Your Nervous System vs. The News Cycle: Why Normal Coping Isn't Working
Welcome back to PsyberSpace. I'm your host, Leslie Poston. Let's be honest. It's been a lot. It is a lot.
Leslie Poston:Every week, we seem to get hit with new political violence, social instability, environmental disasters, and mass scale cruelty disguised as governance. At work, people are burning out or getting laid off in record numbers. In public life, disinformation and artificial intelligence are distorting reality faster than most of us can keep up. And at home, well, that's assuming home still feels like a safe concept. Most of us are just trying to make it through the day without going numb.
Leslie Poston:This isn't normal, but it is our reality right now. So today, we're asking a different kind of question. Not how do we fix the world? We'll get there. But how do we live in it while it's breaking?
Leslie Poston:What does the science of coping tell us about what people do mentally, emotionally, and physically when the world stops making sense? And how can we tell when coping helps or when coping is keeping us stuck? Let's talk about the psychology of coping in an age of chaos. In psychology, coping isn't about staying strong or having a good attitude. It's about how we adapt mentally and behaviorally to stress.
Leslie Poston:Richard Lazarus and Susan Folkman were among the first to develop a formal theory of coping. Their 1984 model defined coping as a dynamic process of managing the demands of stressful situations, especially when those demands exceed a person's resources. They broke it into two broad types: problem focused coping, where you try to change the situation itself and emotion focused coping where you try to manage how you feel about it. Most of us do a mix of both. If you get hit with an unexpected bill, you might first panic, emotion focused, and then make a budget plan, problem focused.
Leslie Poston:That's normal. But what happens when the problem is too big to fix, at least alone? What happens when the stressors are systemic or chronic or deliberately designed to keep you overwhelmed? That's where the coping process starts to get a little more complicated. Here's what makes Lazarus and Folkman's model still relevant to our current moment.
Leslie Poston:They understood that stress isn't just something that happens to you. It's transactional, meaning it emerges from the relationship between you and your environment. The same event can be devastating to one person and completely manageable to another depending on how they appraise it and what resources they have available. Think about this in terms of current events. When a major news story breaks, say another school shooting, environmental disaster, or last week's big ugly bill, your response depends not just on the event itself, but on your cognitive appraisal of it.
Leslie Poston:Do you see it as a direct threat to your safety? A distant tragedy? A call to action? Your assessment shapes your coping strategy. This is critical because it means that changing how we understand and interpret events can actually change our stress response.
Leslie Poston:It's not about toxic positivity or pretending everything's fine. That's not what I mean. It's about recognizing that we have some agency in how we process overwhelming information. Our nervous systems aren't built for sustained chaos. Acute stress is actually more manageable for us.
Leslie Poston:We rise to the challenge, we handle the threat, and we recover. But when stress doesn't end, when the goalposts keep moving or when the threat is ambiguous and never resolved, our brain shifts into conservation mode. Neuroscientist Bruce McEwen describes this in terms of allostatic load, the wear and tear on the body and mind caused by chronic stress. Your stress hormones spike, your immune system gets suppressed, and your cognition slows. You start tuning things out, checking out, dissociating, or overcorrecting emotionally.
Leslie Poston:Not because you don't care, but because you're just so overwhelmed. Let me break down what allostatic load actually looks like in practice. McGuin identified four types of problematic stress responses that lead to this kind of wear and tear. First, there's repeated hits from multiple stressors. Think about someone dealing with job insecurity while also caring for an aging parent while also being worried about climate change while also navigating political tension in their community.
Leslie Poston:Each stressor might be manageable alone, but together, they create a cumulative heavy burden. Second, there's a lack of adaptation when your stress response doesn't adjust to familiar situations. If you've been working from home for three years, but your nervous system still treats every video call like a potential threat, that's your stress system failing to calibrate appropriately. Third, there's a prolonged response due to delayed shutdown. This is when you can't turn off the stress response even when the immediate danger has passed.
Leslie Poston:So you might finish a difficult project, but your heart rate stays elevated for days. Fourth, there's inadequate response that leads to a compensatory hyperactivity of other systems. So if your cortisol response is blunted, other inflammatory systems might overcompensate, creating different kinds of problems. The key insight here is that people often judge these responses as personal failings, and they're not. They're just evidence that your stress system is completely overwhelmed by inputs it was not designed to handle.
Leslie Poston:We all have our go to coping strategies. Some of them are productive and some aren't. Most are somewhere in between. Maybe you numb out with Netflix or, like me, you dooms roll until two or 3AM. Maybe you throw yourself into work or side projects or volunteer causes, not because they're fulfilling, but because the stillness feels unbearable.
Leslie Poston:Maybe you lean on humor or sarcasm or lean all the way into the memeification of tragedy. Maybe you feel like crying for no reason all the time or exploding or disappearing. Psychologist George Bonanno, known for his research on resilience, has shown that people are far more varied and flexible in their responses to adversity than we tend to think. Most of us don't follow neat stages of grief or trauma. We oscillate, mask, and improvise.
Leslie Poston:Let's talk specifically about some coping strategies that often get pathologized but that actually serve important functions. Emotional numbing through media consumption isn't just escapism. It's often your nervous system's way of regulating overwhelming stimulation. When reality feels too intense, creating a controlled environment of fictional problems can actually help you reset your emotional baseline. Doom scrolling gets treated as purely self harm, but research suggests it often serves a hypervigilance function.
Leslie Poston:It's your brain trying to scan for threats and updates in an environment of constant uncertainty. The problem is not the impulse. It's that social media is designed to exploit that impulse without ever providing the resolution your nervous system craves. Dark humor and irony aren't signs of callousness. They're sophisticated cognitive strategies for maintaining emotional distance from overwhelming events while still engaging with them.
Leslie Poston:This humor allows us to process difficult truths without being completely overwhelmed by them. Perfectionism and hyperproductivity often get framed as positive coping, but they can be forms of avoidance too. Sometimes throwing yourself into work or self improvement is a way of avoiding the helplessness you feel about larger systemic problems. The point isn't that these strategies are perfect. It's that they're intelligible responses to an impossible situation.
Leslie Poston:So when people say you're being too sensitive or you're so disengaged or you're overreacting, they're missing the point. These reactions aren't always signs of a breakdown. Sometimes they're signs of brilliant improvisation under impossible conditions. Still, some coping strategies do come with a cost, especially when we're not aware of how they're shaping us over time. There's a fine line between disengaging to preserve your energy and giving up entirely, between using humor to stay grounded and falling into nihilism, between resting and resigning.
Leslie Poston:This is where psychologist Martin Seligman's early work on learned helplessness comes in. He found that when people or animals are exposed to uncontrollable negative events, they eventually stop trying to escape or to improve their situation, even when a way out appears later. They don't take it. They've been conditioned to believe that their effort won't help. Sound familiar?
Leslie Poston:That creeping sense of futility, of why bother, that's not a personal weakness. It's a cognitive adaptation to environments that constantly punish hope. And when it takes hold on a large scale, as it often does during times of political or economic chaos, it becomes a cultural mood, a shared shrug and a flattening. This is where we need to understand that learned helplessness isn't just an individual psychological phenomenon. It's often a political one.
Leslie Poston:Authoritarian systems deliberately create conditions of unpredictability, contradiction, and overwhelm because they produce exactly this kind of resignation in the populace. When people are exhausted by constant crises, when they can't tell what's real anymore or when every action feels futile, they stop participating in democracy. We see this in the 90,000,000 people in The United States that did not vote at all in the last election despite the threat. People in society stop believing change is possible. They turn inward and focus on just getting through the day.
Leslie Poston:That kind of resignation isn't just dangerous emotionally. It's dangerous politically. When people check out en masse, it creates space for the worst actors to consolidate power. The chaos becomes the strategy, and coping turns into complicity. This is why statements in response to Trump's awful legislation passing last week, like, we're so cooked or it's over, folks, are so damaging.
Leslie Poston:They reinforce learned helplessness and contribute to the spread of authoritarianism by amplifying hopelessness instead of galvanizing action and hope. This is why understanding your own coping mechanisms isn't just self help. It's self defense. It's about maintaining your capacity for engagement in a world designed to exhaust it. Now let's talk about resilience because this word gets thrown around a lot, especially in business, education, and government, and often it's weaponized.
Leslie Poston:We've done a deep dive on this in an earlier episode, but it's always good to take another look. You'll see headlines about how resilient teachers are or how nurses bounce back from trauma or how workers should develop a resilience mindset after a layoff. It's a feel good word that's too often used to deflect responsibility. Oh, you're struggling? Be more resilient.
Leslie Poston:You're upset? You're not resilient enough. But that's not how resilience works. In a landmark paper, Southwick, Bonanno, Mastin, Panterbrick, and Yahuda argued that resilience isn't just a personal trait. It's a process.
Leslie Poston:And more importantly, they found it's deeply influenced by context. People aren't resilient in a vacuum. They're resilient because of support, access, stability, and safety. Think about it this way. A tree can be resilient to strong winds if it has deep roots, healthy soil, and a supportive ecosystem around it.
Leslie Poston:But if you strip away the soil, cut the roots, and isolate the tree, it's going to fall over no matter how resilient the wood is. The same is true for humans. Resilience emerges from relationships, resources, and systems that support adaptation. This is why community and mutual aid are so important. When we praise individual resilience while dismantling the conditions that make it possible, we're engaging in a form of gaslighting.
Leslie Poston:There's actually a whole industry built around selling resilience as a personal solution to systemic problems. Mindfulness apps for overworked employees, stress management workshops for underpaid teachers, and grit training for students in under resourced schools. None of these interventions are inherently bad, but they become problematic when they're offered as substitutes for actual support. When employees offer meditation classes instead of a living wage or when schools teach resilience skills instead of addressing overcrowding and underfunding, this is what some researchers call the resilience trap. The idea that individual adaptation can compensate for structural dysfunction.
Leslie Poston:It can't. And expecting it to is a form of victim blaming disguised as empowerment. So when an employer or policymaker praises resilience while removing every condition that makes resilience possible, they are gaslighting you. They are blaming you for struggling in a system they designed to keep you overwhelmed. The good news?
Leslie Poston:Humans don't just cope individually. We cope together. And some of the most powerful forms of resilience are relational. In their study on natural disaster survivors, psychologists Christophe Kanjasti and Fran Norris found that social support, both given and received, was one of the strongest predictors of emotional recovery. People who mobilized their communities, shared resources, and offered emotional care fared better than those who tried to go it alone.
Leslie Poston:And that's part of what we've seen in mutual aid networks, online support spaces, protest communities, and even small local groups that check-in on each other during a crisis. People banding together not just to survive, but to bear witness, to say, yes. This is real. This is hard. This is happening, and you're not imagining it.
Leslie Poston:And mutual aid isn't just about material support, although that's crucial. It's also about collective meaning making. When people come together to name shared problems and work on shared solutions, they're engaging in a form of cognitive therapy on a community level. They're countering the isolation and gaslighting that often accompanies systemic dysfunction. They're creating alternative narratives about what's possible and who deserves care.
Leslie Poston:We talked about that last week. There's actually fascinating research on how social connection affects our stress biology. When we feel genuinely supported and understood, our cortisol levels drop, our inflammatory markers decrease, and our capacity for problem solving and creativity increases. And this isn't just feel good psychology. It's measurable physiology.
Leslie Poston:Social connection literally regulates our nervous systems in ways that individual coping strategies often cannot. And this is why isolation is often a key feature of oppressive systems. When people are cut off from each other, they're more vulnerable to stress, more susceptible to manipulation, and less capable of collective action. We should also talk about protest as a form of collective coping. When people gather to express shared outrage, grief, or hope, they're not just advocating for policy changes.
Leslie Poston:They're engaging in collective emotional regulation, which is why a simple protest march that might look more like a parade to some activists that are more advanced is still just as important because it's giving the community a way to cope. Protest creates what psychologists call meaning focused coping, the process of finding significance and purpose in suffering. It transforms individual pain into collective power, and it says this matters. We matter, and we're not going to suffer in silence. The same is true for other kinds of communal rituals, from religious services to concerts to online communities that process shared experiences together.
Leslie Poston:These aren't distractions from the real work of coping. They are the real work of coping. Because coping doesn't always mean fixing. Sometimes it means being seen, creating new narratives, rituals, art, and new frameworks that help us integrate what's happening rather than to dissociate from it. So how do we build coping strategies that sustain us rather than hollow us out?
Leslie Poston:It starts with self awareness and not self blame. Notice what you reach for when things get heavy. Is it helping? Is it harming, or is it just keeping you afloat? And that's okay.
Leslie Poston:Sometimes survival is the goal, but name it and know it. Next, work on regulation, not suppression. Grounding exercises, body scans, music, movement, breath work, humming to regulate your vagus nerve. These aren't trendy because they're cute. They're necessary tools for helping your nervous system recover from chronic activation.
Leslie Poston:The goal isn't to eliminate stress responses. It's just helping them function more efficient, to turn on when needed and turn off when the real threat has passed. Set media boundaries, and this is one I struggle with in the current news environment. Information overload is not the same as awareness. You're allowed to mute, log off, or take a break.
Leslie Poston:You are absolutely allowed to say, I will not subject my brain to that headline right now. That's not avoidance. That's hygiene. Think about it like your physical hygiene. You wouldn't pour toxic waste on your body every day all day and then blame yourself for getting sick.
Leslie Poston:The same principle applies to information consumption. Curate your inputs deliberately. And most importantly, connect. The myth of rugged individualism collapses fast under pressure. We need each other.
Leslie Poston:We need shared reflection. We need to remember that our pain is not unique and neither is our capacity for care. Psychologist Barbara Fredriksen's work on positive emotions and the broaden and build theory shows us that small moments of joy, love, and connection don't just feel good. They expand our mental and emotional flexibility. They literally help us build psychological resources over time.
Leslie Poston:This feels counterintuitive because we often think of positive emotions as frivolous during difficult times, but Fredriksen's research suggests the opposite. Positive emotions are most critical when things are hard because they help us maintain the cognitive flexibility we need to adapt and problem solve. So the next time someone tells you not to laugh during dark times, laugh anyway. That's coping too. And finally, cultivate purpose, but not the toxic productivity kind.
Leslie Poston:Purpose that's connected to your values and relationships, not just your output. Purpose that acknowledges your interdependence with others and your place in larger systems. This might look like advocacy work, creative expression, community building, or simply being present for the people you love. The key is that it comes from connection rather than control and from abundance rather than scarcity. This is especially relevant to white people who might be new to activist spaces.
Leslie Poston:Instead of taking control and trying to take the lead when you're looking to build these communities, first look around you and see what communities exist and have existed that you can participate in, amplify, and support. One of the most important distinctions in coping research is between survival focused coping and growth focused coping. Survival focused coping is about getting through the immediate crisis. Growth focused coping is about maintaining your capacity for learning, connection, and positive action even under stress. Both are necessary, but if you're only ever in survival mode, you lose touch with your agency and your creativity and become reactive rather than responsive.
Leslie Poston:Therapists often talk about the window of tolerance, the zone where you can experience stress without being overwhelmed by it or shutting down from it. When you're inside this window, you can think clearly, feel your emotions without being controlled by them, and make choices that align with your values. Chronic stress shrinks this window. Everything starts to feel either overwhelming or numbing, but sustainable coping practices can gradually expand it again. The goal isn't to never feel stressed.
Leslie Poston:It's to have a bigger range of stress that you can work with rather than just endure. This is the difference between reactive and responsive coping. Reactive coping is automatic, often driven by fear or anger, and typically focused on immediate relief. Responsive coping is conscious, values driven, and oriented toward both immediate needs and the longer term goals. Neither is inherently good or bad.
Leslie Poston:Sometimes you need to react quickly to protect yourself. But sustainable coping involves gradually expanding your capacity for responsive rather than purely reactive behavior. If you've been feeling checked out lately, if you've been numb or angry or compulsively productive or just tired in your bones, there's nothing wrong with you. You are not weak, dramatic. You are responding appropriately to a reality that is, for many of us, psychologically unsustainable.
Leslie Poston:The fact that you're still here and still curious and listening, that matters. Coping isn't about pretending everything's okay. It's about learning how to stay present with what's not. It's about reclaiming your nervous system from the systems that profit off your exhaustion. And sometimes it's about recognizing that taking care of yourself is a form of resistance.
Leslie Poston:Maintaining your capacity for joy, connection, and clear thinking in a world designed to deplete these resources is not selfish. It's subversive. When systems benefit from your depletion, your restoration becomes an act of defiance. When systems benefit from your isolation, your connection becomes a threat to their power. When systems benefit from your despair, your hope becomes a form of warfare.
Leslie Poston:This doesn't mean toxic positivity or spiritual bypassing. It means understanding that sustainable social change requires people who can think long term, who can maintain perspective, and who could hold complexity without being paralyzed by it. It means recognizing that your mental and emotional well-being is not separate from collective liberation. It is a prerequisite for it. Sometimes the most radical thing you can do is refuse to be broken by systems designed to break you.
Leslie Poston:Sometimes the most political thing you can do is invest in relationships that help you remember who you are beyond your productivity or your trauma. And sometimes the most important thing you can do is simply show up tomorrow, ready to try again. If today's episode gave you something to think about or helped you feel a little less alone, you can listen to my past episodes on related themes, which explore how we mislabel harm, how we protect power, how we fight eugenics, or even episodes like the ones on the power of hope or the power of music that might help you get through these turbulent times. Thanks again for listening to PsyberSpace. I'm your host, Leslie Poston, signing off and reminding you to stay connected to each other and stay curious.
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