Written by Cory Wolbach, Civic Leadership Manager
The SV@Home team is currently reading “Love & Rage: The Path of Liberation through Anger,” by Lama Rod Owens, and I absolutely recommend it.
Thinking, reading, or talking about the news sends me spiraling, distracts me, gets me off track, and can ruin a whole day. It also makes me angry, and angry people are unpleasant to be around. I feel like my brain is mush.
What should I do? I want to stay on top of what is happening in the world, but I also
- Want to be productive
- Don’t want to feel miserable all the time, and
- Don’t want to be a jerk to the people around me
This constellation of symptoms could be caused by one or more of the following:
- I had covid and long-covid a few years ago. I’ve never felt the same, mentally, since then. I’ve always been forgetful, but this feels different. And my energy levels are definitely lower. However, it could be just because…
- I am getting older, solidly in my mid-40s. Maybe this is just what being middle-aged is like: slower both physically and mentally. But maybe it’s not physiological. Maybe it’s just that…
- It’s been a long time since I was in college or serving in office, and I haven’t truly replaced either of those experiences with the same level of intellectual rigor that forced my mind to stay sharp. Maybe I just…
- Spend too much time on my phone and consuming digital media of all sorts. Too much screen time, not enough down time. Not enough time to just reflect. But, maybe more than anything…when I am reading/watching/listening about the terrible daily news…
- I am full of rage.
Rage is often quite justified. But, it’s not often helpful. If I see or hear something that fills me with rage, it really does ruin my day. Those fight-or-flight neurotransmitters (adrenaline, etc.), make me feel anxious, then drained. They definitely don’t make focusing on intellectually complex tasks easier. Thinking about all the bad things happening (and they are objectively very bad) and stewing in those feelings is not helping me.
In the long-term, the neuroplastic nature of the brain means, if I spend a ton of time thinking and feeling “rage! Anger! everything sucks, and I am furious about all of it!”, then I am just reinforcing those pathways in my brain. That makes them more likely to repeat. That means, when I hear something potentially rage-inducing, then I am just more and more and more likely to get angry. It’s self-reinforcing.
And, feeling that, I have found myself either refusing to engage with the news or, more often, just feeling angry and exhausted all the time.
So I am going to try to do something different. Or something old, because I wasn’t always like this.
When I was in college, I read and talked about a lot of objectively terrible things. I studied political science, which meant studying inequality, war, tyranny, terroism, repression, etc., and trying to figure out what made those things happen. Objectively terrible. But I studied them objectively. I was able to study them and learn about them — and think creatively about how we might limit them — because I was able to approach them academically, analytically, and empathetically. It helped that most of our material was historical, so there was some temporal distance. But, even when we were looking at something more contemporary, I was able to approach these terrible things without rage. I was able to step back and look at them as objectively horrible without feeling subjectively horrible myself.
The Trump regime doesn’t want us to control our brains. Like I wrote about last November, they don’t want us to have the cognitive capacity to think beyond our current emotional response. They don’t want us to strategize.
So, in one small form of resistance, which might help me with everything else I do, here’s what I am trying this year:
Before I engage with current events (reading, writing, speaking, watching, or listening),
- I take a moment and a breath.
- I tell the part of my brain that is ready to explode to have a seat — it can listen, I didn’t forget about it. I don’t try to repress it. I just let it calm down before it gets triggered.
- I invite my intellectual side to come out and help me learn.
That’s it.
It will take a while to retrain my brain to respond to objective outrages without rage. But this deliberate approach seems to be helping. I’ve only been doing this for a couple weeks. So far, it feels great. So far, I think it is helping me prepare for the year ahead. And, in 2026, we all need to be prepared.