On Nervous Systems, Power, and the Art of Staying Human in the United States

Something is happening in the United States, and pretending otherwise is no longer a neutral act. The social and political climate is saturated with rage baiting, fear mongering, and algorithmic amplification designed to keep nervous systems in a constant state of activation. Outrage is rewarded. Nuance is punished. Curiosity is quietly buried under an avalanche of certainty. Many people feel like they are living inside an argument they did not consciously agree to join, one that follows them from their phones to their dinner tables to their beds at night. This is not accidental. It is a system that thrives on dysregulation.

Modern political power understands the nervous system remarkably well. Keep people afraid and they will narrow their focus. Keep them angry and they will stop listening. Keep them exhausted and they will trade complexity for simplicity, connection for certainty, and humanity for allegiance. A population in survival mode is far easier to manipulate than one that feels safe enough to think, relate, and imagine alternatives. Echo chambers are not just ideological—they are physiological. Algorithms learn what activates you and then feed you more of it, slowly shrinking the world until only one version of reality feels possible.

I want to be clear: I do not condone the efforts of the Trump administration—or any political force—that relies on fear, dehumanization, and chronic threat to maintain power. Policies and rhetoric that keep people braced against one another fracture our collective capacity to relate. When leaders model domination instead of responsibility, contempt instead of care, nervous systems across the country absorb the lesson. This does not excuse harmful behavior, but it does help explain why so many people feel unrecognizable to themselves right now.

In this context, taking responsibility for yourself becomes a radical act. Regulating your nervous system is not self-help fluff; it is resistance. Choosing to pause instead of react, to question instead of consume, to listen instead of annihilate—these are not passive choices. They are deliberate refusals to be fully hijacked by systems that benefit from your dysregulation. When you learn to notice how fear moves through you, how rage tightens your body, how certainty seduces you when you are tired, you reclaim agency that was never meant to be yours.

This does not mean disengaging from politics or injustice. It means engaging from a place that is harder to control. A regulated nervous system can hold grief without collapsing into despair, anger without turning it into cruelty, and disagreement without turning the other person into an enemy. This is how movements sustain themselves. This is how change becomes possible rather than self-destructive.

When this chapter of history is over—and it will be—we will still be left with one another. We will need new ways of relating, new capacities for repair, and new muscles for disagreement that do not rely on annihilation. The work of learning how to be human again cannot wait until things calm down. It must happen now, in the middle of the noise, by people willing to stay awake, stay responsible, and stay connected—even when everything around them is trying to pull them apart.

This is not neutrality.
It is preparation.