Can Our Brains Handle This Much Fear?

Liberation psychology, collective panic, and what it means to stay human in a world that keeps asking us to brace ourselves.

My friends and I are probably going to get high and pick apart conspiracy theories. Honestly, that sounds like community care at this point. Not because we’re irresponsible. Not because we’re uninformed. But because what else are you supposed to do when every morning wakes up with a new threat? Another headline. Another disease. Another public health scare. Another act of violence. Another politician with a microphone saying something reckless about people’s bodies, minds, or right to exist.

A virus?
A boat?
Another war?
Now we’re talking about antidepressants like depression isn’t already chewing through communities that have been carrying too much for too long?

Baby, what is the plot?

Every day feels like a Boondocks episode somebody forgot to edit. What gets me isn’t even that it feels familiar, though it absolutely does. There’s a strange, haunting déjà vu in watching panic become part of our daily rhythm. It feels eerily like 2019, except this time many of us are entering it already exhausted. Already carrying grief. Already burnt out. Already bracing.

What gets me is what happens in my body. The moment I see Aaron Parnas pop up on my timeline, my nervous system responds before my mind has time to process what he’s saying.

My chest tightens.

My shoulders rise.

My jaw clenches.

My body says, here we go again.

That response is old. Older than me, in some ways. It is the body’s ancient intelligence trying to prepare for threat, trying to keep me safe, trying to predict pain before it arrives.

Fight. Flight. Freeze. Fawn. Hypervigilance. Somatic memory. Chronic activation.

I know this language intimately. I sit with clients every day and help name these experiences. My training is rooted in trauma, nervous system regulation, race, violence, systems, intergenerational survival, and the ways bodies carry what minds sometimes cannot hold. I understand, clinically, what chronic stress does to a person. I know that the body keeps the score.

But damn.

Knowing does not make you immune to feeling it. That’s been the humbling part. I can understand trauma and still feel overwhelmed. I can teach grounding skills and still find myself scrolling at midnight, looking for answers that aren’t there. I can know exactly what cortisol does to the body and still wake up tired in my bones. I can understand systems and still feel crushed beneath them.

That matters because somewhere along the way, we have become very good at pathologizing normal responses to abnormal conditions.

We ask:
Why am I so anxious? Why am I so tired? Why can’t I focus? Why do I feel numb? Why am I irritable? Why do I feel hopeless?

But maybe a better question is:

What am I responding to?

That question shifts everything.

Liberation psychologist Ignacio Martín-Baró argued that psychology cannot understand suffering by isolating it inside the individual while ignoring the social world that produces distress. In other words, sometimes what looks like pathology is actually an appropriate response to oppressive, violent, unstable conditions.

Read that again.

Sometimes distress is not dysfunction.

Sometimes it is awareness.

Sometimes it is grief.

Sometimes it is moral injury.

Sometimes it is a nervous system trying desperately to metabolize too much fear, too much uncertainty, too much instability, too much witnessing. And right now, we are witnessing too much.

Our brains were not built to consume every tragedy in real time. Every headline. Every threat. Every conspiracy theory. Every policy change. Every war update. Every economic fear. Every new thing to panic about before breakfast. We are saturated.

Emotionally saturated.

Psychologically saturated.

Spiritually saturated.

And for Black people, especially Black women, there is another layer that often goes unnamed: resilience has become expectation, and expectation has become burden. We are expected to carry history and still smile.

To be informed and still be hopeful.

To be politically conscious and still be soft.

To work, nurture, produce, care, organize, resist, heal, forgive, survive, and somehow remain beautiful while doing it.

That is an impossible ask of any human nervous system. That’s not resilience. That’s overload dressed up as strength. And I think many of us are quietly collapsing under the weight of what we have normalized. Not dramatic collapse. Not movie-scene collapse. The quieter kind.

Brain fog.

Chewed nails.

Fatigue that sleep doesn’t fix.

Emotional numbness.

Irritability.

Scrolling for hours.

Disconnection from joy.

A body that no longer remembers what relaxed feels like.

A spirit that feels thin.

That is not laziness. That is wear. That is cumulative stress. That is what happens when a body stays braced for too long. Truth is, there is no perfect coping skill for political unrest. There is no breathing exercise that undoes structural violence. There is no journal prompt that solves oppression. You cannot self-care your way out of systems that harm.

But you can protect what is sacred in you. You can refuse to let panic become your permanent address. You can keep some part of yourself untouched by constant access.

You can rest. You can laugh hard.

You can gather with your people. You can touch grass (well…. until we go on lockdown again…too soon?… sorry)

You can sit in sunlight. You can cry. You can dance. You can turn your phone off for a few hours without apologizing. You can remember that joy is not betrayal. You can remember that tenderness is not weakness. You can remember that protecting your mind is part of surviving.

And maybe that is where liberation begins, not just in resisting what harms us, but in reclaiming our humanity from what would consume it.

So I’m sitting with a few questions, and maybe you should too:

What fear is living in your body right now?

What news have you consumed that your nervous system has not yet processed?

Are you informed, or are you flooded?

When was the last time your body felt safe enough to fully exhale?

What does care look like when the world feels uncaring?

What does liberation feel like in your body?

I don’t have perfect answers. But I know you are not weak for feeling overwhelmed. You are not broken because your body is responding. You are not failing because you are tired. You are living through a lot.

We all are.

You are not carrying this alone. The world keeps asking us to brace ourselves. I am asking you, gently, to remember to soften too. Keep some of yourself for yourself. Your mind deserves refuge. Your body deserves peace where it can find it. And your humanity is still worth protecting.