Photo-Illustration: by The Cut; Photos: Getty Images
A short few years ago, news of a shooting at a high-profile D.C. event attended by President Donald Trump and members of his Cabinet would have had my phone blowing up with frantic texts from loved ones. But when chaos consumed the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday night, I didn’t hear a peep. I can count on one hand the number of people who mentioned something the next morning, and most of it was to ask if there was a chance the shooting was staged.
If Trump 1.0 was marked by being in a constant reactionary state — whether that was commiserating over too much wine, flooding the streets, or furiously calling members of Congress every day — this time the relentless onslaught of extreme events seems to have sent many formerly politically engaged people into a state of paralysis. Maybe I would’ve been shocked by their malaise before, but I’m not anymore. “I’m so tired” is the baseline response. When Trump threatened to wipe out “a whole civilization” earlier this month, my family and friends replied to my increasingly panicked messages about nuclear war with variations of “I’m numb at this point lol,” “I’m not paying attention,” and “Well, I guess that’s it.” When he kidnapped Nicolás Maduro, the conversation in one of my group chats went from “I guess we’re at war with Venezuela?” to “What do you think of these linens?” in the span of a few texts. Many of my friends have left social media in hopes of escaping the news cycle. When I share insane news developments with them, the information is often met with a shrug.
“I just can’t pay attention to the news anymore,” one friend despondently told me recently. “I physically can’t.” It’s as if it were a medical affliction. While she was politically active during Trump’s first time in office — obsessively tracking legislation, phone banking, and showing up to protests — these days, she says, she has found herself unable to keep up. A single headline about ICE detaining 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos made her anxiety so bad that she had to cancel her meetings at work because she couldn’t stop crying. Part of it is that she’s now a mother and feels she has much more to lose compared to the first time Trump ran for office. The other part is that she has had to accept that his rise to power was not an aberration or onetime glitch event — and the accelerated way in which he has deployed his agenda and harmed people has left her horror-struck. Sometimes, she says, it feels almost like the only way she can cope is to play dead.
Dr. Kali Cyrus, a Washington, D.C.-based psychiatrist and assistant professor at Johns Hopkins Medicine, has heard versions of my friend’s feelings in her practice. There’s a general sense that, despite the powerful ways in which people have shown widespread opposition to Trump for the past year, there are moments in which he simply can’t be stopped — either because institutions like the Republican-controlled Congress are bending to his will or because as president there are areas where he has unchecked power, such as him having sole authority to launch nuclear weapons.
“This time around people are more scared, and that is a different kind of thing to sit with. We all feel powerless right now. There are so many things we can’t do. Sometimes we don’t even know what we would do. It’s a really distressing place to be in,” Cyrus says. “The brain really does not like to not have a plan for what you can do next.”
When fear hijacks our nervous systems, she says, it causes a wide range of physiological responses in preparation for us to fight, flee, or freeze. Your body is flooded with stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol, your heart races, your lungs open up so you can let in more air, and your digestion slows down. This was designed to keep us alive from predators and, once the threat passed, our nervous systems would return to their baseline. But, today, the pitfalls of life under Trump 2.0 — with the (mis)information overload, the political chaos, the general sense of uncertainty — can mean that we’re stuck in a state of feeling under threat. “Our hormones that do that aren’t supposed to be chronically activated, and that’s what ends up happening,” Cyrus says. Shutting down, she adds, is a normal response then.
This is also happening because the administration’s sudden and constant horrors — from its casually cruel deportation memes to its threats to invade or end entire civilizations — have us stuck in a loop of “constant threat perception with no end in sight,” says Dr. Sanam Hafeez, a New York City–based neuropsychologist and director of Comprehend the Mind. “At the end of the day, we’re all survivalists. What Trump has really done to us is that he’s shifted our thinking from planning and a formulaic, algorithmic thinking to this constant need to be in a survival mode,” she says. Her patients are not only fretting about the headlines but the ways in which Trump’s policies are affecting their day-to-day lives in practical terms. They wonder, Am I going to have this job tomorrow if there’s a recession? Is my 401 (k) going to tank? Will I have health care next year? “There’s a cognitive overload,” she says.
Making matters worse is that then Trump has also taught Americans “a learned helplessness,” Hafeez adds. She says that, because people feel that they haven’t been able to come up for air for most of the past decade, it has them thinking, It doesn’t matter what happened or what I do, things are just not changing. We literally elected this guy a second time. We can’t get away from him. “It can lead to this numbing effect where you get into a passive loop of doomscrolling, shrugging your shoulders, and reduced engagement,” she says. (Fear and learned helplessness are, of course, key tools that authoritarian governments use to maintain control; a terrified population that feels nothing will change is unlikely to rise up against the regime.)
Of course, none of this is to say we’re all at home burying our heads between the couch cushions all the time. Millions have taken to the streets and pockets of resistance are popping up all over the country, from Minneapolis, Chicago, and New York to Charlotte, New Orleans, and South Texas. But for some people there’s a general sense that unless the administration is invading their neighborhood and banging their door down, their brain is shutting down in a way it hadn’t the first time around. This is why another friend told me that, after avoidance, comes guilt: that she is able to look away, but so many others living through ICE terrorizing their communities or losing their federal jobs cannot.
To Cyrus, guilt is also a normal reaction. On the bright side, it tells you you are human, she says. But it can also be counterproductive and add to the sense of paralysis. “There’s the kind of psychoanalytic, very heady space that would say that guilt is a distraction. That you’re distracting yourself from the actual fear that you experience. You’re thinking about one thing instead of thinking about the thing that you actually need to process,” she says. “The question you need to ask yourself is how to break these cycles.”
So, what does that look like? Cyrus says it starts by naming your feelings. “When we’re numb, we’re shutting down all the anxiety and the fear that we’re feeling. It’s kind of a null, void space,” she says. “You first need to realize you’re in the state, then you need to want to be outside of that. You need to put words to what you’re feeling.” That can be I feel stuck and I don’t know what to do about it or I feel helpless, but I’m not in immediate danger.
Once there’s that recognition, then you can start implementing actions to break the pattern. Ask yourself why you think you’re feeling overwhelmed and whether there’s anything you can do to fix it, Cyrus says. If the answer to the latter is that you can, then great! But if it is not, then look for alternatives that align with your value system. Maybe that looks like volunteering with a cause or making a donation — whatever motivates you to not want to be stuck in the cycle. Rather than allowing emotional paralysis to dictate how you engage with politics, you can also set planned breaks. “On a Monday, say, ‘I won’t watch the news until Thursday.’ Spend those three days doing other things that fulfill you. That way you have some time away out of that nervous-system activation and can reset,” Cyrus says.
Hafeez also recommends structuring your news consumption with “intention”: Pick a time to check the news, avoid social-media accounts that prioritize creating engagement by inflaming your emotions, and choose depth over volume when it comes to information. If your daily noon news scan is still making you spiral, there are other tools she recommends, including meditation, journaling, and seeking professional support. Now more than ever, Hafeez also believes in the importance of community building. “Connecting with someone who centers you is invaluable, and people don’t use that enough,” she says. “From a nervous-system point of view, the past few years have indelibly changed us. You may think you’re alone, but you are not. Everyone is feeling it.”
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