Regulating In A World On Fire

In this episode of Regulate & Rewire, we explore how to navigate collective trauma and maintain mental health in a world that feels increasingly chaotic. From California wildfires to global conflicts, we discuss why our ancient nervous systems struggle with modern information overload and offer practical strategies for staying regulated while staying informed. Learn about the concept of "conscious oscillation," tips for healthy information consumption, and why finding moments of joy isn't just allowed - it's necessary for sustained resilience and impact.

Three Takeaways:

1. Our nervous systems evolved for a world of immediate, local threats - not the constant stream of global catastrophes we now face through modern technology. Understanding this mismatch helps explain why we feel overwhelmed and gives us permission to set boundaries.
2. Balance Information and Regulation: Limit news consumption, take meaningful action when you can, and prioritize rest and joy to keep your nervous system balanced.
3. Finding joy and allowing moments of lightness during dark times isn't privilege or denial - it's a biological necessity for nervous system regulation. Conscious oscillation between engagement and rest helps us stay resilient and effective.

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Transcript

0:00  
Amanda, welcome to regulate and rewire an anxiety and depression podcast where we discuss the things I wish someone would have taught me earlier in my healing journey. I'm your host, Amanda Armstrong, and I'll be sharing my steps, my missteps, client experiences and tangible research based tools to help you regulate your nervous system, rewire your mind and reclaim your life. Thanks for being here now. Let's dive in. Hi friends. 

Welcome back and Happy New Year, because this is my first podcast of the new year. I don't know how many of you noticed that there was no podcast last week for the first time in two years, and honestly, it actually feels like a relief to have let a week come and go and to have made a really conscious choice not to try to squeeze it in. There are many, many podcasts in the past that I have stayed up way later than I had planned, scripting or recording or editing to make sure that a podcast got out on Tuesday. And a lot of times I felt really aligned with that choice. But last week, I found myself in a situation where it felt aligned to make a different choice. 

It was our first really big snowstorm here on the East Coast. School was canceled, my childcare canceled, which threw my whole workday out the window. And I thought, oh, maybe I'll squeeze it in during my youngest nap. And then I found my older one begging to go sledding. And there are so many past versions of me that would have said no to play. To say yes to productivity, I would have said no to play, to say yes to perfectionism. And I found myself looking at my husband, and I said, I said the words, I was like, Oh, I could probably squeeze it in during nap time. And then before he could even respond, I just looked at him, I said, No, not this year. I'm not doing that this year. The podcast will survive one missed week, and here we are friends. We survived it. There were no angry emails. I had so much fun sledding that day, and this was just such I think we just have these like moments, these small moments sometimes that confirm to us that we have healed in some degree, because there is a past version of me that might still have made the choice to skip that week's podcast episode, but it would have ruined my whole day. I wouldn't have been able to get it out of my head. I would have ruminated about it all week, and friends. Tuesday came and went, and I never gave it a second thought, and here we are just carrying on. 

And so I just want to take a moment right here to just acknowledge this for me, as an invitation for you, for two things. Number one, can you pause for just a moment in those small moments where you didn't fall into that old pattern, or maybe you caught yourself and were able to correct the old pattern, and to recognize that for what it is, as the fruits of your labor in your healing journey, and also As an invitation that maybe this year is the year that you do step outside of some of those patterns. 

Now I wish I was going to continue in this really uplifting and positive direction for today's conversation, but what actually feels really important for me to talk about today is to turn towards the many heavy hearts right now for so many different reasons, and even though this isn't the most positive note to be entering the New Year on it is a real one. It's an important one. 

Now, for those of you who don't know or might not be as aware, since I know I have listeners all over the world, there are currently very devastating wildfires raging through California. And while I currently live in Virginia and have for the last six years, the 28 years before that, California was home. It's where I was born, where I was raised, and I grew up just south of LA in a place called Orange County, and that's where my parents and two siblings still live, and we visit often, and so that's something that's been weighing pretty heavily on my heart and a lot of the United States right now. But each of us has something, or has had something, and will have something, because it's not just about California wildfires. There were recent hurricanes that devastated so much of another part of the United States, there is the despair in Palestine. There's a hunger crisis in Somalia. This world is full of heaviness and pain, and it can feel suffocating. It can feel heartbreaking. It can feel helpless and hopeless at times. And on top of that, each and every one of us has very real, very challenging things. That happen in the quiet corners of our own lives and amidst tragedy, something that I hear people struggling to navigate is this cognitive dissonance that can happen when we are aware of all of these terrible things happening all over the world while also celebrating our kids' first birthday or laughing at dinner with friends, because our homes are still intact and our world is still spinning. 

And today I want to filter these conversations, these experiences, this reality, through a nervous system lens to talk a little bit about how to navigate collective trauma and what you can do to regulate your nervous system when it feels like the whole world is on fire. First, what you have to understand is that our nervous systems are not meant for the modern world. Society has evolved so much faster than our biology could ever keep up with, and understanding this and then using it to provide context for the choices that you make in your daily life can have a massive impact on your well being over time. Now, according to current scientific understanding, the modern human nervous system reached its present day form between 100,030 5000 years ago. So for context, life at this point was characterized by hunter gatherer societies. People lived in small groups that were nomadic, and they moved between places for different food sources at different times of year. Their big technology was stone tools that they used for everyday things and to make art and sculptures with. And this is fundamental to understand, because it tells us a lot about what our nervous systems were oriented for and what they are not. Because while our nervous system has the capacity to adapt and change throughout our current life, through something called neuroplasticity, the major structural or functional changes to our nervous system are not significantly evolving to match the rapid changes of the modern world. 

So our basic neural architecture is largely considered to be pre wired for environments our ancestors lived in. Objectively, we do not live in the same world as our ancestors. The environments that they lived in don't exist anymore. And in sharing this with you, I am not suggesting that you abandon society to live out your days as a nomadic hunter gatherer, but what I am suggesting is that you think critically about what it means for you in your life to have an operating system that is still very much primed for that way of living. The nervous system that exists within you is not designed to handle knowing about devastation happening even a city away, let alone across the globe, all of the crises happening at the same time everywhere in the world. Your nervous system is designed to perceive immediate threats and then respond accordingly by either fleeing, fighting or freezing, whichever gave you the best odds of survival, and then you would either not survive the stressor, the animal would eat You, or whatever it was or it would pass, and so your system would reset, and you would go about your life until the next threat showed up. This is how our nervous systems are designed to work. 80% of the time you are just living your life, foraging for food, and then 20% of the time you are in an active, purposeful, accurate stress response that then settles and your system resets. But with the advances in technology, in seconds, you can hear about natural disasters, war, injustices, happening in 100 different places all at once. It's important to know that you were never meant to have this much information, and we have to lay that up against the reality that we do have access to this much information. 

What your reality is right now is that you are learning about threats that you can't control, ones that you often can't even contribute in any way to the solution of, and this can leave you feeling really hopeless and helpless. And so often what we are experiencing in the modern world is that our stress response is activated and. And before we can ever resettle that we're reactivating it. We're reactivating it. We're reactivating it with more and more information, more and more fast paced lifestyle. And again, I am not asking you to not know about world happenings, or to cancel your phone plan, or to quit your job and run away and live as a recluse. I am simply providing you with the context that if the world feels overwhelming to you right now, it's because you were never meant to experience the heaviness of the world with your current nervous system. You were meant to know very little outside of your very close knit community and what nature had to offer you. Life was harsher then, in many ways, but it also contained more of the ingredients that our nervous system needs to feel safe and secure, community, seasons of rest, quality sleep, unprocessed foods. But then again, our reality still remains that we live in this modern world, one that is on fire in many ways. 

And so the question you might be asking is like, okay, so what now? Understanding your physiology helps you to navigate the modern world with more agency. Put your phone down. You have enough information about what's happening. You do not need to keep scrolling and keep watching the devastation that's out of your reach. If you are not intentionally collecting more information to help you take action, then you are just leading to more collective dysregulation in the face of an initial stress response, we are primed to take action. Where we get stuck in states of shutdown or hopelessness is because so often there's no action to take, and yet we still continue to consume the devastation. 

So here are some suggestions that I have on how to operate with an old world nervous system, living in a modern world with really hard things happening. Number one, if you are consuming the information, what action are you planning to take? And it doesn't need to be big action. It doesn't need to be monetary action. It doesn't need to be get in your car and drive for me. Yesterday, this looked like catching myself in a doom Scroll of watching one video of destruction after another after another, and the action I chose to take was to call my dad. His office is 20 miles from one of the fires some of his employees live in LA and so I called him just to see how he was doing, to see if we directly knew anybody who needed support. And what this did was it allowed my nervous system to feel like it was in some small way pushing up against the threat, and it gave me that ingredient of connection, and it pulled me away from just the continuous consumption of destruction. And then today, I put my phone away. I wasn't on social media, and chose to just focus on my little world inside the four walls of my home. And I know there might be some of you listening right now thinking like, yeah, Amanda, it must be nice. It must be nice that you still have a home, that your kids are safe, that you have the luxury to pretend like the world isn't burning for millions of other people. And to that, I'll reply, it is. It is nice, and it's not lost on me how much I have to be grateful for and I also know that I cannot pretend like everyone else's devastation is my own if I am ever going to be able to show up in the world in a productive way. 

And what I want you to hear, if you are struggling with the heaviness of the world right now is this reminder that every battle is not yours to fight. There is a skill, a critical skill, in learning how to hold other people's disaster within you tenderly, without it weighing on you so heavily. The other part of this is permission I want to give you for the reality that in deep devastation, for one person, another person might be having their best day, or even amidst your own deep devastation, you can have pockets of good and joy and light. I've shared pretty openly about some of the deepest moments of grief that I've experienced in the last few years. In my deepest grief of losing one child, I still found myself the next day laughing with my other son, who was Earth side. It's why often in war torn countries we. See pictures of children who are playing, we have to find both. You have to balance out the stressors with supporters, or else your nervous system will move into a shutdown state. 

And so if you are somebody who is feeling some of that cognitive dissonance of so much devastation happening in the world alongside you having a good day, and there's guilt there or there's shame there, we have to find both. 

Now suggestion number two that I want to make is to create clear boundaries around your information consumption. Maybe that means picking specific times to check the news, maybe once in the morning or after your work day. Do not let it bleed into every moment of your day. Your nervous system needs breaks to regulate and reset, and when you do check in, can you choose reliable sources that provide factual information without sensationalizing it? Media outlets often capitalize on our nervous system's tendency to fixate on threats. They know exactly which buttons to push to keep us engaged, but that engagement often comes at the cost of our mental health, so be mindful of that. 

Suggestion number three is to focus on what I call your sphere of influence. This is about identifying what you actually can control or impact. Maybe you can't stop the wildfires, but can you check on a neighbor? Maybe you can donate to relief efforts, engage in a small act of service. My husband decided he was going to shovel our neighbor's driveway. You can make dinner for a friend, or even turn your action towards creating your own emergency preparedness plan. My husband and I sat down and we said, Okay, do we know if we had 15 minutes, what's the box we grab? And we realized we didn't. And so instead of me ruminating in watching my California home just burn, and knowing that there's very little action I can take from so far away, we've decided to turn this nervous system's need to mobilize, to take action, into can we control the controllables? Can we create a system within our own home to help us feel more prepared, taking concrete actions, even small ones, helps your nervous system to feel less helpless. 

My fourth suggestion is something I've already hinted to, but it is to lean into your community spaces. Our ancestors dealt with hardship in tight knit groups, not in isolation, scrolling through social media. Can you call a friend? Join a support group, connect with others who are working towards solutions or who have been through similar experiences issue, be in collective healing spaces. Remember that nervous system co regulation is one of our most powerful tools for managing stress. 

And just echoing this with a personal story to illustrate this point, a few years ago, when I was dealing with some of the heaviest personal challenges I've been through, I found myself constantly scrolling through social media, finding similar situations in other people's lives, and I thought I was staying informed or showing solidarity, but really I was just re traumatizing myself over and over and over again. In facing their familiarity, I was just re experiencing my own It wasn't until I started setting boundaries and focusing on direct meaningful actions that I began to be more regulated and was actually able to help myself and others. And I've heard a similar sentiment from so many people who recently experienced a ton of devastation and lost their homes to a hurricane, if you are struggling because of your own lived experience that feels too similar to what you're seeing in the world, it's okay. It is okay to step aside and to tend to your own wounds without feeling obligated to re engage in the wounds of others that just hit a little too close to home. 

And the last thing that I'll offer is something called Conscious oscillation, or pendulation, and this means to intentionally move between engagement with difficult realities and then periods of rest and joy, because your nervous system needs both. It is okay. Actually, it is vital to laugh, to celebrate, to create, to find joy, even when there is suffering in the world. And this isn't about ignoring reality. It is about maintaining the resilience to face it. And again, some of you might be thinking, but. Isn't this just privilege to be able to turn away from some of these problems? And you're right, it absolutely is a privilege to have that choice. But here is what I have learned, both as a mental health professional and as somebody who has navigated my own devastation, we have to be strategic about how we carry the weight of the world. When you're on an airplane, they always tell you, put on your own oxygen mask first before helping others. This isn't selfish. It is vital, because if you pass out from lack of oxygen, you can't help anybody. And the same principle applies to our nervous system regulation. If you are dysregulated, you are in no position to be a stable support for others in need. 

And I want to remind you that your body doesn't know the difference between scrolling through devastating news and actually being in immediate danger. Both activate your threat response system, and this is why it is crucial to move through the world with awareness, with understanding of your physiology, and to have practices that help you return to a more regulated state. 

And as we wrap up the conversation today, I want to leave you with this thought, you are carrying an ancient nervous system in a modern world. This isn't about shutting yourself off from what is happening globally. It is about being strategic and intentional in how you engage with it. It's about finding the balance between staying informed and staying regulated. And so your homework this week, if you choose, is to audit your information consumption, to notice when you are consuming news or social media out of genuine need versus just anxious scrolling. Can you set specific times to check in for updates. And most importantly, can you pair your awareness of global challenges with either concrete action, let your nervous system play out that stress response, face it in some way and to pair it with the other things that our nervous system needs to thrive, genuine social connection, play, time in nature, movement, deep breaths. When you find yourself in moments of heightened activation, pause and think, Okay, what does this system that's 35,000 years old. My hard wiring is 35,000 years old. What does it need right now to settle to feel safe more often than not, getting outside and going for a walk or turning to some form of community and connection are what helps our system to settle the quickest. 

And ultimately, my hope in this conversation was to provide some context for if you're feeling a little extra anxious these days, if you are feeling a little extra heaviness that makes sense, that makes perfect sense, but if you allow that extra activation or that heaviness to go unchecked for too long, it is going to wear your system down, and being mindful of that can help you to show up with a little more intentionality, because we need each other now, I think, more than ever in a progressive modern society that is more and more often separating us than building stronger communities, and we need to live in opposition to that, to choose different than that default for the sake of our and and all of the people around us for our well being. 

Now today's three key takeaways is, number one, our nervous system evolved for a world of immediate, local threats, not the constant stream of global catastrophes that we now face through modern technology. And understanding this mismatch helps explain why we feel overwhelmed, and please let it also give you permission to set some boundaries. 

Takeaway number two is to balance information and regulation, limit consumption, take meaningful action when you can, and prioritize rest and joy to keep your nervous system balanced. 

And number three is an echo of this and a reminder that finding joy and allowing moments of lightness. This during dark times is not privilege or denial, so much as it is a biological necessity for nervous system regulation. This conscious oscillation between engagement and rest helps us to stay resilient and effective as we face the modern world. 

All right, friends, that's it for today. And truly, I am sending as much hope and healing as I possibly can out into the world and to you. I'll see you next week. 

Thanks for listening to another episode of The regulate and rewire podcast. If you enjoyed what you heard today, please subscribe and leave a five star review to help us get these powerful tools out to even more people who need them. And if you yourself are looking for more personalized support and applying what you've learned today, consider joining me inside rise my monthly mental health membership and nervous system healing space, or apply for our one on one anxiety and depression coaching program, restore. I've shared a link for more information to both in the show notes, again, thanks so much for being here, and I'll see you next time you

Transcribed by https://otter.ai