Be Inspired..!!

A story about why we’re all panicking more than our parents did, and why you can’t meditation-app yourself out of it.

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I was 3 AM the other night and couldn’t sleep, which is fine, except I also couldn’t scroll, which is NOT fine. Like my phone was there, Instagram was there, but my nervous system had basically sent out a group text saying “thanks but no thanks, we’re overheating, nobody touch anything.” So instead I just laid there doing that thing where you count your heartbeats and convince yourself you’re dying? You know it. We all know it. Except then I started reading some study on my phone about how checking your heart rate when anxious actually makes anxiety worse because you’re literally feeding the panic loop, which is helpful information delivered at the absolute worst time, so now I was panicking about panicking, which is honestly a newer, worse thing that started happening to me around 2024.

And I was thinking about how my mom describes her 30s versus how anyone I know describes their 30s now, and honestly the difference is insane. She was stressed about, like, getting promoted and whether her perm looked good. We’re stressed about our perm andwhether our perm is secretly giving us cancer and also the fact that we read that one thing on Reddit at 2 PM and can’t stop thinking about it. But also that wasn’t the real Reddit thing, it was someone’s interpretation of a Reddit thread they found on TikTok that was actually from a Discord server. So we’re essentially panicking about a game of telephone played by an algorithm that designed the game on purpose to make us panic. It’s giving multi-level marketing but for anxiety.

The thing nobody says out loud is that anxiety isn’t actually rising because we’re weaker or more broken than previous generations. It’s rising because we’re getting real-time updates on literally everything that could kill us. And our brains are still operating on the same nervous system architecture as people from 1997 who would’ve known about exactly zero disasters that didn’t happen within like fifty miles of them. Now we know about disasters in real-time. We know about them while they’re happening. We know about them in formats designed specifically to make us feel maximum dread. Honestly it’s kind of impressive in a horrifying way. Like someone looked at how human brains work and said “what if we just removed the safety buffer” and then built an entire civilization around it.

Like I’m not exaggerating when I say the last time I actually felt calm was the 45 minutes after I moved to a place without great WiFi coverage. Just 45 minutes. Because my nervous system didn’t know it could check the news, so it just… relaxed? Like it had permission? And then the WiFi started working again and I literally felt the anxiety return like a physical sensation, which is when I realized we’ve all basically been conditioned to believe that peace is only possible if nothing bad is happening anywhere in the world. Good luck with that. The minute connectivity came back my chest got tight again, which tells you everything about whether this is actually about the world being dangerous versus about us being constantly monitored by danger.

Here’s what I’ve realized: you can’t medicine your way out of this, but you can stop making it worse. And weirdly, some of this comes down to stuff that feels stupid and obvious and also inexplicably hard to actually do, which is giving the entire wellness industry honestly.

The yescool Weighted Blanket actually works, and I know that sounds like every wellness blog ever and I hate that I’m becoming this person, but like… there’s a reason it’s always sold out. Your nervous system is basically in permanent fight-or-flight mode, right? It’s been activated so many times that it literally forgot what calm feels like. A weighted blanket is just applying continuous pressure across your entire body, which triggers something called the parasympathetic nervous system. It’s like someone’s hugging you involuntarily but it’s also lowkey creepy to think about so don’t think about that part. Your brain gets the signal that you’re safe and you don’t have to monitor for threats every single second. Do I sound insane? Probably. Is my cortisol lower? Also probably. The point is your nervous system doesn’t distinguish between “real threats” and “the vibes feel dangerous,” so you have to trick it into feeling safe. A weighted blanket is honestly the lowest-stakes way to do that. $60 and it’s heavier than your conscience and also weirdly comforting on nights when existence feels overwhelming, which is most nights actually.

NOW Foods Magnesium Glycinate is like… okay so your nervous system runs on electrolytes, and magnesium is the one that tells your muscles to relax. When you’re constantly stressed, you burn through it faster, which makes you more tense, which makes you more stressed, and it’s a loop that only ends when you either supplement or have a complete breakdown or both. I’m not being dramatic. I did the research. Take some. Not some sketchy powder that tastes like a parking lot. This one is actually tolerable and doesn’t give you that weird magnesium taste that lives in your mouth for three hours, which happened to me once and I was convinced I was dying of heavy metal poisoning, which is actually not how any of that works but try telling that to my 3 AM brain.

The third thing is going to sound insanely stupid but I actually mean it and I use it and I’m not getting paid to say this which is annoying because I probably should be: Mack’s Pillow Soft Silicone Putty Earplugs or like, any of those cheap moldable earplugs. Not even for full noise blocking. Just for taking the edge off. Because every single background noise you hear right now is being processed by your threat-detection system. Every notification, every dog barking, every car horn, every DING of the microwave is a potential piece of information you might need to react to. You don’t realize how much your nervous system is hunting until you put in earplugs and suddenly the constant low-level threat-monitoring just… stops? Like your brain can finally focus on one thing instead of running a background process that’s looking for danger sounds. White noise apps are fine but honestly? Cheap earplugs that just muffle the environment so it’s not dead silent (which activates different anxiety) but also not constantly pinging your threat system? That’s the sweet spot. And they cost like $6 and I can’t believe this is the thing that actually helped.

Here’s the thing though: none of this fixes it. I’m not out here saying that a weighted blanket is going to cure anxiety or that magnesium is the answer. I’m saying that if your nervous system is literally on fire, you can’t think your way out of it. You have to calm the body first. The blanket helps. The magnesium helps. The earplugs help. And then maybe you have enough bandwidth to actually address the fact that we’re living in genuinely unprecedented circumstances. That social media is designed to hit your amygdala on purpose. That the news is essentially a threat-compilation algorithm owned by people who profit when you’re scared. That we’re all running on a nervous system that’s biologically unsuited for this amount of information.

The actual fix is bigger than any Amazon purchase, which is honestly depressing because Amazon purchases are easy and the real fix requires like… building a different life? Creating boundaries that feel rude? Saying no to things? Putting your phone in a different room? All the things that feel impossible when you’re already anxious. So you have to start small. You have to get the blanket. You have to take the magnesium. You have to put in the earplugs. And then you have to give yourself permission to stop acting like managing anxiety is a moral failing or like you’re weak or like you just need to be more positive, which is honestly the most gaslit thing anyone has ever told a panicking person. “Just be more positive” is like telling someone who’s drowning that they need to hydrate better.

If this resonated with you, like if you’re also laying awake at 3 AM thinking about diseases you’ve never heard of or scrolling Reddit medical threads at 2 PM convinced you have stage four something-or-other, then honestly I’d love for you to subscribe. I write about this stuff every week. Not just anxiety, but all the ways our nervous systems are getting hijacked by modern life and what actually helps versus what’s just performance and what’s actually making it worse. Plus there’s weird shit I’m working on about how peace feels suspicious when you’re used to crisis and why like, the idea of just sitting quietly without input feels actively dangerous now.

Anyways come hang: Subscribe on Medium and Substack

(Probably gonna crash and burn on this whole anxiety management thing in like two weeks but at least we can spiral together, which is giving community actually.)

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