All the tools in this toolbox require something of you: energy, presence, clarity. And if you’ve been running on empty, you’re not going to be able to use any of them.

This final lesson is about the small, regular, repeatable practices that keep you functional, grounded, and alive to the good stuff that’s still here. You’ll explore why joy is not frivolous and rest is not lazy, how to tell the difference between self-comfort and self-care (and when each one is exactly right).

You’ll also discover what daily restoration can look like in a life that’s heavy with caring. From morning rituals to nighttime boundaries, this is your sustainability plan for staying in the fight without losing yourself to it.

Throughout this course, we’ve been building a toolbox. You’ve got radical acceptance for when you’re burning through all your energy fighting reality. You’ve got nervous system regulation for when your body is stuck in survival mode. You’ve got check-in practices for navigating the line between staying informed and drowning. And you’ve got questions to help you channel all that frustration into something meaningful.

This final tool is the foundation that holds everything else up: daily restorative habits, and the small, regular, repeatable things you weave into the fabric of your day that keep you functional, grounded, and alive to the good stuff that’s still here.

The guilt problem

If you’re in this course, you care. You care deeply. And somewhere along the way, caring started to feel like it required suffering. Like, if the world is in pain, you should be in pain too. Like enjoying a sunset or laughing with a friend or taking a nap on a Saturday afternoon is somehow inappropriate when people are losing their homes, their rights, their lives.

There’s this unspoken math a lot of us are doing where we think our misery is somehow a contribution. That if we just feel bad enough, worried enough, angry enough, we’re at least doing something. And conversely, that if we let ourselves feel joy, we’re being dismissive. We’re turning away. We’re the person at Target with the Starbucks who doesn’t seem to care.

I want to challenge that, because I think it’s one of the most destructive beliefs a person who cares about the world can carry.

Here’s what is actually true: you wallowing in depressing news is not helping anyone. Your sadness does not offset someone else’s suffering. You choosing not to take advantage of the privileges and opportunities you have, you refusing to snatch joy wherever it’s available to you, is not making it more possible for someone else to do the same. It’s actually making it less possible, because emotions are contagious.

Think about the last time you were around someone who was genuinely at peace. Not checked out, not oblivious, but grounded and present and still capable of laughter and warmth despite knowing full well how messed up everything is. How did that feel to be around? Probably pretty good. Probably like a relief. Probably like, okay, maybe it’s possible to care about the world AND still be a whole person.

Now think about the last time you were around someone who was consumed by despair, who couldn’t talk about anything without circling back to how terrible everything is, who had completely lost access to pleasure or humor or lightness. Did that inspire you to go out and fight for justice? Or did it just make you feel heavier?

Joy is not like pie. You don’t divide it up and there’s less for everyone else. It’s more like something contagious. The more you live with joy in a broken world, the more it gives other people permission to do the same. The more you model what it looks like to be informed, engaged, heartbroken even, and STILL capable of presence and gratitude and delight, the more you show the people around you that it’s possible to hold both.

That’s not selfish. That’s actually one of the most generous things you can do.

So approach daily restorative practices knowing that they’re not a retreat from the fight. They’re what makes you someone who can actually stay in it. When you are rested and nourished and connected to the things that bring you alive, you are sharper, kinder, more creative, more resilient, and more useful to every person and cause you care about. When you’re depleted and miserable and running on outrage alone, you’re brittle. You snap at the people you love. You lose perspective. You burn out. And then you’re no good to anyone, including yourself.

Your restoration is not separate from your purpose. It IS your purpose. It’s what keeps the engine running.

What daily restorative practices actually are

The wellness industry has turned “self-care” into a product you buy. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m not talking about luxury purchases or spa days or the $200 weighted blanket that’s supposed to fix your anxiety. If you enjoy those things, enjoy them. But most of that is self-comfort. It’s a treat. And there’s nothing wrong with a treat, but a treat doesn’t sustain you.

What I’m talking about is simpler and more fundamental. It’s being in tune with your own needs and actually attending to them on a daily basis. It’s recognizing your breaking point and caring for yourself before you get there, not after you’ve already crashed. It’s understanding what you need in order to function as a human being and prioritizing those needs instead of always putting yourself last.

There are going to be days when the idea of doing anything good for yourself feels like too much. You’re so physically exhausted and emotionally spent that trying to decide what to have for dinner feels overwhelming. On those days, self-comfort is fine. Netflix and cookie dough. The couch. A blanket. No guilt. Let yourself have it.

But don’t live there. Self-comfort is the bridge that gets you back to your restorative habits when you’ve let things slide too far. Use it when you need it, and then gently, when you’re ready, come back to the practices that actually sustain you over time. Because what you do on a regular basis is far more important than what you do occasionally. You can’t do one big nice thing for yourself every few weeks and expect that to carry you. It’s the daily stuff, the small stuff, that creates a life that can hold the weight of everything you’re carrying.

We also can’t restore our way out of injustice. Daily restorative practices are not a replacement for systemic change. They are not a substitute for the work we talked about in the last lesson. Bubble baths cannot offset a broken system.

But you also cannot fight for change if you have nothing left to fight with. Rest is not a break from the work. It’s what makes the work possible. Restorative practices are a survival strategy. They’re what give you the strength and energy to keep showing up, to keep caring, to keep doing whatever your version of meaningful action is. Audre Lorde said caring for herself was an act of political warfare, and she was right. The systems that exhaust you and grind you down are not bothered at all by your burnout. In fact, your exhaustion is useful to them. A depleted population doesn’t organize, doesn’t push back, doesn’t create. Your restoration is, in a very real sense, an act of defiance.

What restoration can look like

So let me share some of the things that help me and the people I work with, because when everything feels heavy, it can be hard to even remember what restoration looks like. Sometimes you just need someone to paint a picture of what’s possible.

Morning rituals

If you always feel like the world is demanding things from you before you’ve even opened your eyes, think about claiming the first 10 or 15 minutes of your day as yours. No phone. No news. No scrolling. Just you, with yourself, before you let anything else in. I started doing this years ago and it changed everything. I sit outside if the weather permits, have my coffee, breathe, read, mentally prepare for the day. It’s not about being a morning person. It’s about having a few minutes that belong to you before the noise starts.

For the people in this course especially, I want you to think about what you’re consuming in the first minutes of your day. If the first thing you do is reach for your phone and check the news, you are starting every single day with your nervous system already activated. You’re beginning every morning in fight-or-flight. What if you gave yourself 10 minutes of quiet first?

Midday breaks

Something, anything, that interrupts the nonstop momentum of your day. Three minutes of deep breathing after lunch. Stepping outside for fresh air. Putting on music you love while you’re cooking dinner instead of having the news on. Sitting with a cup of coffee for five minutes when you get home before you launch into the evening. None of these take more than a few minutes, and they can genuinely re-energize you for hours if you pick something that actually fits your life.

And notice what you’re filling your downtime with. If every spare moment goes to news and social media, you’re not actually resting. Your brain doesn’t know the difference. A real break means actually stepping away from the stream of information, even briefly.

Nighttime rituals

For anyone who feels like they don’t get time to themselves until everyone else is in bed, and by then they’re too exhausted to do anything except scroll... maybe the practice is shifting things around so you can get to bed earlier and have 30 minutes to actually enjoy something. Read, watch a show, take a hot bath. Or maybe it’s just creating a hard stop, a time when the phone goes in another room and you’re done for the day.

Putting the phone in another room at night is, honestly, one of the single most powerful changes you can make. If it’s next to your bed, you will pick it up. That’s not a discipline problem, that’s just how stimulus and response works.

Rest and sleep

If you’re always physically exhausted, this might be where to start. Maybe your one thing is committing to a certain number of hours of sleep and working backward to figure out what has to change. Maybe it’s building in 15 minutes in the afternoon to actually lie down and rest.

And I know for a lot of you, rest feels irresponsible. Like, how can I nap when things are this bad? But remember what we talked about. You depleted and exhausted is not a contribution to anyone. You are more reactive, less creative, less present, and less capable of helping when you’re running on nothing. Rest is the catalyst for everything else.

Mental and emotional decompression

If your brain never turns off, if you feel like a hamster on a wheel that just keeps spinning, think about creating a daily decompression practice. Meditation, prayer, journaling, whatever helps you process and release. Or it could be a boundary: no news before 9 a.m. No social media after 8 p.m. A block of time on your calendar where the only thing on the list is nothing.

The permission piece is big here. If you have no clarity and zero energy to do anything, it probably means you need to release yourself from the pressure to be productive. Granting yourself permission to just be done for the day, even if it’s 4 p.m., even if your list isn’t finished, that is sometimes the most restorative thing available to you.

We’re afraid that if we stop, we won’t start again. But the opposite is actually true. The more you practice giving yourself permission to rest without guilt, the more you learn to trust yourself. You’re not going to fall into some permanent lazy spiral. You’ll come back. You’ll re-engage. But only if the break is a real break, not a break filled with guilt about not doing more.

Physical movement

Not punishing exercise. Not forcing yourself through something you hate. Something your body actually wants to do. Walking, stretching, yoga, dancing in your kitchen, playing with your dog. If you’ve been spending a lot of time sitting and consuming bad news in a sedentary position, getting your body moving is one of the fastest ways to shift your nervous system state. We talked in Lesson 2 about how fight-or-flight chemicals need to be physically discharged. This is where that happens. Even a short walk without your phone can do more for your mental state than an hour of scrolling for solutions.

Creative outlets and hobbies

This one matters if you’ve lost touch with the things that make you feel like yourself. When the world is heavy, hobbies and creative interests are usually the first thing to go because they feel frivolous. But having something that’s yours, something you do purely because you love it, is not frivolous. It’s what keeps you human. It’s what keeps you connected to the part of yourself that exists outside of the crisis. Maybe you carve out two hours a week for something you love. Maybe you get up 30 minutes early to write or paint. Maybe you spend an hour a week outside, not to exercise, just to be in the world.

Where to start

If any of that sparked something, pay attention to it. And if you’re not sure where to start, ask yourself, “Can I just...?” Can I just step outside for a minute? Can I just put the phone in the other room tonight? Can I just sit down and drink my coffee without doing anything else at the same time? That question, “can I just,” has gotten me through more stuck moments than I can count, because it takes the pressure off doing it perfectly and just gets you moving.

The other question I come back to all the time is, “What would this look like if it were easy?” Because when you ask that, your brain usually knows the answer immediately.

What’s next?

Even though everything is in fact terrible, today you can pour yourself something warm or cool to drink, sit in a spot you like, and let yourself have a few minutes to rest.. You can go outside and notice the trees and the birds and the wind or sun on your face. You can put on a song you love and dance or just close your eyes and feel your body breathing.

These are small things. But they add up to a life that can hold the weight of caring about a world that is, frankly, a lot to care about right now.

We will persevere through the grief and heartache, and we’ll do it together with our humanity intact.

It’s not going to be easy, its going to be worth it.

If you appreciate this toolkit, a donation of even a couple dollars means a lot! Thank you for your support.

-Angela

When you care deeply about the state of the world, one of the worst feelings is the sense that you're not doing anything about it. You see everything that's broken and you don't know where to put yourself, so you either try to fix it all, freeze up entirely, or exhaust yourself trying to convince other people to care.

This lesson walks you through a set of questions to help you find your lane: not just what makes you sad, but what fires you up, and where that fire overlaps with what you're actually equipped to do. You'll also get two permission slips: that your "doing something" can be as simple as choosing kindness with intention in a world that's forgotten how, and that your train can leave the station without everyone on board.

So let’s say you’ve been doing the work. You’ve started practicing radical acceptance. You’ve got some nervous system tools for when your body is stuck in fight-or-flight. You’ve been checking in with yourself, noticing the difference between staying informed and drowning in it.

And you get to this point where something in you says... Okay, but what do I actually DO about any of this?

Because if you’re anything like me, sitting with acceptance and breathing through the hard stuff is helpful, it really is, but at some point you hit a wall where the anxiety isn’t just about the state of the world. It’s about the feeling that you’re not doing anything about it.

And that feeling is its own kind of suffering.

You see so much that’s broken: the environmental stuff and the political stuff and the education stuff and the healthcare stuff, and all of it feels urgent, and all of it feels like it matters, and you don’t know where to put yourself.

So you end up doing one of a few things.

Maybe you try to care about everything equally. You’re signing every petition and sharing every post and donating to every GoFundMe, and you’re stretched so thin that none of it actually feels meaningful. You’re a mile wide and an inch deep.

Or maybe you go the other direction and you just freeze. Because when everything is on fire, where do you even start? The overwhelm becomes its own kind of paralysis. You care so much that you can’t move.

Or, and this is the one that really got me, maybe you spend all your energy trying to convince other people to care. You’re in the comments, you’re at the dinner table, you’re forwarding articles to people who have made it very clear they’re not interested. And at the end of the day you’re exhausted and nothing has actually changed except your blood pressure.

I spent years doing that last one. Years.

Everyone’s not going to like what you’re doing, and that’s ok

My husband is a musician, and he said something to me once that completely reframed how I was thinking about this. He said, “You know, that reminds me of jazz.”

Jazz is one of the great art forms, but it wasn’t universally respected in the beginning. A lot of people just didn’t get it.

And the jazz musicians didn’t say, “Well, some people don’t like jazz, so we should switch and play country music or classical music instead.”

They just kept playing the jazz. And the people who liked jazz supported them, and it grew organically over time.

To this day, there are people who don’t like jazz, and that’s fine, because jazz still thrives and evolves regardless.

The jazz musician’s job is to keep playing. Not to conform to the whims of every person around them, but to commit to what they’re passionate about and let the like-minded folks come.

You don’t have to convince everyone to like jazz in order to be a successful jazz musician. And in fact, if you spend all your time trying to persuade people who can’t stand jazz that they should like it, you’re going to be too distracted and discouraged to produce the beautiful music that so many people are depending on you to create.

That hit me hard, because I have spent way too much time trying to get people to like me and what I care about instead of playing for the people who already appreciate who I am.

I’ve wasted so much time explaining myself to people who didn’t want to understand me.

I’ve wasted so much energy trying to convince people who don’t want to be convinced.

And every minute I spent doing that was a minute I wasn’t actually doing anything.

So here’s what I want you to sit with in this lesson:

Your job is not to fix everything. Your job is not to convince everyone. Your job is to find your thing, and do it.

And I know that sounds simple, but finding your thing when the whole world feels like it’s falling apart is actually kind of hard.

So, I want to walk you through some questions that have helped me get clearer on this, and I’d love for you to just sit with each one for a moment. You don’t have to have an answer right away. Just let the question land and see what comes up.

What lights a fire in your belly?

Here’s the first one: What lights a fire in your belly?

I don’t mean what makes you sad. I don’t mean what makes you feel hopeless when you scroll past it.

I mean what fires you up.

What’s the thing where you hear about it and you don’t just feel bad, you feel driven? Where you have opinions. You have ideas. Something in you says, “This is wrong and I want to DO something about it.”

Because there’s a difference between those two responses, and it matters.

When I hear about ocean pollution, I feel sad. I feel helpless. I take comfort in knowing that other people are working on it, and I donate to those causes when I can. But I’m not moved to get personally involved, at least not in this season of my life. It’s not where my fire is.

But when I hear about the conditions inside prisons and the way our incarceration system works? I get fired up. I have strong ideas about what needs to change. I care on a really deep level about how people who are incarcerated are treated, because they’re fellow human beings, and because they will one day reintegrate into our communities, and if we’re further traumatizing them in the process, that’s not going to end well for any of us. And I care deeply about the families, especially the children of people who are incarcerated.

So in different seasons of my life, I’ve volunteered inside jails and prisons. I donate to organizations that support kids with incarcerated parents. I stay up to date on prison reform news. And when that topic comes up in conversation, I have something real to contribute. I’m not just sharing someone else’s Instagram post. I actually know things about it and care about it on a level that gives me something to say.

I don’t try to do that with every subject. I can’t. Nobody can.

There are people who know about protecting the tundra, and they are working on that. There are people who know about special education funding, and they are advocating for that. There are people who are experts in housing policy or food insecurity or water rights.

What is that thing for you? Or things? Most of us have more than one.

What are you equipped to take action on right now?

Here’s the next question, and this one builds on the first:

What are you actually equipped to do something about? What do you already know? What experience do you have? What connections? What skills?

I have strong feelings and opinions and a lot of knowledge and experience about multiple topics, and you probably do, too. You dont have to select just one thing, and in fact having more than one can be helpful, so when you hit a dead end or get burned out on one project, you have other interests to follow.

So think about what lights you up or fires you up, and what you’re in a position to do something about. The venn diagram overlap of the two is what you’re looking for.

Because passion matters, but passion alone can burn you out fast if you’re starting from scratch on something you have no foothold in or background information about.

The sweet spot is where that fire in your belly overlaps with something you’re actually positioned to act on.

Maybe it’s your professional background. Maybe it’s your lived experience. Maybe it’s just that you’ve been reading and thinking about this one thing for years and you actually know a lot about it, more than most people around you.

And think about low-hanging fruit. What’s an easy way to start making a difference that doesn’t require you to quit your job or overhaul your entire life?

Sometimes it’s volunteering once a month. Sometimes it’s a recurring donation to an organization that’s already doing the work. Sometimes it’s just being the person in your circle who actually knows what they’re talking about on this topic, so when it comes up, you can have a real conversation instead of just shaking your head and saying “it’s all so terrible.”

Think locally, too. What’s happening in your town, your school district, your neighborhood?

We get so focused on the big national and global crises, and those matter, they really do, but sometimes the thing that’s right in front of you is the thing you could actually impact.

The food bank that needs volunteers. The school board meeting where nobody shows up. The neighbor who’s isolated and could use someone checking in. What’s right in front of you that could use someone who cares?

I often look for one-off opportunities, because I’m commitment-avoidant and don’t liek to be overly scheduled.

Our local parks department in New York City has volunteer opportunities several times a month that you don’t have to sign up for in advance, you just show up. And you can go whenever you want, no one is depending on you. That’s perfect for me. So I just stay up to date with their calendar, and I know, oh this Tuesday I can help plant new seedlings, next Saturday I can pick up trash, the following Wednesday I can help mulch the flower beds.

I absolutely love our local park, it’s a huge forested area and I have a deep connection to it, so this is a super easy way for me to feel like I’m giving back in a way that suits my personality and schedule.

And here’s one more question to help you consider how you might take meaningful action, and this one might surprise you …

What if part of your purpose right now isn’t a cause at all?

I know that might sound strange given everything we’ve been talking about, but stay with me on this.

We are living through a time when basic human decency feels like it’s becoming rare. People walk around staring at their phones. We don’t really look at each other anymore. Connection has been replaced by content. Kindness feels almost countercultural at this point.

I know it can sound cliche to talk about the ripple effect of kindness, but I actually think it holds more weight right now than it ever has in our lifetime.

Holding the door for someone and looking them in their eyes, actually seeing them? That is not nothing. In a world where people feel increasingly invisible and disconnected, choosing to be present with another human being is a real, tangible thing you’re putting into the world.

So your “doing something” might look like organizing a fundraiser or volunteering or writing to your representatives, and it might look like being the person in your community who still makes eye contact and asks “how are you” and means it.

Both of those count. Both of those are you channeling your care into the world, just at different scales.

You don’t have to have all of this figured out today. But I want you to start noticing. Start paying attention to where that fire is. Not just the sadness, but the drive. What makes you feel less helpless? What gives you energy even when the topic is heavy? Follow that thread.

And once you start to get even a little bit of clarity on what your thing might be, I want to share one more idea with you that has really helped me stop spinning my wheels.

The train has to leave the station

I want you to think about a train.

Your train is about to leave the station and head off toward its destination, toward the thing you care about, the change you want to see, the work you want to do.

And there might be a lot of folks hanging around the train station who aren’t interested in where you’re going.

Maybe they think your cause doesn’t matter, or they disagree with your approach, or they just don’t care. They’re standing around on the platform and they are not getting on.

And your impulse, if you’re anything like me, is to stand at the station trying to convince them. “Here’s why this matters, here’s why you should care, here’s why the places we’re going are the right places.”

I have wasted years of my life doing that. Years standing in the station, delaying my own train, trying to get people on board who had zero interest in coming along.

They cannot stop this train. They can get left behind by it, or they can get on board, but they cannot stop it. The train is leaving the station.

Because the alternative is for your train to wait for everyone to get on board, and if you do that, the train is never going to move.

If you don’t move forward until all the people who don’t want you to move forward get out of the way, that train will idle in the station for all of eternity.

Your train has to leave with however few people might be on board, because if it keeps going, it will pick up more people along the way. Maybe your colleagues will catch the next train. Maybe your family member will meet you at a later stop. Maybe that person you’ve been arguing with online will never get on any train, and that has to be okay, because their choice cannot be what stops you.

So don’t spend years like I did arguing with people about why your train is going somewhere they should want to go too. Don’t let other people’s lack of vision keep you standing still. Make your “all aboard” announcement and head out toward your destination.

And here’s something I don’t want you to miss about this train:

It’s not empty. There are people already on it.

Part of finding your meaningful action is finding the people who are already doing it, the ones who care about the same thing you care about, who get fired up about the same stuff, who you don’t have to explain yourself to.

Because if you’re the person who looks around and feels like nobody else notices what’s happening, if you’ve felt like the odd one out at the dinner table or the friend group or the office, finding even a handful of people who see what you see is like oxygen. You stop spending all your energy feeling crazy and you start spending it actually doing something, together.

So as you’re figuring out what your thing is, look for who’s already doing it. Find the local group, the online community, the organization, the two other people in your life who light up when this topic comes up. You don’t have to build the whole movement yourself. You just have to get on the train and find the people who are already riding.

It’s time to get really clear on where you’re going. What’s the thing that’s yours to do in this season of your life? Where are you trying to take your community? Your family? Yourself?

You don’t need everyone on board. You don’t need to solve the tundra problem if that’s not your train. Somebody else is on that train. Your job is to find yours, and go.

Taking meaningful action is a powerful anti-anxiety tool

And here’s what I’ve found from experience. When you finally stop trying to do everything and convince everyone, and you just pour yourself into your thing, it is one of the best anti-anxiety tools there is.

You go from feeling helpless and overwhelmed to feeling like you’re actually moving.

You’re not spinning anymore. You’re steering.

It won’t fix the world. But it’ll give you a reason to get off the couch. And some days, that’s plenty.

In the final lesson of this toolbox, we’re going to talk about the stuff that makes all of this sustainable. Because you can accept reality and regulate your nervous system and check in with yourself and find your meaningful action, but if you’re running on empty, none of it’s going to stick. Lesson 5 is about building daily restorative practices into your life, the simple stuff that’s weirdly hard when everything feels heavy, and figuring out how to do it anyway.

Until then, keep playing the jazz.

Proceed to the final tool …

How do you know when you've crossed the line from staying informed to destroying yourself with headlines? Your body already knows, you just have to ask.

This lesson teaches a 30-second body scan you can do anytime, anywhere, plus a simple "look up" practice for building awareness into your whole day. From there, you'll explore the power of the pause: learning to notice the space between a stimulus and your response, becoming the observer of your own thoughts instead of being consumed by them, and stepping into the director's chair to ask the question that changes everything: "What else might be true?"

Drawing from contemplative mindfulness practices and cognitive reframing, you'll walk away with a complete sequence you can use in under a minute: notice, breathe, observe, ask, choose. This is the tool that ties everything else in the course together.

Imagine you’re sitting in the carpool line, scrolling on your phone while you wait. You’re not looking for anything in particular, you’re just filling the time. And somewhere in the last fifteen minutes, you ended up deep in a thread about something terrible happening, and you didn’t even notice the shift.

Your kid gets in the car, says something totally normal like “Can we get pizza?” and you snap at them. Not mean, just sharp. Short. And they look at you, and you immediately think, Where did that come from?

Or maybe it’s a Tuesday afternoon at work. You’re on a break, you pick up your phone to check the time, and twenty minutes later you’re reading about a crisis on the other side of the world and you’ve completely lost the break. You go back to your desk carrying all of that with you, and you can’t focus, and you don’t connect it to what you were just reading.

Or you’re cooking dinner with the news on in the background, which feels harmless enough, and you don’t realize your shoulders have been up by your ears for the last half hour until your neck starts aching.

This is just regular life when you have a phone in your hand and a news cycle that never stops.

In the last lesson, we talked about what to do when you’re already in it: when it’s late at night and your chest is tight and your jaw is clenched and you can’t sleep. Those tools are your fire extinguisher: the breathing techniques, the grounding phrases.

This lesson is about the smoke detector: How to catch what’s happening before you’re in full crisis mode. How to read your body like a dashboard throughout the day, the way you’d glance at your gas gauge, not because something’s wrong but because you want to know where you are before you’re stranded on the side of the road.

Because in every one of those scenarios I just described, there were signals. Your body was sending information the whole time. The tight shoulders while you were cooking. The tension building while you scrolled in the carpool line. The shallow breathing at your desk. Your body knew you’d crossed a line long before your brain caught up. You just weren’t checking.

So let’s talk about how to check.

A 30 second body scan to see what signals your body is sending

Your body is keeping a running score of everything you’re taking in, even when your mind is telling you a perfectly reasonable story about why you need to keep scrolling.

“I need to stay informed.”

“This is important.”

“What if something changes and I miss it?”

Your mind is very good at justifying the scroll.

Your body doesn’t do that. Your body just tells you the truth.

So here’s a quick body scan you can do anytime, anywhere, in about 30 seconds. You don’t need to close your eyes, you don’t need a quiet room, you don’t need to stop what you’re doing. You can do this mid-scroll, in the carpool line, at your desk, standing at the stove. Nobody will even know.

Start at the top and work your way down. Five checkpoints.

Jaw. Is it clenched? Are your teeth pressed together? Are you holding tension you didn’t realize was there? Just notice.

Shoulders. Where are they right now? Have they crept up toward your ears? Just notice.

Chest. Does it feel tight? Constricted? Is there a heaviness sitting there? Just notice.

Stomach. Is it churning? Knotted? That hollow, slightly nauseous feeling? A lot of people don’t connect their scrolling habits to the pit in their stomach, but your gut is one of the most sensitive indicators you have. Just notice.

Hands. Are you gripping your phone? Is there tension in your fingers, your forearms? Just notice.

Jaw, shoulders, chest, stomach, hands. Top to bottom. You can run through this in the time it takes to read a single headline.

And here’s what’s powerful about it: you’re not trying to change anything. You’re not telling yourself to relax. You’re not making yourself wrong for being on your phone. You’re just getting an honest read on where you are right now. That honest read is the thing that tells you whether you’re in the “informed and okay” zone or the “this is wrecking me and I need to stop” zone.

If you scan and everything is relatively loose, your breathing is easy, your shoulders are down, your stomach is settled, then you’re probably in a fine place. Keep reading if you want to.

But if you scan and your jaw is clenched and your shoulders are concrete and your chest is tight and your stomach is in a knot, that’s your body telling you clearly that you’ve crossed the line.

Not because reading the news is bad, not because you shouldn’t care, but because your nervous system is activated and you’re now taking in information from a state of fight or flight, which means you’re not actually processing it well anyway. You’re just absorbing pain.

That’s the moment to use the breathing tools from the last lesson. A few physiological sighs or a minute of extended exhale breathing to bring your body back down. You’ve already practiced those. I’m not going to re-teach them. Just know that this is the exact moment they’re designed for. You notice, and then you regulate.

How to build the habit of checking in with your body

Now, I don’t want you to think of this body scan as just an emergency tool for when you suspect you’re doomscrolling. I want you to think of it as something you do all day long, in tiny moments, almost as a habit.

Here’s what I do. I’ll be on my phone or at my computer, and there’ll be a natural pause. A page is loading, I’m watching an ad I can’t skip, a file is downloading, I’m waiting for someone to text me back, I’m between tasks.

And then I scan. How’s my jaw? Where are my shoulders? Am I hungry? Thirsty? When’s the last time I drank water? Have I been sitting in the same position for an hour? Do I need to stretch?

I don’t necessarily get up. I don’t necessarily do anything about what I notice. Sometimes I can’t. But just the act of looking up from the screen, returning to the physical room and my physical body for ten seconds, is incredibly grounding.

It pulls me back into actual reality instead of the reality constructed by whatever I’m reading on a screen.

And the more you do this throughout the day, the less likely you are to end up forty-five minutes deep in a doom spiral without realizing it, because you’ve been maintaining a relationship with your body and your surroundings all along instead of just living in your head and your phone.

If you want to go deeper with the body scan as a practice, I have a full guided body scan meditation on Insight Timer that will walk you through it slowly and thoroughly. The more familiar you get with checking in with your body in a calm setting, the quicker and more automatic it becomes in the moments when you actually need it.

Finding the space between the trigger and your response

So the body scan and the breath are your noticing and regulating tools. But they’re really just the setup for what I think is the most important part of this lesson, and maybe this entire course:

The pause.

There’s a space between something happening and your response to it. A headline hits your feed, someone says something that lights you up, a notification pops up that makes your stomach drop, and there’s this split second before you react. Before you post, before you text someone, before you spiral into worst-case thinking, before you decide you know exactly what this means and how bad it’s going to be.

Most of us blow right past that space. We don’t even know it exists. The stimulus and the reaction feel like one thing, fused together, automatic. But they’re not. There’s a gap. It might only be half a second, but it’s there.

And the pause says: Not yet. I don’t have to know what I think about this right now. I don’t have to post about it. I don’t have to assume the worst. I can let it sit for a minute.

That might sound simple, but it’s genuinely one of the hardest things to practice, because everything about the way we consume information right now is designed to eliminate that gap. Every breaking news alert, every algorithmic outrage cycle, every “you won’t believe this” is engineered to make you react before you think. The platforms profit from your reactivity. The pause is the thing they don’t want you to take.

Becoming the watcher of your thoughts

So what do you actually do in that gap? This is where it gets interesting.

There’s a concept from contemplative and Buddhist mindfulness traditions, and it’s something I’ve taught for years using different language, which is the idea that you are not your thoughts. You are the observer of your thoughts.

Think about it this way. Your mind is running a constant stream of content. Thoughts, reactions, stories, judgments, predictions, worries. And most of the time, we’re so fused with that stream that we think we ARE the stream. We think our thoughts are us. “I’m furious” feels like a statement about who we are in that moment, not just a description of something passing through.

But there’s a part of you that can step back and watch the stream. The part that notices, “Oh, I’m having a lot of anxious thoughts right now.” The part that can observe, “I’m really activated by what I just read.”

When I teach this to middle and high school students, I use the metaphor of watching a movie. Your thoughts are the movie playing on the screen.

Sometimes it’s a scary movie, sometimes it’s boring, sometimes it’s funny. But you’re not in the movie.

You’re the person sitting in the audience, watching the movie. And when you realize that, when you can step back and just watch what’s playing without getting completely swallowed by it, everything shifts. A scary movie is a lot less scary when you remember you’re in a theater and you can choose to look away.

So with doomscrolling, instead of “I’m furious about this headline,” it becomes “I notice I’m feeling furious about this headline.”

Instead of “Everything is falling apart,” it becomes “I’m having the thought that everything is falling apart.”

You’re watching the movie. You’re seeing the thought appear on the screen without deciding it’s the truth about reality.

And once you can watch the movie, you can start to direct it.

Because you’re not just the audience. You’re also the director.

Becoming the director of your thoughts

You don’t have to keep playing the horror movie your anxious brain queued up. You can say “cut” and rewrite the scene.

You can look at the script your mind is running and ask: Is this accurate? Is this the whole story? Or is my brain doing that thing it does where it grabs the scariest possible interpretation and presents it as the only one?

And this is where a question I introduced back in Lesson 1 really comes alive. The question is: “What else might be true?”

When you’re in a reactive state, when your nervous system is activated and you’ve just read something alarming, your brain locks onto one narrative. It’s usually the worst one. The most catastrophic interpretation. The version where everything is as bad as it could possibly be, where there’s no other explanation, no additional context, no chance the situation is more complex than the headline suggests.

Your brain does this because it’s trying to protect you. If it assumes the worst, it can prepare for the worst, and you won’t be blindsided. It’s a survival strategy. But it means you’re constantly living in the worst-case version of every story, even when reality is more nuanced than that.

“What else might be true?” is the question that cracks that open.

Finding what else might be true

Think of any situation like a many-sided die, one of those polyhedral dice with dozens of faces. When your anxious brain grabs the story, it holds the die so you can only see one face. The worst one. And it presents that single face as the whole die.

“What else might be true?” is turning the die. It’s looking at another face. And then another. Not to find the “good” face and pretend the bad one doesn’t exist, but to see that the die has many sides and most of them are showing something different.

Because here’s the thing your anxious brain doesn’t want you to know: many things can be true at the same time.

A situation can be genuinely bad and also contain things that are okay.

A policy can be harmful and also face legal challenges that could change its impact.

A setback can be real and also not be the catastrophe your 1am brain tells you it is.

The world can be a mess and your life can still have beauty in it today.

These aren’t contradictions. They’re just different faces of the same die.

So when you find yourself locked into one narrative, the worst-case, most catastrophic reading of whatever you just saw, turn the die. You’re not doing this to feel better or to minimize what’s happening. You’re doing it because the version your anxious brain gives you at 1 am is almost never the full picture. It’s one face, the scariest one, presented as the whole thing.

And as the director of your mental movie, you can pull back the camera and see more faces. What else is true here? What else might be happening that I can’t see from this angle? What would this look like if I turned it?

That’s the progression. You learn to be the watcher, the one who can observe “I’m having a really intense reaction right now” without being consumed by it. And then you learn to be the director, the one who can look at the script and say, “What else might be true? What’s the wider shot here? Is this the whole story, or just the scariest version of it?”

Putting it all together through a >60 second check-in

So here’s the whole sequence, and it can happen in under a minute:

Notice the reaction in your body. Run the quick scan. Jaw, shoulders, chest, stomach, hands.

Take a few breaths. Physiological sighs or extended exhales, whatever worked for you in the last lesson. Give your nervous system a moment to settle.

Step into the audience. Watch the movie your mind is playing. “I notice I’m having the thought that...” Name it without becoming it.

Step into the director’s chair. Ask: “What else might be true?” Turn the die. Look for the faces your anxious brain left out.

And then, from that calmer, wider place, choose: what do I actually want to do here? Not what am I being pulled to do, not what does my reactive brain want me to do, but what would the wisest, most grounded version of me choose right now?

Maybe the answer is I need to keep reading because this matters and I need to understand it. That’s a choice, not a compulsion.

Maybe the answer is I need to put the phone down and go outside for ten minutes.

Maybe the answer is I don’t know yet, and that’s okay.

You can be okay with not knowing the answer

That last response, the “I don’t know yet,” is the hardest for a lot of us.

And I think part of the reason it’s so hard is that there’s enormous pressure, especially online, to have an immediate hot take on everything. Something happens and within minutes people are posting their analysis, choosing sides, declaring who’s wrong and why.

And if you don’t have your take ready, it can feel like you’re falling behind. Like you should already know what you think.

But you don’t have to react immediately. You don’t have to have a decision. You don’t even have to have an opinion. And honestly? More people need to practice saying that.

You can say, “I don’t know enough about that to have an opinion yet.”

I can tell you from experience, people really respect that answer. It’s disarming. In a world where everyone is rushing to stake their position before they even have all the facts, the person who says “I’m still learning about this” stands out. Not as uninformed, but as thoughtful.

You can also just ask questions instead of immediately launching into a prepared line about who’s wrong and why. “I’m just learning about this, what can you tell me about it?”

That shifts the whole dynamic. Now you’re gathering information instead of performing certainty. You’re looking for nuance instead of choosing a team.

So giving yourself permission to not know yet, to let something be unresolved, to sit with the discomfort of “I’m still learning about this and don’t have enough background information to have an informed opinion”… that is the pause in action.

That’s what it looks like to turn the die instead of grabbing the first face you see.

Look for nuance. Sit with paradox. Let things be complicated for a while.

You can always form an opinion later, when you have more information and a calmer nervous system.

The more you practice all of this, the more natural it becomes. The gap gets a little wider. The pause gets a little easier to find. You start catching yourself earlier, before you’re forty-five minutes deep, before your body is locked up, before you’ve fired off a text or a post you’re going to regret.

And, you start to notice it showing up everywhere. Not just with the news, but in conversations, in relationships, in the small daily frustrations that used to send you spinning. The watcher and the director travel with you. The pause is a skill that transfers to everything.

In the next lesson, we’re going to talk about what to do with all this energy once you’ve got it. Because there comes a point where you’ve accepted reality, you’ve learned to regulate your nervous system, you’ve learned to pause and observe and ask better questions, and you’re left with this burning need to actually DO something. That’s Lesson 4: finding ways to channel your frustration into purposeful action, finding the specific thing that’s yours to do, and letting that be enough.

Proceed to the next tool …

You know that feeling when you've been reading the news for two hours and your chest is tight and your jaw is clenched and you can't fall asleep? That's your nervous system running a survival protocol it was never designed to run around the clock.

This lesson explains what's actually happening in your body when you're stuck in fight or flight, why your ancestors' hardware can't handle a 24/7 global news cycle, and most importantly, what to do about it when you're already in it. You'll learn two specific breathing techniques you can use right away, including the physiological sigh and extended exhale breathing, and you'll walk away with a collection of grounding phrases for when your mind keeps spinning even after your body starts to calm down.

In the last lesson we talked about radical acceptance, about how fighting reality is its own kind of suffering, and how a lot of the pain we’re carrying isn’t just from what’s happening in the world, it’s from the energy we’re burning insisting it shouldn’t be happening.

And at the end of that lesson I mentioned something I want to pick up on here, which is: what’s actually going on in your body when you’ve been reading the news for two hours and your chest is tight and your jaw is clenched and you can’t fall asleep?

Because that’s a real thing that’s happening. That’s not just “being stressed.” That’s your nervous system doing exactly what it was designed to do, except it’s doing it in a context it was never designed for.

So let’s talk about that.

The toll of always scanning for threats and bad news

Your nervous system evolved to keep you alive. That’s its whole job.

And for most of human history, the threats it was dealing with were immediate and local. A predator. A storm. A conflict with someone in your tribe. Something happening right here, right now, that you could either fight or run from.

Your body would flood with adrenaline and cortisol, your heart rate would spike, your muscles would tense, your digestion would shut down, because in that moment none of that mattered. What mattered was surviving the next five minutes.

And then the threat would pass. The predator would leave. The storm would end. And your body would come back down. Your heart rate would slow, your muscles would relax, your breathing would deepen, and you’d return to baseline. You’d rest. You’d recover. And then you’d be ready for the next threat whenever it showed up, which might not be for days or weeks.

That’s how the system was designed to work: short bursts of activation followed by long stretches of recovery.

Now think about what we’re asking that same system to do today.

You wake up and check your phone. Before your feet hit the floor, you’ve already seen three headlines about a humanitarian crisis, a political scandal, and an environmental disaster. You go to work, where you’re managing your own stress while also absorbing the stress of the people around you. You come home and turn on the news, or you open social media, and it’s just more. More suffering, more outrage, more reasons to be afraid.

Your nervous system can’t tell the difference between a threat that’s right in front of you and a threat you’re reading about on a screen.

Your amygdala, the part of your brain that processes fear, registers “danger” either way. It doesn’t care that the wildfire is three thousand miles from your house. It doesn’t care that the political crisis is happening in another country. It just sees threat after threat after threat, and it keeps flooding your system with stress hormones because as far as it’s concerned, you are in danger. Constantly.

And because the threats never stop coming, your body never gets the signal that it’s safe to come back down. There’s no moment where the predator walks away and you can exhale. You’re just... stuck. In this low-grade (or sometimes high-grade) state of fight or flight, all the time.

That’s why your chest is tight at night.

That’s why your jaw hurts in the morning.

That’s why you can’t sleep even though you’re exhausted.

That’s why you feel on edge even on a “good” day.

Your body has been running an emergency protocol for months, maybe years, and it hasn’t gotten the memo that you’re safe on your couch in your living room.

Activating the parasympathetic nervous system

So what do we do about it?

This is where understanding your parasympathetic nervous system becomes really useful.

You have two main modes. The sympathetic nervous system is the gas pedal, the fight or flight response, the one that revs you up when there’s a threat.

The parasympathetic nervous system is the brake. It’s the “okay, we’re safe now” signal. Rest and digest. It slows your heart rate, deepens your breathing, relaxes your muscles, and tells your body it can stand down.

The really cool thing is that you can activate the parasympathetic response on purpose. Your body has these built-in pathways, and when you know how to access them, you can manually send the “all clear” signal even when the external world is still chaotic.

You’re essentially telling your nervous system, “I know there’s a lot happening, but right now, in this moment, I am physically safe, and I can come back down.”

There are a lot of ways to do this:

• Humming or vocal toning stimulates the vagus nerve, which is the main highway of your parasympathetic system

• Movement helps your body complete the stress cycle and discharge the fight or flight chemicals that have been building up

• Time in nature, even a few minutes standing outside, downregulates the nervous system

• Sound healing, including sound baths, works through vibration to activate that same parasympathetic response

• Small mindful moments throughout the day can keep you from building up to full activation in the first place.

I have sound bath tracks and mindful moment meditations for free on Insight Timer if you want to explore any of those, and we’ll talk more about building restorative practices into your daily life in a later lesson.

2 tools to help you regulate your nervous system anytime you’re stressed

But right now, I want to teach you the two tools that I think are the most useful when you’re already activated: the ones that work at 1am when you’ve been scrolling for too long and your body is wound up and you need to come back down.

They’re both breathing techniques, and the reason breathing is so powerful is that it’s the one autonomic function you can consciously control. You can’t decide to slow your heart rate directly. You can’t tell your cortisol levels to drop. But you can change how you breathe, and when you do, everything else follows.

Here’s a clip of the full video which demonstrates the guided breathing exercises

The physiological sigh

The first one is called a physiological sigh. Researchers at Stanford found that this is one of the fastest ways to downregulate the nervous system in real time. It takes about 30 seconds. Here’s how it works.

You take a double inhale through your nose, so it’s two quick inhales stacked on top of each other, and then a long, slow exhale through your mouth. The double inhale reinflates the tiny air sacs in your lungs that collapse when you’re stressed and breathing shallowly, and the extended exhale activates the parasympathetic response.

Let’s try it together. I’ll walk you through it a few times.

Take a breath in through your nose... and then sip in a little more air on top of that... and now let it all go out through your mouth, slowly, like you’re blowing through a straw.

Let’s do that again. Inhale through the nose... sip in a little more... and a long slow exhale out through the mouth.

One more time. Double inhale through the nose... and a long, extended exhale.

Just notice how you feel. You might feel a slight shift already. Your shoulders might have dropped a little. Your chest might feel a tiny bit more open. Even if you don’t feel a dramatic change, your nervous system registered that signal.

Extended exhale breathing

The second technique is extended exhale breathing. This one is great for lying in bed when you can’t sleep, because it’s gentle and repetitive and you don’t have to think too hard about it.

The principle is simple: when your exhale is longer than your inhale, it activates the parasympathetic response. So you breathe in for a count of four and out for a count of six or eight. That’s it. The extended exhale is like pressing the brake pedal over and over, sending repeated “safe” signals to your nervous system.

Let’s practice. Breathe in through your nose for four counts. One, two, three, four. And out through your nose or mouth for six counts. One, two, three, four, five, six.

Again. In for four... one, two, three, four. Out for six... one, two, three, four, five, six.

Let’s do a few more rounds at your own pace. Breathe in for four, out for six. If six feels comfortable, you can try extending to eight on the exhale. Find what feels right.

Keep breathing.

And when you’re ready, let your breath return to its natural rhythm.

Those two techniques, the physiological sigh and the extended exhale, are your emergency toolkit. They work in bed at 1am. They work at your desk after reading something upsetting. They work in the car, in a meeting, in the bathroom at a family gathering when you need two minutes to yourself. You always have your breath. You never have to go get it or set it up or find the right app. It’s just there.

Using mantras to calm your nervous system

Now, I want to offer something else here, because calming the body is essential, but sometimes at 1am your mind is still running even after your body has started to settle. You’ve done the breathing. Your chest isn’t as tight. But your thoughts are still going, still circling, still pulling you back into the spiral.

Sometimes what you need in that moment isn’t a tool that asks you to think. You’ve been thinking all day. Your brain is exhausted. What you need is something to rest in. A phrase you can repeat that gives your mind somewhere to land instead of the spiral.

So I want to give you a few options.

The first one is “all is fundamentally well.” And I know, I know, that sounds like exactly the kind of thing that would make you throw your phone across the room. Everything is NOT well, that’s the whole point of this course. But stay with me for a second.

“All is fundamentally well” isn’t a statement about current events. It’s not saying the news is fine, politics is fine, the world is fine. It’s a much deeper claim than that. It’s pointing to something underneath all of it, the idea that at the most foundational level of existence, beneath the chaos and the suffering and the uncertainty, there is a ground that holds. Life continues. Spring follows winter. People keep loving each other and making art and raising kids and planting things. The fabric of existence itself is intact even when the surface is a disaster.

You don’t have to believe it perfectly. You just repeat it and let it do its work. “All is fundamentally well.” It’s like an anchor dropped below the waves. The surface is still choppy, but you’re tethered to something steady.

If that one doesn’t land for you, here are a few others you can try.

“I am safe in this moment.” Not safe from everything, not safe forever. Just right now, in this bed, in this room, I am safe. Because your nervous system needs to hear that, even when your brain is arguing with it.

“This is not mine to solve tonight.” That one’s for the people who lie awake trying to fix things at 2am. It’s a permission slip. You’re not abandoning the problem. You’re acknowledging that nothing you do between now and sunrise is going to change the situation, and the most useful thing you can do right now is rest so you can actually show up tomorrow.

“I’ve survived every worst day so far.” That one’s not a platitude, it’s just a fact. Your track record for getting through hard things is 100%. That doesn’t mean the next thing won’t be hard, but it means you have evidence that you can handle hard things.

Pick the one that makes something in your chest loosen, even slightly. Or make up your own. The words matter less than the function: you’re giving your spinning mind something to land on instead of the spiral. A place to rest instead of a problem to solve.

Practice noticing when you’re activated, and try a calming technique

So here’s what I want you to try.

The next time you’re scrolling at midnight or lying in bed with your thoughts racing, try this sequence: first, do the breathing. A few physiological sighs, or a minute or two of extended exhale breathing. Get your body to settle, even a little bit.

And then, once you’ve got a tiny bit of space, choose a phrase and let it repeat. You don’t have to force anything. Just breathe and rest in the words.

Over time, this gets easier. You start catching the activation earlier. You start noticing, “Oh, my jaw is clenched, I’ve been on my phone too long,” before you’re an hour deep. And you start reaching for these tools not as a last resort but as a first response.

In the next lesson, we’re going to talk about finding the line between staying informed and drowning in it, because knowing how to calm yourself down after a doomscrolling spiral is important, but learning how to notice when you’re crossing the line BEFORE you’re in full crisis mode is even better. That’s the check-in practice, and it’s tool number three in the toolbox.

Proceed to the next tool …

When everything feels heavy, it's tempting to pour all your energy into being angry that things aren't the way they should be. But that resistance is its own kind of suffering, a second layer of pain sitting on top of what's already there.

This lesson walks you through radical self-acceptance (making peace with who you are as someone who can't look away), radical acceptance of others (releasing the weight of people who don't seem to share your concern), and radical acceptance of circumstances through the lens of non-attachment and the powerful "we'll see" parable.

You'll walk away with a practice question for when your anxious brain locks into worst-case tunnel vision: "What else might be true that I haven't considered?" Radical acceptance is the foundation everything else in this toolbox builds on.

When people hear “radical acceptance,” there’s almost always an immediate resistance to it, which is kind of ironic when you think about it. The concept literally asks us to stop resisting, and our first response is to resist.

That resistance usually sounds something like, “So you want me to just be okay with everything that’s happening? You want me to accept injustice and suffering and just... make peace with it?”

And I get that, I really do, because acceptance sounds a lot like approval if you don’t sit with the distinction for a minute.

Practicing radical acceptance doesn’t mean you approve of the problems you’re facing or that you deem harmful behavior as okay. You don’t have to let people walk all over you, or ignore what’s happening, or tell yourself it’s fine. What it means is that you stop wasting energy resisting reality, that you stop spending all your strength being outraged that things aren’t the way they should be, long enough to actually deal with what is.

And that “long enough to actually deal with it” part matters, because I think a lot of us have gotten stuck in a place where we’re so busy being angry about how things should be different that we’ve run out of energy to do anything constructive about how things actually are.

I spent a long time there myself. Just pouring everything I had into the injustice of it all, the disbelief, the “I can’t believe this is where we are,” and at a certain point I realized that all of that was a second layer of suffering sitting on top of the suffering that was already there.

The reality of what’s happening in the world is painful enough on its own. The insistence that it shouldn’t be happening, that endless loop of resistance, was draining me of everything I needed to actually function and show up and do some good.

I think of it like standing in the rain, completely soaking wet, and being furious. Not just because you’re wet, but because you checked the forecast and it said sunny and this is wrong and this isn’t fair and it shouldn’t be raining. And you’re standing there getting more and more drenched while you argue with the sky about what the weather should be doing.

Radical acceptance is the moment you stop arguing with the sky and go find an umbrella. You’re still wet, the rain hasn’t stopped, but now your energy is going toward actually dealing with the situation you’re in.

Radical self-acceptance

I want to walk through three layers of this, because I think each one builds on the one before it, and they’re all relevant to the kind of overwhelm we’re talking about in this course.

The first is radical self-acceptance, and I start here because I genuinely believe that when you can practice acceptance toward yourself, it becomes so much easier to extend it toward others and toward your circumstances. Many of you already have a practice of self-compassion and non-judgment in your meditation, and radical self-acceptance is really an extension of that same principle into the rest of your waking life, into the places where it’s harder to access.

So if you’re someone who feels the weight of the world, who can’t just tune it out and go about your day, there’s a good chance you’ve spent some time wishing you weren’t like that. Wishing you could be the person who scrolls past the headlines and enjoys their weekend without carrying the heaviness into everything. That wish, that “why can’t I just be normal about this,” is itself a form of resistance. You’re fighting against who you actually are. You’re holding yourself up against an ideal version of yourself that doesn’t exist, someone who’s somehow unbothered, and you’re suffering in the gap between who you are and who you think you should be.

And many of us swing between two versions of this. Either we’re comparing ourselves to that ideal unbothered person and feeling like we’re too much, too sensitive, too affected... or we’re sitting in the worst possible interpretation of ourselves and feeling like something is fundamentally broken about the way we experience the world. Neither of those is actually you. They’re stories about you. Radical self-acceptance is being brave enough to see yourself clearly, without the stories, and accept what you find. You’re a person who cares deeply, who feels things in your body, who can’t unknow what you know. You don’t have to love that every day. You just stop spending energy fighting against it, and all of that energy becomes available for something more useful.

Radical acceptance of other people

The second layer is radical acceptance of other people, and this is honestly the one that takes the most practice for me.

Because the people who seem unaffected by the state of the world can be really triggering. The coworker who’s cheerfully planning their vacation while you’re reading about families being displaced. The family member who votes in ways that feel personally harmful to people you love. The friend who tells you to just stop watching the news, as if you’re choosing to feel this way on purpose and could simply opt out.

Radical acceptance of other people means accepting who they are and knowing you cannot change them. You can influence people, but you cannot control them, and you can believe the best about them and believe in their capacity to see things differently someday, but that’s different from taking on the responsibility of making it happen. And all the energy you pour into being frustrated that other people aren’t as affected as you, that they don’t care the way you care, that they can just carry on like nothing is happening... that’s energy you’re spending on something you have zero control over, and it’s leaving you with less for the things you do.

You’re already carrying the weight of the world. You don’t also have to carry the weight of other people’s responses to it. You can put that one down.

And I want to add that radical acceptance of others might actually lead you to create some boundaries with certain people in your life. When you truly accept that someone is never going to see the world the way you do, you can stop trying to convince them or being perpetually disappointed, and instead make clear-eyed choices about how much of yourself you give to that relationship. That’s not giving up on them. That’s seeing them for who they actually are and responding to reality rather than to your hopes about who they could become.

Radical acceptance of circumstances

The third layer is radical acceptance of circumstances, and before we get into the practical tools for this, I want to name something that I think a lot of us are carrying and might not have words for yet.

It’s grief.

And it might feel strange to call it that, because grief is a word we usually reserve for death, for losing a person. But you can grieve a future that didn’t happen. You can grieve the world you thought you were building toward. And I think a lot of us are doing exactly that right now without recognizing it for what it is.

Because if you’re anything like me, you can remember a time, and it really wasn’t that long ago, when it genuinely felt like things were moving in a good direction. When technology seemed like it was going to connect us and make our lives better rather than, you know, destroying the fabric of society. When progress felt real and durable, like we were actually building something. And then you watched it reverse. And it happened fast enough to give you whiplash but slow enough that you couldn’t point to the exact moment it all turned, and now you look around and think, how did we get here? How is this where we ended up?

That feeling, that disbelief and heartbreak and disorientation, is grief. It’s the loss of something you believed in. And it deserves to be named, because when you’re walking around with unrecognized grief, it shows up as exhaustion, as cynicism, as this heaviness you can’t quite explain to people who don’t seem to feel it.

So I want to be really clear that accepting the present doesn’t mean you can’t grieve what you thought the future was going to look like. You can hold both of those things at the same time. You can say “I accept that this is where we are” and also “I’m heartbroken that this is where we are” and neither one cancels out the other. In fact, I think the grief is part of the acceptance. You can’t fully accept where you are if you haven’t let yourself feel the loss of where you thought you’d be.

And once you’ve named it, once you’ve given yourself permission to grieve the future you were counting on, it becomes a little easier to loosen your grip on it. Which brings me to non-attachment.

Practicing non-attachment to outcomes

A lot of our suffering comes from attachment. We have this picture in our minds of how the world is supposed to work, what progress is supposed to look like, what we thought we could count on. Things we thought were stable have shifted. Norms we believed were dependable got shaken up. I’ve seen memes that say “I wish we could live in precedented times again” and I feel that so deeply, because it captures that sense of having lost something we didn’t even realize we were counting on.

And for those of us who cope with anxiety by planning for various outcomes, by running through the “if this happens, I’ll do this” scenarios, it feels like there are just too many variables right now, too many interdependent issues where one thing creates a ripple effect that’s impossible to predict. We can’t prepare for every scenario, and that feeling of not being able to prepare is deeply unsettling for people like us who find comfort in having a plan.

Non-attachment to outcomes means you loosen your grip on your certainty about what the future should look like and when it should arrive. It means you release the insistence that things unfold on your timeline and according to your expectations, which, if you’ve spent any time in meditation, you already know something about. You already know what it’s like to observe a thought without chasing it, to notice an emotion without building a whole story around it. Non-attachment is that same skill applied to the bigger, scarier things.

There’s a Chinese proverb that I keep coming back to lately. A farmer’s horse runs away one day, and his neighbors come over and say, “What terrible luck!” The farmer replies, “We’ll see.” A few days later, the horse comes back and brings a herd of wild horses with it. The neighbors say, “What great fortune!” The farmer says, “We’ll see.” Then the farmer’s son tries to ride one of the wild horses, falls off, and breaks his leg. The neighbors say, “How awful!” The farmer says, “We’ll see.” And then soldiers come through the village drafting young men for war, and the farmer’s son is spared because of his broken leg.

We’ll see.

That story feels so relevant to this moment because we are living in a time where what seems terrible might have outcomes we can’t predict, and what seems like progress might lead somewhere we didn’t expect. Our brains want to categorize everything immediately, good or bad, hope or despair, and we often just don’t have enough information yet to know. “We’ll see” isn’t apathy or a dismissive shrug. It’s a conscious choice to release your attachment to knowing how this all turns out right now, this minute, and to allow things to unfold without rushing to judgment about what’s ultimately good and bad.

And when you’re caught in a spiral, when your brain has locked onto a story about how terrible something is and you can’t see any other possibility, there’s a question I come back to again and again that helps me loosen the grip. I ask myself, “What else might be true that I haven’t considered?”

Not to minimize what’s happening or put a positive spin on it, but to acknowledge that my anxious brain might not have the full picture. Anxiety is so good at tunnel vision. It grabs onto the worst possible interpretation and presents it as the only possible outcome, and when you ask “what else might be true” you’re just creating a little space, a little room for the possibility that the story you’re telling yourself isn’t the whole story. Maybe the thing you’re terrified about doesn’t unfold the way you think it will. Maybe there are people working on solutions you don’t know about yet. Maybe this particular setback catalyzes something you couldn’t have anticipated. Maybe not. We’ll see.

Accept, then act.

Now I want to bring all three of these layers together, because I think radical acceptance has a reputation as something passive, something you do instead of taking action. And in my experience, it’s the opposite. Radical acceptance is what makes action possible.

You can’t regulate your nervous system, which is what we’ll get into in the next lesson, if you’re spending all your energy fighting reality. You can’t take meaningful action to make things better if you’re stuck in a loop of outrage about how things shouldn’t be this way. You can’t figure out what’s yours to do if you haven’t first accepted what things actually look like right now. Acceptance creates the foundation. Everything else builds on it.

As Eckhart Tolle wrote, “Accept, then act. Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it. Always work with it, not against it.”

And I want to say something about the way many of us, myself included, get stuck talking about the same problems over and over, going around and around on how messed up things are. I say this with love because I do it too. That kind of repetitive venting can feel like caring, it can feel like engagement, but a lot of the time it’s actually an unproductive form of resistance that keeps us from moving forward. We’re trying to make sense of things, which is natural, our brains are pattern-seeking and we want to find meaning. But there’s a difference between examining a problem from multiple angles to understand it and just replaying your outrage on a loop.

When you start to understand the root causes of the things that bother you, when you move from “I don’t understand why things have to be like this” to “what am I not understanding, and how can I learn more,” radical acceptance actually gets easier. You shift from judgment to curiosity, and that curiosity becomes the foundation for productive action rather than just more frustration.

How to notice and shift your thinking

So here’s what I want to leave you with, and think of this as something to practice, not master. Because radical acceptance is something you return to over and over, especially when things feel overwhelming.

When you notice yourself resisting your current reality, when you catch those thoughts like “I can’t believe this is happening” or “this shouldn’t be this way,” just notice it. You know how to observe a thought without judgment, you’ve practiced that.

So, bring that same skill here. Notice the resistance. Notice where it lives in your body. And then see if you can gently shift toward something like:

When your brain offers you its very convincing worst-case scenario, try, “What else might be true that I haven’t considered?”

And if all of that feels like too much, just try the farmer’s answer.

We’ll see.

I’m not asking you to feel better about any of this. I’m just asking you to stop spending your precious energy fighting against what already is, so you have that energy for what comes next.

In the next lesson, we’re going to talk about what’s happening in your body when you’ve been doomscrolling for two hours and your chest is tight and your jaw is clenched and you can’t fall asleep. Understanding your nervous system is the second tool in this toolbox, and it pairs really well with what we covered today, because once you’ve stopped fighting reality, you need to know how to calm your body down enough to actually be present in it.

If you appreciate this toolkit, a donation of even a couple dollars means a lot! Thank you for your support.

-Angela

Proceed to the next tool …

You’re completely distracted by the horrors of the live video footage but people are waiting for your email response so you just keep … entering data and attaching links and replying with “Happy Thursday!”?

The cognitive dissonance of maintaining regular life while it feels like the world is crumbling is so hard to process, especially when many of the folks around us seem to be unimpacted by the heaviness.

I’m Angela Watson, and I can’t relate to the person who just goes to Target and gets a Starbucks and carries only vaguely aware of the wider world outside of my comfortable bubble. I just can’t.

I’m an empath, an intuitive, and a highly sensitive person. I feel the weight of the world in my body. I sense the pain. I feel connected to other living beings and the planet.

I’m also a person who gets stuck in my head, and wish I could un-know some of the things I’ve felt compelled to research and process. Because, society and the world around me deeply matters even if I am not personally impacted. I often find myself lamenting that ignorance truly seems to be bliss.

If you’re someone who feels the same way, who cares so deeply about the state of things that you can’t do anything about that it’s keeping you up at night, this toolkit is for you.

There are five practices in this toolbox that are genuinely getting me through right now, and I want to share them with you.

The first is learning how to stop fighting reality long enough to actually deal with it. I have spent a lot of energy being angry that things aren’t the way they “should” be before I realized that was its own kind of suffering. Radical acceptance is a powerful concept, and when paired with non-attachment and compassion for self and all beings, it’s become a bearable lens for seeing reality, and a healthy framework for processing it.

The second tool in this toolbox is understanding what’s actually happening in your body when you’ve been reading the news for two hours and your chest is tight and your jaw is clenched and you can’t fall asleep. Having strategies for nervous system regulation and activating the parasympathetic state is absolutely essential.

The third tool is being able to automatically check in with yourself moment by moment, so you can navigate the line between staying informed and drowning in horrific current events. There’s a version of learning and caring that keeps you engaged with the world and present in your life, and a version that leaves you hollow, depressed, and hopeless, and these two things can look really similar from the outside. Learning to stay in the body and observe how your actions are impacting you, to check in and see what you need in the moment, is a gamechanger.

The fourth tool is finding ways to channel your frustration into purposeful action. One of the best anti-anxiety tools is knowing you’re actually doing something to make a tangible difference: not tackling everything, not solving the whole mess, but finding the specific thing that’s yours to do in this season and letting that be enough.This course won’t tell you what you can do to make things better, but rather, prompt you to ask yourself some questions so you can uncover what the highest, wisest version of yourself knows to be true. When you understand the specific moral injury that’s burning inside you, and tie it together with your gifts, callings, connections, trainings, and opportunities, you’ll know the next step to take. And feeling like you’re channeling all the rage into productive action is incredibly healing and energizing.

And the final tool is a collection of daily restorative practices. It’s the stuff that sounds simple but is weirdly hard right now, like mustering up the energy to go outside, move your body, and regain perspective. It’s the stuff you know you should do but can’t seem to make yourself do when everything feels heavy and pointless, but when you have a collection of daily practices you can choose from, self-care and self-compassion become as much of your routine as checking the news.

Everything Is Terrible isn’t a rigid program. Each lesson is a tool you can pick up when you need it.

I’m not here as someone who’s figured it all out. I’m here as someone who’s finding her way through, sharing what’s working along the way. We will persevere through the grief and heartache, and we’ll do it together with our humanity intact.

If your head is full and your heart is heavy right now, welcome. I’m glad you’re here.

Proceed to the first tool …

If you appreciate this toolkit, a donation of even a couple dollars means a lot! Thank you for your support.

-Angela