Tending the Nervous System in Uncertain Times

Understanding the Impact of Uncertainty

If you feel like uncertainty is jumping from the screen to your body, you are not alone. That's because what we're seeing in the news in our country and beyond can register not just as one scary headline but as a loss of trust in the social fabric itself, activating core attachment questions.

Am I safe? What will happen if someone comes for me, my community member, or my loved one? This isn't about needing everyone to agree. It's about needing to know that care, restraint, and dignity are still shared human values. That we are not disposable to one another.

This uncertainty is primal. It lives in our bodies and relationships, flowing through our nervous systems and hearts. It affects how we reach for or retreat from one another. Clinically speaking, experiencing or witnessing traumatic events, whether in person or on our phones, activates our nervous systems and attachment patterns. This shapes how we seek safety, closeness, and meaning in unsettling times. Our bodies and minds are reacting not just to a video, but to a perceived rupture in our relational world.

This is why it feels like a lot. Because it is. As human beings, we need to feel a sense of shared safety, connection, and belonging. The absence, or threat of annihilation, of this is overwhelming to our nervous systems, that have evolved to scan for social rejection and danger. All that is to say, you are not broken, if things feel unsteady. Your nervous system is responding to a rupture in trust. Now that we've seen how these times have the potential to send us into a cascade of post traumatic responses, let's look at some alternatives that might help us live more fully, even now.

Some Grounding Truths:

• Consuming "the news" (often emotionally derailing) is not a moral obligation.

• We can re-assess and re-orient: Are my worst fears happening, right now?

• We can make an impact by practicing dignity in small, daily, relational ways.

• Indeed, this is how attachment in repaired, not just between individuals, but within a society.

Practical Tools:

• Identify at least one person who you can check on and who can check on you.

• Ritualize brief daily check ins. These can be casual. It's the act of being seen and known.

• Protect your own nervous system and emotional bandwidth by stepping back from traumatic content when you need to; this preserves capacity for care.

• Make regular time to find and do what helps you settle (ie cooking, pets, being outside). This is not a luxury. It's a necessity for tending to the social fabric, of which we are a part.

Finding A Personal Focus: Word for the Year

I've been inviting clients, many of whom have come in distraught over current events, to come up with a word for the year. Not as a self improvement tactic, set of goals, or to do list, but as a grounding and centering intention to return to in times of stress. Something to focus on when focus is hard to come by. Words like stillness, relationship, gentleness, devotion, and health have come up. In choosing where we put our energy, we can reclaim a sense of agency. And, in acting in the service of these values or intentions, we can restore a sense of connection.

Closing Thoughts

These times have the potential to destabilize us socially and emotionally because what we are witnessing is destabilizing. The sheer content at our fingertips is staggering. But, we have a choice, with how we engage personally and with each other. People have found ways to seek connection and joy, even in the most dire of circumstances. Living through wars, pandemics, and other horrific events. May we see how this time, too, brings out not just the worst but the best in human nature. May we each find what we need to help us do that. One moment at a time.