Holding Both: Managing Personal Stress in a World in Crisis
How can we care about a city like San Francisco [let alone the rest of the world] when we are already overwhelmed by our own lives?
Many people are experiencing heightened stress, anxiety, and emotional fatigue with everything that is going on in the world. One minute we are reading news about a war, the next we are paying a utility bill — all within the same five minutes.
In San Francisco alone, we’ve witnessed waves of protests downtown, labor strikes affecting public transit and university systems, ongoing housing instability, and visible economic shifts reshaping neighborhoods in real-time. Headlines cycle through tech layoffs, climate events, geopolitical conflict, and civic unrest — often before we’ve had time to metabolize the last story.
Most of the clients I’ve worked with in recent weeks have said some version of the same thing:
“It’s just hard to be a human right now.”
We are witnessing suffering and distressing events all over the world, even in our own communities. At the same time, we still have jobs, children, and responsibilities we need to take care of.
Our nervous systems are absorbing all this instability, often in real time, on the tiny screens we carry everywhere. And there is no pause between “another crisis” and “back to work.”
And it’s exhausting.
The Guilt and Helplessness Loop
Living in the Bay Area — in San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley — where activism and civic engagement are woven into daily life, many people feel a deep responsibility to stay informed and involved.
I hold a great deal of privilege that protects my family from certain vulnerabilities. And yet, there are still areas of our lives that are too fragile. I still feel stressed. There are only so many hours, so much energy, so many resources to help. So for those with less access to resources, I can truly only imagine the state of survival their nervous system is in from distress.
When I zoom out to the scale of global need, it feels overwhelming. The gap between what exists and what is needed feels enormous.
That awareness can quickly turn into guilt.
Shouldn’t I be doing more?
For my family? For my community? For the world?
That guilt quickly turns into helplessness.
And helplessness erodes agency to act.
This is how anxiety and moral stress often reinforce each other. The cycle feeds itself.
“I should do more.”
“I can’t do more.”
“I should do more.”
“I can’t do more.”
On repeat.
Many of my clients are living inside this same loop.
They care deeply. They want to help. But they are also working within systems that demand productivity, limit time, and keep them financially tethered. The result is a quiet, chronic tension:
How do I show up for everything?
The truth is, no one person can.
And that doesn’t make you morally deficient.
When Anxiety Has Nowhere to Go
Anxiety always asks the same question:
“How do I fix this?”
For many personal stressors, there is at least a possible action step. But global instability is not a problem one individual can solve.
When there is no clear action step, anxiety has nowhere to land. It turns into urgency. Doom-scrolling. Over-functioning. Burnout.
We scroll past tragedy. We feel sad, angry, and distressed. We might leave a comment or share the content we see. And then we switch immediately back into work mode.
There is no metabolizing. No communal processing. Just activation followed by suppression.
Over time, that takes a toll.
Empathy vs. Overload
Sometimes we confuse empathy with nervous system overload.
Empathy is available without effort. It allows us to feel something with others without losing ourselves.
Nervous system overload is urgent. It feels tight, braced, watchful. It demands a reaction, narrows perspective, and collapses time.
Empathy says, “This hurts.”
Overload says, “I have to fix this right now, or I can’t tolerate it.”
Sometimes hypervigilance can disguise itself as moral urgency. But sustained care requires stability.
The body and the nervous system are not designed to process the suffering of the entire world in real-time. And yet we are trying.
The False Choice
When we can’t define the difference between empathy and nervous system overload, we start cornering ourselves with impossible choices:
Care for my family
or
Care about the world.
Rest
or
Engage.
Be okay
or
Be ethical.
But that is a false binary.
Caring deeply about injustice - whether it’s happening in your neighborhood, on local university campuses, or across the globe - and tending to your own nervous system are not opposites.
Here in San Francisco and throughout the Bay Area, many people feel called to engage locally while also tracking global crises.
If we believe that exhaustion equals virtue, we will burn out. If we believe that calm equals apathy, we will remain in constant activation.
Steadiness is not indifference.
It is capacity.
The Role of Systems
This pressure doesn’t come out of nowhere.
Many modern systems reward constant attention and productivity. We are expected to stay informed, engaged, and responsive — all at once.
Chronic time scarcity has become normalized, and overextension keeps people reactive and depleted.
When we internalize that pressure, we begin to see our limits as personal failures rather than systemic constraints.
But your nervous system has limits because it is human. Not because you are weak.
What Regulated Engagement Looks Like
If burnout is the result of chronic activation without restoration, then the alternative is regulated engagement.
Regulated engagement means participating without abandoning yourself.
It is a nervous system skill that means:
Staying informed intentionally, not compulsively.
Choosing specific avenues of contribution rather than trying to solve everything.
Allowing grief without demanding immediate resolution.
Resting without moralizing it.
It means recognizing that sustained care requires rhythm — activation and restoration.
It also means accepting that tending to your own life is not a betrayal of collective care.
Reclaiming Calm
Reclaiming calm in a world that is not calm is not denial; it is a necessary response. It is a form of nervous system regulation. It is a refusal to let constant activation dictate your internal state.
This does not mean numbing out. It does not mean disengaging.
It means increasing your capacity to hold multiple truths at once.
In Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy, we work with the idea that we all have different parts inside us. There may be:
A part that feels outrage.
A part that feels grief.
A part that feels overwhelmed.
A part that wants to protect your family.
A part that feels guilty for not doing more.
These parts can conflict with each other. But they do not have to dominate you.
When you develop steadiness, you can listen to each part without being hijacked by it. You can feel grief without collapsing. You can care deeply without burning out. You can act with intention rather than urgency.
Steadiness increases discernment.
Discernment increases effective action.
You cannot carry the entire world on your shoulders.
And abandoning yourself does not save it.
It is possible to hold both:
Your own stress and the world’s suffering.
Your privilege and your pain.
Your family and your care for the collective.
If your care destroys you, it will not last.
The world does not need more burned-out people. It needs regulated ones.
You do not have to hold all of this alone. Support for your nervous system is available. Therapy - including IFS - can help you build the steadiness and resilience that allow your care to endure.
If you’re curious about working together, you can learn more about Internal Family Systems therapy or explore whether IFS intensives might be a supportive next step for you.
