Beyond Spiraling and Shutting Down
When Mere Escapism Is Not Enough to Overcome Depletion or Despair
I wake up and reach for the phone, promising myself I won’t read anything about politics, war, climate change, or anything else in the news. I just want something positive to help my brain stir, and my body follow. I go onto Instagram, which I’ve recently curated to include only accounts of people who lift my spirits: musicians, dancers, writers, and a dwindling number of late-night hosts.
But there is no escaping it. I see the latest news in someone’s post, and I’m off and running. WTF? OMG! The spaciousness I felt only moments before, in those delicious early moments after awakening, has all but evaporated. That blissful gift of possibility—delivered with eyes opening to a new day—now feels like a deflated balloon found on the floor the night after a birthday party.
I am anxious. I am angry.
I am spiraling. I am shutting down.
Again and again and—how many times in recent years!—once again.
Sometimes, I lean more toward one response than the other. Sometimes, they emerge in successive stages. Sometimes, simultaneously. Often, one takes over before I know it, as if I have no control over my responses whatsoever.
The spiraling does little good for me or anyone else. Shutting down at least feels more like self-protection—though in truth, it comes at great cost. Like shutting down a computer, we don’t just shut one part of ourselves down.
I clearly am not alone in this.
Approximately 62 percent of people in the United States find today’s societal division a significant source of stress, according to a 2025 American Psychological Association study.
70 percent say that the news makes them feel overwhelmed and want to disengage, according to a 2026 study from the Media Insights Society.
And overwhelm is, well, overwhelmingly present in workplaces. Research published in the Harvard Business Review in late 2025 found that 9 in 10 working professionals reported feeling overwhelmed in the prior month.
We might think these are just the waters we swim in today. But when we feel overwhelmed, being reactive or disengaged does not follow far behind—and from that comes poor decision-making and more.
So, how do we cope—or, dare we imagine, do something better than cope with the macabre parade of headlines we face on a seemingly daily basis?
Humans, after all, were not made for navigating an exponential rate of change, extreme uncertainty, seemingly constant crises, and, most assuredly, the ongoing reminders of it all.
And so, and so, and so!
We need a better way.
We need balance.
We need relief.
We need delight.
We need shoulder-drops.
We need joy.
We need the deepest of deep reconnections with the love of life that drew us to wanting to protect people and places in the first place.
This is what gives us the Staying Power to keep making a positive difference in the world, and this is the focus of my work.
But sometimes, you can also just stumble upon something simple that helps with that all-important need for capacity building in tough times.
This week, I found a wonderful example of that in an essay in The Atlantic, “The Ordinary Miracle of Existing,” by the physicist and novelist Alan Lightman.
While I cannot convey the impact of reading the piece start to finish, here is the briefest of tastes:
“Being alive at all,” Lightman writes, “is the most extraordinary stroke of good luck we will ever experience”—for reasons he goes on to enumerate before concluding:
“The simple fact that we are here, conscious and aware,
is so unlikely that it borders on the miraculous.”
I love that because underneath all our worries and fears and our anxieties and frustrations about the state of the world lies our awareness of something like that: the sheer wonder of it all—and the abundance of love that follows: For people. Places. Ideals. Life itself.
So, what if we aspired to practice that kind of awareness on a day-to-day basis? If we moved forward not only with an outsized aspiration of trying to do something to help “save the world,” but also with an equal, if not greater, commitment to savor it?
Would we become more capable of strengthening the clarity, presence, and agency it takes to stay in the arena and keep watering the seeds of a better future?
I know what the research shows, but what, I wonder, would your experience reveal?
If you or your organization is challenged by, well, the challenges of it all and would like to learn more about my workshops on Leading With Staying Power, please reach out. I’d love to connect.
Lisa Bennett is the co-author of Ecoliterate with emotional intelligence pioneer Daniel Goleman, editor of Women Amplified, and author of the forthcoming Savor the World: How Good People Rise to Great Challenges in Tough Times.
Savoring is not retreat from the world; it is fuel for staying in it. Spiraling burns agency and shutting down abandons it. Reconnecting with what is worth protecting makes action possible again.