming information, feeling emotionally flooded one moment and numb the next, struggling to focus, carrying low-grade dread in my body, oscillating between urgency and paralysis.

And honestly, there was shame in that realization. A feeling that I should “know better.” That all this somatic and trauma work should somehow shield me from overwhelm at the state of the world.

But the more honest I became with myself, the more I started realizing something important: maybe it wasn’t my failure to regulate my nervous system. Maybe it was responding appropriately to conditions that actually are overwhelming.

I think many of us are living with a kind of cognitive and emotional dissonance right now. We’re watching democratic instability, political violence, climate collapse, economic uncertainty, war, social fragmentation, and the erosion of trust in institutions unfold in real time while simultaneously being expected to continue functioning as though everything is normal.

We still have to answer emails, make dinner, pay bills, care for ourselves and others, and carry on with ordinary life while sensing that the ground itself feels increasingly unstable.

And yet, so much of the conversation around personal healing and wellness continues to individualize what is also deeply collective. We’re encouraged to regulate ourselves better, optimize our routines, practice mindfulness, and manage our anxiety more effectively.

To be clear, I believe deeply in nervous system care. I’m an advocate for somatic practices, trauma healing, contemplative practice, and rest. But we’re missing something vital when every response to collective overwhelm gets framed as an individual problem to solve privately.

Because underneath all my attempts to soothe myself was a deeper reality I didn’t want to fully acknowledge:

Part of what I was feeling was helplessness.

And helplessness is incredibly hard on the nervous system, especially when experienced in isolation.

One of the things I’ve come to understand through trauma work is that the freeze response often emerges when the body perceives threat without a meaningful pathway for action. The system becomes overwhelmed, and mobilized life energy isn’t able to move. And so we shut down, collapse, numb out, or become immobilized.

And honestly, that’s what doomscrolling started to feel like for me: an endless loop cycling through fear and helplessness without anywhere for the energy to go.

What started changing things was realizing that part of the collapse comes from the lack of embeddedness in collective responses. Human beings need spaces of shared grief and collective response. We need opportunities to organize, to participate, and to feel that our energy can move toward something meaningful.

And I noticed something surprising happening in my body when I began moving toward collective engagement instead of remaining isolated inside my overwhelm: the immobilization started to ease.

Historically, human beings have never metabolized uncertainty, grief, fear, or instability entirely alone. We moved through difficult times collectively through ritual, storytelling, gathering, music, spiritual practice, resistance, caregiving, and shared meaning-making. But modern culture, especially in the United States and Europe, has become profoundly individualized, and even healing itself has become individualized.

I no longer believe healing means becoming immune to overwhelm or impervious to grief, fear, or political despair. If anything, deeper healing can sometimes make us more sensitive to what’s happening around us and more impacted by the suffering we witness.

Maybe healing isn’t about never entering freeze again. Maybe it’s about recognizing it more quickly, meeting ourselves with less shame inside it, and remembering that we were never meant to carry collective fear entirely by ourselves.

In my work with The Outer Work Project, we’re interested in the relationship between trauma, nervous system overwhelm, political despair, and collective action. We believe strongly that it’s within us to remember the collective ways of moving through these times together.

I still catch myself doomscrolling sometimes, and I still feel overwhelmed when I look honestly at the state of the world. But I no longer interpret those feelings as evidence that I’m failing at healing. More and more, I see them as evidence of my humanity and a reminder that perhaps what many of us need right now aren’t better coping mechanisms, but collective forms of response.

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A “relephant” read to get us through these difficult times: