Resisting Despair: Coping Tools for a Declining Democracy
Episode 525 | Author: Emilie Aries
How are you countering the constant onslaught of depressing and downright frightening news?
Have you noticed lately that in spite of being busy, the truth of our country’s onslaught of overwhelmingly awful situations always finds a way to burrow back into your psyche?
I’ll be honest: this is the reason I’ve missed a few weeks of the podcast recently. Reporting on the job market, and dealing with burnout, and becoming a better leader feels a bit futile when our nation is flirting with fascism.
With that in mind, I want to talk about bossing up in a slightly different way: How do we continue to function when we’re faced with crisis after crisis, day after day?
Recognize that overwhelm is a political strategy
The first thing I want to highlight here is that those daily declarations and blatantly contradictory and untrue statements we see in the media are all part of the game.
After Trump’s first election campaign, his political advisor, Steve Bannon, stated it outright: “All we have to do is flood the zone. Every day, we hit them with three things. They’ll bite on one, and we’ll get all of our stuff done, bang, bang, bang. These guys will never be able to recover.”
It’s actually a pre-Soviet approach. They hit us with huge amounts of misinformation to leave us overwhelmed and questioning reality. Layer on enough BS, and we start to tune it out because there’s just too much.
So, how does this play into your mental health? It means self-care and finding a way to persist sustainably isn’t selfish or lazy—it’s part of resistance.
It can help to take a deep breath. Yes, a disturbing number of American citizens, migrants, and immigrants are currently under attack. If you’re privileged enough not to be one of them, pause and refocus on your basic human needs.
Are you objectively safe, secure, fed, and housed at the moment? Don’t misinterpret the news as personally endangering if it’s not. Once you’ve leveled out your sympathetic nervous system (the one screaming at you to fight or flee), you can start to practice other forms of resistance, too.
Decrease the doomscrolling
Research from the American Psychological Association discovered that over two-thirds of U.S. adults cite “the future of the nation” as a significant source of their stress. In other words, this isn’t some personal stress management problem; we’re going through a collective trauma here.
If you don’t need to closely track the news for your own safety or that of your loved ones, start establishing some boundaries around your news consumption. Good media hygiene is vital to our mental and physical health, and that’s never been truer than it is now.
Research found that “media fatigue” increases anxiety and decreases empathy, so set a timer on your news and social media scrolling. Focus on what you can control, on what is meaningful to you—your friends, your family, physical fitness, your job. Making a mindful effort to spend time on things that align with your values isn’t frivolous; it’s foundational. And so is redirecting that reading time in more productive directions, like sources that teach you about your rights and the rights of those being targeted by ICE.
Joy is resistance
Finding ways to sustain joy in your day-to-day life is a form of resistance, a concept that started in the Black feminism movement with revolutionary figures like Audre Lorde. Lorde’s famous quote, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare”, certainly applies here.
For the greatest impact, pair that joy with real action. As much as it raises our blood pressure, news consumption isn’t action; it’s a means to become informed to act. So take what you learn and apply it. Reach out to your political representatives (phoning seems to be the best way to be heard). Volunteer, seek out leaders to listen to and events to attend. If getting out on the streets doesn’t work for you, donate your money or your time in other ways.
Don’t let this violent fear campaign paralyze you—that’s just playing into their hands. Choose an action, big or small, and make your move. We owe that to ourselves, and to everyone who doesn’t have the power to fight for their own freedoms.
Learning about how you’re getting involved will help me fend off my own despair about the state of democracy and get inspired. How are you making your voice heard in this tumultuous time? DM me directly about how you’re taking action, or join the discussion at our Courage Community on Facebook or our group on LinkedIn.
Related Links From Today’s Episode:
American Psychological Association, Stress in America 2024
Vox, “Flood the zone with sh*t”: How misinformation overwhelmed our democracy
American Friends Service Committee, “How allies can defend against ICE raids”
National Immigrant Justice Center, “Know Your Rights: If You Encounter ICE”
Episode 293, What 2020 Taught Me (About F-Off Funds)
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[INTRO MUSIC IN]
EMILIE: Hey, and welcome to the Bossed Up podcast, episode 525. I'm your host, Emilie Aries, the Founder and CEO of Bossed Up. And I, for one, succumb to a consistent pattern lately. Tell me if you can relate.
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All weekend long, I'm pretty busy, like living my life, cooking, cleaning, running errands, planning fun things to do with my family, and being really present with my little kids who are one and four. A little one-year-old and a little four-year-old. Let me tell you, they'll keep you present. But then something happens on Monday morning, following daycare drop off.
I finally have a chance to breathe. Maybe I tune in to NPR on the radio, or I peruse the New York Times on my app on my phone, or I just dare to catch up with friends on social media. And most of those Monday mornings, when doing so, I am met with yet another week of overwhelming, shocking, and depressing news. As someone who cares deeply about democracy and about the promise of America, I mourn for my country and the ideals that we at least used to pretend to try to live up to.
I have been falling into despair lately, and there's really no other word for it. It makes me like look at the work I do with a different kind of level of depression. [LAUGHS] Like, what does this even matter? How can I sit here and draft a new episode on navigating the job search? Or, you know, becoming the best leader you can be, or God forbid I should talk about hacks for overcoming burnout, right? Because how am I supposed to summon the energy and enthusiasm to tackle these topics that feel banal in the face of rising fascism, right? How are you supposed to just function when we're not just deluged by bad news? Like, that's something we've become habituated to in recent years, but we're in the midst of like a political upheaval moment of takeover.
And so, to be quite honest with you, this is part of the reason why I've missed a few weeks of podcast episodes in recent months. It all just feels so d*** futile. And I was lamenting this in therapy the other day when my therapist said, that's the podcast episode. Like, that's what you turn it... That's your experience you turn into an episode This impossible feeling of like, how are we supposed to continue functioning in the face of a crisis? That it feels like no one is doing anything about? The cavalry is clearly not coming.
Paige Connell is someone I follow on Instagram under the handle She is a Paige Turner. Who, by the way, I adore, you should check her out for her content around my motherhood and the mental load. But she summed it up beautifully on Instagram the other week when she called it her Monday morning crash out. [LAUGHS] It was unfortunately on her Instagram Stories, not her Reels, so I can't link you to that directly, but she was talking about how she falls into the same habit. And I've never related to something more. So before I get back to the business of bossed up and our usual programming and record you more episodes on burnout prevention, which is very popular for us because a lot of us are feeling this way. Or navigating the modern job search and leveling up your leadership, I simply must take a little bit of a risk here for just a moment and talk about the backdrop upon which all of this is playing out.
So if you have ever found yourself doom scrolling wondering how on earth you're supposed to show up at work, raise children, or just function while watching your country flirt with fascism, you are not alone. And today we're talking about how to survive the mental fatigue of living through a Democratic backslide. And hopefully how to turn despair into hope.
So first, what's helped me is recognizing that overwhelm is part of a specific targeted political strategy. Steve Bannon himself, who advised President Trump during his first term, has openly discussed overwhelming the media as a key priority for advancing these kinds of initiatives. Quote, all we have to do is flood the zone, end quote said Bannon to Frontline in 2019. Quote, every day we hit them with three things. They'll bite on one and we'll get all of our stuff done. Bang, bang, bang.
That is like absolutely chilling. This is a strategy that harks back to a pre-digital Soviet practice of producing huge amounts of disinformation meant to make people question reality. Which is certainly what I see playing out in our digital ecosystems nowadays, where we're all siloed and consuming what feels like different facts every day. And it's not just that it's a high volume of information. It's also unprecedented, seemingly unconstitutional moves every single week. So that it makes it hard for us to actually make sense of what it all means. Like, does any of this stick? Will our checks and balances hold up? Will anyone reign this administration in without that kind of certainty? We don't know what to expect that will happen next. So we start to just tune it out because there's too much uncertainty to make any sense of.
Some research from the APA, the American Psychological Association finds that more than two-thirds of U.S. adults cite the future of the nation as a significant source of stress. So this isn't just individual stress management that's failing. It's a collective trauma that we're all living through.
So knowing that this is a deliberate part of a fascist strategy makes everything else that I'm going to say come a little easier to me. Because we have to view our self-care and our personal sustainability in this moment as part of a radical response to what is a radical administration. So first and foremost, take a deep breath, like, both literally and figuratively, like, we have to pause and focus on our basic human needs. Are you safe? Are you secure? Are you fed? Are you housed? Are you protected, at least for this moment? Because some of our neighbors and colleagues and friends and maybe even some of you listening are not. Especially when people are being disappeared off the streets, when our ICE Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents are being used like a personal Gestapo for the President.
So if you are not in immediate danger, we need to really check ourselves to make sure we don't, like, misinterpret the very scary and stressful news to make us actually feel personally in danger, if you're not. That's not true for all of us. But if you're not, I would ask yourself, okay, what do I need to do to try and keep myself and my loved ones safe? For me, this often comes back to finances, which, yes, is a privileged position to be in to not have to be worried about leaving my house for my sake of safety or even seeing ICE agents helicopter into my apartment building like they did in Chicago the other week. Like they're part of a Mission Impossible movie, which is horrific. In which, by the way, American citizens, in addition to undocumented migrants or immigrants, were treated like absolute criminals. Which is horrific. But I digress. Like, what is it that you need to do to keep yourself feeling safe?
Yes, it's a very tough economic climate right now, but whatever you can do to focus on shoring up your savings, reducing expenses, and collecting what I call a F***-off Fund, right, for the sake of your safety. That is a huge way that we can help ourselves sleep a little easier at night. In hopes that if and when need be, we will have resources to turn to to protect ourselves and our families. I have a whole episode on that. I'll link to, like the F-off fund and how you can navigate the personal finances of trying to claw back some sense of agency and power in a world where no one knows if they're next or who will be spared the reaches of these really terrifying times.
And on the topic of ICE, while we're talking about the very real fear that so many Americans are living under right now, I want to link to a few resources around how to know your rights if you're stopped by ICE. And how you can serve as an ally and protect others from ICE raids if they were to descend upon your city. So head to the corresponding blog post at bossed up dot org slash episode 525 or in today's show notes for two resources I'm dropping there from immigrant justice dot org and from the American Friends Service Committee, um, AFSC, for more resources that can help. Like, knowing what to do is a really important first step if and when those threats to safety should become very real for you.
Now, beyond that, we gotta set limits and practice good media hygiene. This is advice I need to take, not just give out, by the way. [LAUGHS] Because media fatigue, as psychologist Mary McNaughton-Cassill's research coined it, shows that so many of us who provide constant exposure to crisis coverage end up increasing our anxiety and actually reducing our empathy along the way. So limit your doom scrolling to specific times, balance problematic like over consumption of media, and try to consciously end your day with something beautiful or hopeful instead. Focusing on what's happening that you can control, what's happening in your own family, your own household, your own neck of the woods that brings you joy. Like, there's no shame in focusing on what gives you joy and peace in a moment that is full of stress and terror for so many.
I've literally paid for a premium subscription on an app called BePresent to help me limit my overuse of Instagram. Because the doom scroll is real, y'all, and it is a problem that we can talk more about. I should actually interview a cognitive scientist about the dopamine effects of doom scrolling sometime, but let me know if you'd be interested in that.
Okay, next step, refocus on something that's actually meaningful to you. Your friends, your family, your community. Your health, your fitness, your well-being. The clients, patients, or constituents that you serve. Your job, if it lights you up, if it gives you a sense of purpose. Make sure you're not discounting that, right? Find the meaning. Name the meaning, if you have to. Remind yourself, like I have to on occasion when I'm just talking into a black box here, that, you know this matters, and that there are lots of you listening on the other end of this, right? Like that this is something we're doing in community and that it makes a difference.
Finding meaning and reminding yourself of that meaning and spending time on things that align yourself with your values and your purpose, it's not frivolous. It is, in fact, a revolutionary act. So think of it as a way to stay sustainable and to fuel yourself for the long fight ahead. Joy, as it's been said many times before, is resistance. But, I would argue, only when paired with real action. And so that brings me to my final point, to take collective action.
Perhaps some of you took part in the protests recently around No Kings on October 18th. I hope you did. Most importantly here is that we all find a way to do something, honestly, anything, whatever is within your sphere of influence, within your scope of control, whatever you have the bandwidth or capacity to do. It is important that we do it, and we do it now. That means reaching out to elected officials on social media, via email, via the telephones, especially in Congress. For some reason, they seem to listen to people when you call on the phone. Build community. Join collective action groups. Join rapid response teams in your neighborhood. Join protests, volunteer. Find the leaders who are already present in your community and find ways to help. If you can't help by, you know, marching in the streets. Maybe it's donating, maybe it's preparing food for those who can, right? Whatever it is, we need to in this moment, not succumb to paralysis, but to counteract the fear campaign that is designed to keep us static.
As Arash Javanbakht, a psychiatrist and a neuroscientist at Wayne State University said, your local school board is still holding meetings. Your town hall is still trying to figure out are you going to get money to fill the potholes or not? News consumption is not an end in itself. From a democratic theory standpoint, news consumption is a means to become informed to act. So let us choose action in the face of overwhelm, and starting small is the way we can do that.
I would love to hear from you. And frankly, I would love to be inspired by how you are taking action, no matter how big or small, to make your voice heard in this moment. It can feel scary to speak out. It can feel risky to take a stand. But if you love democracy, if you love freedom, if you love everything that America stands for, it feels too precious to just like, succumb to the numbness that I've been feeling lately and do nothing. And so I'm ready and willing and interested in doing something.
So let me know what that something is for you so we can share resources and inspire one another to keep going. As always, the conversation continues in the Bossed Up Courage Community on Facebook after the episode, or in our Bossed Up group on LinkedIn. My inbox is always open at emilie at bossed up dot org, and I think this is our moment. This is our turning point to say enough is enough. That government is of, by, and for the people. And right now this is not what the people, regardless by the way of political party or affiliation, this is not what the people want.
I'll leave it at that for now. And I appreciate you for giving me grace as I venture into this terrain, because it has been hard to get behind the mic and say much of anything at all lately.
[OUTRO MUSIC IN]
But I'd rather speak up imperfectly than not at all, frankly.
So on that note, as America's first Black Women's Club said, as their motto way back in 1896, let's keep lifting as we climb.
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