Episode 271: Politics Has Hijacked Your Nervous System

Today we're gonna talk about something a lot of men are feeling, but many don't have language for chronic agitation, restlessness, irritability, low grade anger, impatience, exhaustion, a sense of being constantly on edge. Or the opposite, numb, checked out, disengaged on your phone playing games.

This episode is not about policy debates, it's about what the current political system has been doing to our nervous systems, especially during and after the chaos, aggression and norm breaking behavior of the Trump administration. Because regardless of where you fall politically, your body has been paying a price, whether or not you know it.

This is not just politics. Let's get one thing straight. Your nervous system does not experience politics as abstract ideas. 90% of your brain responds exactly the same to things that are happening right in front of you in your real life as compared to things that you watch on video so your brain has a hard time differentiating between whether or not it's happening to you or not.

Your brain and your nervous system, in this climate, experience real threat, uncertainty, instability, conflict, loss of predictability. And over the last several years, those signals were relentless. Daily outrage cycles, constant emergencies, public cruelty normalized, truth destabilized, institutions attacked, language turned into a weapon, shaming turned into a crowdsourced sport. This wasn't one big traumatic event. It was thousands of small shocks with occasional massive ones layered on top.

Which brings us to an important distinction, the difference between little T and Big T Trauma. Now, I like Faith Harper's definition of trauma, which is anything that disconnects us from a feeling of safety.

Now, most people think trauma only counts if it's catastrophic. Massive life changing. That's true and that's Big T trauma. Major losses, violence, serious violations, acute danger, real life and death stuff, but your nervous system is equally shaped by little T trauma that accumulate over time.

Repeated stressors, chronic unpredictability, ongoing exposure to contempt, disgust, and anger. Feeling powerless over long periods of time, feeling as if your identity is under attack. The Trump era gave us both some big T moments, the January 6th uprising, family separations that we see on video open, encouragement of violence, democratic norms under threat, and.

He's given us endless little T moments, daily inflammatory rhetoric, attacks on truth, expertise in science, public shaming and bullying masquerading as leadership, constant crisis mode, messaging often to distract from the last crisis, and your nervous system doesn't get to opt out of this. Even if you stopped watching the news, even if you don't care about politics, even if you just focused on your own life, your body is still swimming in the same water.

We are all swimming in this shame soup. So how does this show up for men?

Here's how this kind of prolonged dysregulation tends to show up in men specifically. And if you think of that sympathetic nervous system versus parasympathetic nervous system, it's activating the sympathetic nervous system, which is the stress response, which is fight, flight, freeze bond.

So number one, we get triggered into a chronic fight state. Irritability, snapping at loved ones online, arguing, impatience, moral rigidity, righteousness, rage, described or disguised as righteousness. Your body's primed to fight for survival. That works, hopefully. However, what happens when that threat is from the leader of your country and half the population in your country and your federal law enforcement officers? What happens when the threat is something so big you can't fight it physically?

The second level is flight or disengagement. Things like avoiding the news entirely or saying, I'm done caring, or. Hiding yourself in work or escaping in other ways, addictive numbing, drugs and alcohol. And this isn't apathy, this is overwhelm. If you are being chased by a bear, this one makes sense. Get the fuck outta there.

Run. But what happens when there's nowhere safe to run? Number three, freeze or collapse, marked by numbness, hopelessness. Learned helplessness. That thought of what's the point? What does it matter? And procrastination. And this happens when the system decides, I can't fight this, I can't escape. Begin nervous system.

Shut down. And if you're a small lap dog, this one makes sense. If you're under attack by a pit bull, lie down, lay on your back, play dead. Go all possum on his ass. Fourth and final level or response is fawn or compliance, where you minimize your own reactions. You gaslight yourself. That's not that bad. I'm over, I'm overreacting.

Avoiding conflict at all costs, pretending nothing is wrong, being overly complimentary of others, apologizing when you've done nothing wrong. This is the nervous system choosing safety through appeasement, and this is what most of Trump's followers and cabinet members and family members seem to have chosen as their go-to strategy.

Agree with him, stroke his ego, and for God's sake, don't challenge him because he'll attack you. Now, none of these mean you're weak. They mean your system adapted, and the problem is it adapted without your consent and probably without your knowledge.

So why is this climate that we're in felt so personal, and why does it elicit such intense emotions?

One of the most damaging aspects of the Trump administration wasn't just the policies, it was the emotional tone in which the policies were enacted. Contempt, humiliation, dominance, disgust, and zero empathy for the other. If this were a marriage. We'd be so far down the road of divorce, it's not even funny.

And yet it's our country. And for a lot of people, especially those who grew up with bullying or authoritarian figures or domineering parents or chaotic households, what's happening right now doesn't actually feel new. It feels familiar, and that's the giveaway. You're not reacting to now. You're reacting to. Then as Terry Real puts it, if it's hysterical, it's historical. When your emotional response is way bigger than the current situation warrants, that's your cue to look backward. Not to blame your past, but to understand it. The source of the reaction usually isn't in the room with you anymore.

It's in your nervous system's memory.

Lemme give you a couple concrete examples. Years ago, Jo went with her daughter on a volunteer trip to help a village deepen the Ecuadorian rainforest. I didn't go. Communication was basically non-existent. She was in the jungle. I had no idea if they were safe. I didn't consciously register fear, I buried it.

Instead, it came out as anger. When she came home, I was so mad. I barely wanted to see her. Now pause there because that emotional reaction makes no sense on the surface. She went on a volunteer trip. She came home safe. End of story, except not really. What eventually became clear is that when I was a kid around six or seven, my parents would leave for two or three week trips without me or my sister.

during some of those separations, genuinely traumatic things happened. So my nervous system learns something early. When the people you love leave, bad shit happens. So my anger had very little to do with jewelry. It was an old alarm going off in a new situation. That's what if it's hysterical, it's historical.

Really means not that you're broken, not that you're overreacting for no reason, but your body is responding to a threat it learned long ago when it hasn't yet been updated on. And once you see that real change becomes possible, see, the body doesn't say, this is a different context. It says, I've been here before and I'm here again now.

That's why reactions felt disproportionate. That's why friendships fractured. That's why families exploded, not because people were too sensitive or snowflakes a term, which I hate because we're all sensitive, but because their nervous systems were being repeatedly poked in old injuries. I don't mean to minimize what's going on now, because what's going on now is traumatic.

It's just that our reactions to it are amplified emotionally because it's trauma steeped in trauma, or it's trauma that's put on the back of old trauma. So here's the most important reframe I want you to hear. Clearly, you're not crazy for how this affected or affects you. You don't heal this by arguing harder or better learning tools to argue better with loved ones.

Doom. Scrolling. Shutting down, shaming yourself for caring. This wasn't a failure of resilience. It was cumulative stress. Without enough regulation or recovery, your system did what it always does. It adapted to survive.

So what actually helps now? You don't heal nervous system trauma with more information.

You don't heal it with a level of cognition or thinking. No amount of reading books or learning new psychobabble is gonna help that you heal it with safety, predictability, and agency.

So here's a quick exercise to start. Number one, name it. This environment has been dysregulating for years. Two. Reduce re-exposure.

Take on less outrage as entertainment. You consume media more intentionally. Think about what's the emotions this brings up for you? What emotions do you want to cultivate? Jori and I tend to stay away from political shows, detective shows, murder mysteries, anything that increases anxiety. We have to choose really carefully when we do that.

Three re-anchor in the body. Focus on your breath. Focus on moving mindfully. Focus on nature to really help. You can name five things in the environment that you see and focus on getting good sleep. Four, restore agency, small local actions. Meaningful connection with good people. Set boundaries around what you tolerate.

Control what you can control, help out where you can help out to get out of this situation is gonna take the efforts of millions doing small acts. Be one of the millions and five, reconnect without collapsing. You don't have to agree, you don't have to disengage. Regulate your nervous system, regulation first, engagement second.

Always in closing, this episode isn't about telling you what to believe. It's about helping you understand why you feel the way you do. Prolonged exposure to chaos, aggression and instability changes our nervous systems.

That's not politics, that's biology. And the work now is not to stay activated forever, but to rebuild capacity, clarity, and grounded strength. Because a calm and regulated man is more creative, a better problem solver, and has greater stamina, a regulated man is harder to manipulate. Harder to provoke harder. To divide and conquer.

Sit with that. Until next time, this is Dr. John.