Protecting Your Peace in a World That Profits from Panic
A reflection on overwhelm, boundaries, and the slow work of staying human
In January, I shut everything down.
No more doomscrolling. No reels, no updates, no curated chaos coming at me through a tiny glowing screen. I stepped away from social media completely, not because I had a grand plan, but because I was unraveling in ways I couldn’t ignore anymore.
It wasn’t one thing. It was everything.
The constant news cycle. The ads that knew just where to poke. The way every scroll felt like taking on the weight of the world while also being reminded I wasn’t doing enough. Or being enough.
I stopped because I couldn’t breathe.
And something shifted in that silence.
I remembered that I’m not here to carry it all.
Some of us were born with spongy hearts absorbing everything around us like second nature. We notice the way a room changes. We feel the collective ache before it’s named. And when the world screams, we often whisper, “What can I do?”
But here’s the thing no one profits from you knowing:
You don’t have to hold it all.
You were never meant to.
There’s an economy that runs on your anxiety.
When you feel like there’s an emergency at all times, you’re more likely to scroll. To click. To buy. To join. To fix.
And the body? It doesn’t know the difference between a real emergency and a digital one. It just knows there’s something wrong, all the time. And eventually, it starts to shut down or speed up in ways that feel like they’ll never stop.
The wild part is that your nervous system, this ancient, beautiful system inside you, is still wired for what it was thousands of years ago. It’s scanning for danger, for change in the environment, for what’s safe and what’s not. It wasn’t made to absorb the heartbreak of the entire globe before breakfast.
It makes so much sense that you're overwhelmed.
It’s not a personal failure.
It’s a human response in a world that doesn’t stop yelling.
After I stepped away from social media, it took a while to come back to myself. It wasn’t instant peace. I’d been living outside of my own body for too long. The static was still there inside me even when the screens were gone.