On Hypervigilance, Meltdowns and Surviving the Spiral of National Chaos

Hope Infusion Newsletter • June 28, 2025

You know that moment when you completely lose it over something ridiculous? When the thing that finally breaks you isn’t actually the thing that’s been breaking you for months?

Last week, I had a full meltdown because I couldn’t find my clear purse. It’s the only bag allowed into Atlanta’s Mercedes Benz Stadium unless your purse is extra tiny, and they measure at the gate to confirm.

I was running late, still had a last minute stop to make, and before I knew it hot tears were streaming down my face as I tore through closets and drawers like a woman possessed.

But it wasn’t about the purse. Not really.

It was about six months of accumulated dread. About waking up each day to a fresh avalanche of chaos: tariffs on, tariffs off, tariffs back on. Federal workers fired en masse, then desperately recalled when agencies realized what they actually did.

Farms reporting rotting crops because there’s no one left to pick them. Small businesses hemorrhaging workers overnight. Children snatched from parent’s arms. People being disappeared from American streets in broad daylight.

The list of examples is legion.

And if all that were not enough, last week we launched an unprovoked attack on a sovereign nation. Then declared a ceasefire, then two hours later, never mind, no ceasefire. The whiplash is so relentless and disorienting that military action barely registers before the next crisis lands.

The American populace is living in a perpetual state of “What fresh hell is this?” And our nervous systems are keeping score.

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When Your Body Tells the Truth Your Mind Won’t Admit

A few weeks before my purse meltdown, my OURA ring delivered a notification that I brushed off at the time:

“Hi there, your stress levels are going haywire!” What it actually did was notify me that my stress levels lasted up to 4h 45m/day that week with limited resilience most days.

But there was NO acute crisis in my life that week. NO illness, NO conflict, No major decision weighing me down. Yet my body was telling the truth my mind had been trained to override: Even in the absence of visible threat, my system was on high alert.

I didn’t fully understand what my body was attempting to convey until I found myself in the throes of a Level 10 meltdown over a clear purse. Then it clicked. This was the embodied manifestation of something I already knew in my bones.

We are all carrying more than we realize. And it’s not just the headlines. It’s the cumulative toll of trying to stay sane while democracy does donuts in the parking lot.

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Hypervigilance: When Survival Mode Becomes Your Default

Looking back, I now know what was happening in the weeks before my meltdown. Hypervigilance had crept in, that nervous system hijack that trains your body to constantly scan for danger, even when none is immediately present.

This is not ordinary caution. This is your internal alarm system stuck in the “ON” position while the world burns around you in slow motion.

Signs you might be trapped in hypervigilance mode:

• Sleep that never feels restorative

• Racing thoughts and difficulty focusing (Hello, doom-scrolling at 2 AM!)

• Emotional exhaustion even after rest

• A persistent sense that something terrible is about to happen (Spoiler Alert: something terrible probably IS about to happen, but not the thing you’re catastrophizing about)

• Tendency to blow small problems into existential crises (See: clear purse incident)

• Avoiding social situations because everything feels too much

The cruel irony? Hypervigilance keeps us too “on” to actually respond effectively when real threats emerge. It exhausts our resilience reserves on phantom dangers while the actual democracy-threatening stuff unfolds in broad daylight.

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Tools I Use When the Spiral Starts

I’m not going to pretend I have this figured out. But I have learned a few things that help when I feel myself sliding into that familiar pit of overwhelming dread:

1. Name It Before It Names You

The sooner I acknowledge I’m dysregulated, the sooner I can shift course. My personal red flags: shallow breathing, obsessively refreshing news feeds, and mentally rehearsing disaster scenarios that haven’t happened yet.

2. Ground in Your Actual Present

The 5-4-3-2-1 technique pulls me out of my spiraling mind and back into my actual body:

Pause to identify 5 things you can see, 4 things you can touch, 3 things you can hear, 2 things you can smell, 1 thing you can taste.

3. Reset Your Nervous System

Cold water on the face. A short walk outside in bare feet. Gentle stretching. These aren’t feel-good suggestions, they’re neurological interventions that signal to the system: “I’m safe right now.”

4. Curate Your Information Diet

This is the biggest pivot to which I’ve forced myself to adhere. I now set strict limits for news and social media exposure. I cancelled cable back in 2021.

And I’m taking an intentional leave of absence from all social media for the remainder of the summer. I’m a Substack Writer who has turned off Substack notifications because I can’t take the relentless headlines populating my screen every hour.

Even as someone who writes about current events, I’ve had to accept that staying “informed” to the point of paralysis helps no one. The world will still be chaotic when I return from my sanity break—I promise.

5. Remember You’re Not Doing This Alone

Even a quick voice note or text to a friend reminds me that I’m not the only one feeling like the world has gone completely sideways. Connection is medicine!

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On Sacred Resistance in Unstable Times

Here’s the essence of what I’m learning: True resilience isn’t hyper-vigilance dressed up in productivity’s clothing. It’s not staying “informed” to the point of paralysis or preparing for every possible catastrophe.

True resilience is the quiet trust that even when everything falls apart, you will still be held.

We’re living through a sustained assault on our collective nervous system. The chaos isn’t accidental. It’s designed to exhaust us into compliance, to overwhelm us into giving up.

As writer Nadia Bolz-Weber puts it: “I just do not think our psyches were developed to hold, feel and respond to everything coming at them right now. We’re being asked to carry every tragedy, injustice, and disaster happening to every human across the entire planet, in real time, every minute of every day. Our hearts and spirits were designed to hold what happens in our village—not the weight of the entire world’s suffering streaming into our pockets 24/7.”

There’s power in recognizing the game being played on our psyches. The world is unstable. The news cycle is designed to keep us spinning. Our leaders are conducting policy via Twitter tantrum.

But we don’t have to spiral with them. Presence is still possible. Your peace is still sacred. And you are never navigating this alone.

Sometimes a meltdown over a lost purse is your body’s way of saying: “Enough already! Set something down. You don’t have to carry it all.”

Listen to that wisdom. Your nervous system knows what it needs!

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If this resonated, feel free to share or repost it. Someone in your orbit may need to know they’re not crazy for feeling overwhelmed by a world that in the current season, has, and continues to, lose its darn mind!