Ten Minutes, One Step Back

Her phone buzzed with a news alert. A short vibration, a small sound.

Six months earlier, that sound would have taken Sarah's next hour. She would have opened the story, followed the links, and sent anxious messages to people she loved. By the end she would have been more frightened than informed, and no closer to knowing what to do.

This time she paused.

Sarah is a woman in Chapter Fifteen of my book, Staying Strong in Unsteady Times. She is not the Sarah in my other book, Reversing the Drift. Two different women who happen to share a name.

In her pause, she asked three plain questions. What is happening? What matters? What can I do? But look at the very first thing she told herself. She did not say, "This is terrible." She said, "This alert hit my alarm system."

That sentence is small, and it does real work. It puts a little room between Sarah and the feeling. The alert is still there. The fear is still there. But now there is someone standing beside the fear, noticing it.

Psychologists call this self-distancing. Ethan Kross and his colleagues have studied it for years. The idea is simple. When something upsets you, you can stay inside the feeling, or you can step back and look at it the way an observer would. People do it in different ways: picturing the scene from across the room, speaking to themselves by name, or asking what they would say to a friend in the same spot. As far as I know, the research suggests that stepping back tends to lower the emotional charge. It is not a cure, and it is not denial. It is a way to keep your thinking available when your body wants to take over.

This is not only about politics, either. The buzz might be a news alert. It might be a patient portal message, a text from work about "a quick call," or the school's number on your screen. The body does not sort them by topic. It just sounds the alarm.

I studied history and political science, and I trained to teach them. Knowing how to read the news is one skill. Knowing what it does to your body is another.

Here is what Sarah did next. She decided she could read the story later, or check one reliable source now and stop. Then she put the phone down for ten minutes.

Nothing was solved. I want to be plain about that. But she had not handed the next hour to the loudest signal. In the book, I call the root of this coherence, and it comes down to three sentences: I can understand enough. This still matters. I can do something. Sarah's ten minutes gave her all three.

If you want to try it, start small. The next time something buzzes and your stomach drops, say one sentence in your own head: "That hit my alarm system." Then wait one breath before you touch anything. That is all. You are not trying to feel calm. You are trying to get one step of room.

Sarah's story, and the other people in Staying Strong in Unsteady Times, are the kind of company I wish I had had at certain hours. If this sounds like the life you are living, the book is on Amazon: amazon.com/dp/B0GY49XSVZ

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Why Sounding Sure Feels Like Being Right

Carrie listened to the same talk radio host every day. Same voice. Same easy confidence. After a while it felt less like listening to a stranger and more like having a friend in the room.

Then one day he said the election had been stolen. The votes had not even been counted yet.

Carrie stopped. A small, quiet question came up: "How could he know that already?"

That is a scene from my book, Reversing the Drift. It matters because of what it was for her. It was the first time she wondered whether confidence and truth were the same thing.

They are not. But our minds are built to treat them as if they were, and I want to tell you why, because it is not a flaw in Carrie. It is a feature of all of us.

Psychologists call it the illusory truth effect. In 1977, Lynn Hasher, David Goldstein, and Thomas Toppino asked people to rate how true a list of statements was. Some statements appeared more than once. The ones people had heard before were rated truer than the new ones. Nothing about the evidence had changed. Only the repetition had.

Later researchers found something even more humbling. It works on things we already know. People who knew the right answer still leaned toward the false version after hearing it repeated.

The reason is simple. When something is easy for the mind to process, it feels right. A claim we have heard a hundred times is easy. A voice that never hesitates is easy. Ease starts to feel like truth.

I saw a version of this in my twenty-five years in addictions work. People would say the same sentence about themselves so many times that it stopped sounding like a sentence and started sounding like a fact. Nobody in that room was stupid. They were human, and the mind does this to everyone.

In the book I describe two kinds of authority. Some of us believe because of who says it. Others want the evidence. Repetition quietly pulls us toward the first kind, because a familiar voice feels like a trusted one.

You do not need to be a skeptic about everything. Here are three small habits that help:

1. Notice the feeling of "I've heard that before." Familiar is not the same as checked.

2. Ask how the speaker could know. Carrie did, and it opened a door.

3. Ask what you would expect to see if the claim were false.

None of this takes a degree. It takes a little curiosity, and I have come to think that curiosity is a quiet act of courage.

If you have ever believed something mostly because you heard it so often, you are not alone, and it does not say anything bad about you. If it happened to you, you are not stupid. You are human.

Carrie's question is still one of the best I know. How could he know that already?

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How Would You Have Found Out?

How Would You Have Found Out?

Carrie listened to the same talk radio host every morning. She did the dishes while he talked. She liked his voice. He was certain about everything, and certainty is restful when the world is not.

Then one morning he said the election had been stolen. The votes had not been counted yet.

She stood there with a plate in her hand and a question she did not want. How could he know that already?

That question is the whole thing, really. Not the anger, not the argument. Just a small crack of daylight in an ordinary kitchen.

Here is something worth knowing about what had been holding Carrie in place. Psychologists call it identity-protective cognition. Dan Kahan at Yale studied how people reason about politically loaded facts, and what he found is not what most of us would guess. On questions tied to group identity, people who were better at math and better at interpreting data did not converge on the truth. They diverged. The more skill they had, the further apart they landed.

Read that again, because it matters.

Their intelligence was not asleep. It was working hard. It was just working for a different client. When a fact threatens your standing with the people you belong to, the mind quietly reassigns itself to defending the belonging instead of checking the fact. That is not a character flaw. That is a social animal protecting its place in the group, which is close to the oldest instinct we have.

Which is why the question I want to hand you today is not "were you wrong."

It is this. If the people you trusted most had been wrong about something big, how would you have found out?

Sit with it. It is not a trap. Most of us have never been asked it.

I coached for twenty-two years, and some of that work was with young people who had been part of a cult. I want to tell you plainly what I learned there, because it has stayed with me. Not one of them was stupid. Several were the sharpest people in any room they walked into. Their problem was never intelligence. Their problem was that finding out would have cost them everyone. Every friend, every mentor, every dinner table. The information was never really the obstacle. The price of the information was.

That is true in a cult, and it is true in a family, and it is true in a workplace, and it is true in a political party. It was true for Carrie, standing at the sink.

So if you are going to ask the question honestly, ask the second half of it too. Who would you have had to stop trusting? What would it have cost you? And is there one person, just one, who could tell you a hard thing and still be there afterward?

That person is worth more than any argument.

Carrie did not change her mind that morning. She just noticed something. Confidence and truth had been arriving together for so long that she had stopped telling them apart.

Noticing is enough to start. Curiosity is a quiet act of courage.

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The Woman With the Rag in Her Hand

Mark's coffee shop had a television in the corner that nobody chose and nobody turned off. Most mornings it played the same channel. On the drive over, Pastor Jim's program had already run on the radio. By the time Mark sat down with his cup, he had heard the same story twice before eight in the morning.

He nodded along. Everyone at the counter nodded along. That was the shape of the morning, and it had been the shape of the morning for years.

Then one day a woman came down the counter with a rag in her hand. She wiped the spot by his elbow and said, with no heat in it at all, “Funny how leaders tell you who they are long before we notice.”

She kept wiping. She did not look up to see how it landed.

And nobody argued with her.

That was the part Mark could not put down. Not what she said. What did not happen after she said it.

Psychologists have a name for what was running that room. They call it pluralistic ignorance. It describes a group where most people privately doubt something, and every one of them assumes everybody else believes it. Nobody is lying. Nobody has been fooled, exactly. Each person reads the silence of the others as agreement, then adds his own silence to it. The room lands on a position almost nobody in it actually holds.

It was studied carefully in college students who each thought the drinking culture around them had gone too far, while each assumed his friends were fine with it. The same machinery runs in churches, in families, in town councils, in break rooms. It runs anywhere the cost of speaking first feels higher than the cost of nodding.

This matters for the drift, because we usually tell the drift as a persuasion story. Somebody got argued into something. Most of the time that is not what happened. Mark was not argued into anything. He was surrounded by agreement that may never have existed, and his own quiet made that agreement look more solid to the man on the next stool.

Which is also why one sentence from a woman with a rag in her hand can do what a thousand arguments cannot. She was not trying to win. She said a true thing out loud in a room that had agreed not to. The moment she did, the silence stopped meaning what it had meant.

I was in a room in 1971 when Jesse Jackson founded PUSH. I have turned that day over for fifty-five years, and what stays with me is not the speeches. It is how much of it rested on people willing to say a plain thing before they knew who would agree. That is not courage of the dramatic kind. It is the small, unshowy kind that changes what a room believes is possible.

You probably will not be the loudest person at your counter. You do not have to be. You only have to be one honest voice in a silence, and let the silence stop doing the work it has been doing.

If you have ever sat somewhere nodding at something you were not sure you believed, this book was written for you, not about you.

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What Loyalty Meant to Me at Nineteen

In the spring of 1968 I spent my Saturdays knocking on doors in Indiana for Robert Kennedy. I was nineteen. I believed, without much question, that if you were on someone's side, you stayed on their side. That was what loyalty meant. You didn't have to relitigate it every week. You just showed up.

I met him once, about three weeks before he was killed. I remember his handshake more than anything he said, how tired it looked, how he still stopped for me like it mattered. Loyalty, at nineteen, felt simple. You picked your person, your cause, your side, and you stayed.

I don't believe that anymore, not in that uncomplicated way. Fifty-some years of watching people, counseling people, coaching people, has taught me that loyalty without a periodic gut check is how good people end up defending things they'd never have signed up for at the start.

In Reversing the Drift, I write about Marcus, a Black veteran in Detroit who believed deeply in hard work and personal responsibility. He felt betrayed by both parties long before he ever got pulled toward a strongman's promises of self-reliance. His loyalty wasn't to a party. It was to a set of values. But somewhere along the way, the values got mistaken for a team, and the team started asking for things the values never would have.

Psychologists have a name for what happened to Marcus, and honestly, to most of us at some point. It's called social identity theory, first laid out by Henri Tajfel. The basic idea is that we don't just hold beliefs privately, we belong to groups, and a good chunk of our sense of self gets wrapped up in that belonging. That's not a flaw. Humans are wired for it. But it means that when the group asks something of us that our private conscience quietly objects to, changing our mind can feel less like updating a belief and more like walking out on family.

That's worth sitting with. Not as an accusation, but as an honest question: what did loyalty mean to you five years ago? Was it loyalty to a party, a person, a label? Or was it loyalty to something steadier, your own conscience, the people you love, the truth as best you can find it?

Does that definition still hold up? If it doesn't, you're not disloyal. You're paying attention.

That's the whole argument of Reversing the Drift: that you can love the values you started with even while you let go of what got attached to them along the way. Not to a party. Not to a label. To yourself.

If you want to read the first chapter free, it's linked below. If this rings a bell for someone you know, send it their way. No pressure. Just a door left open.

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Sarah Had a Master's Degree. That Was Never the Point.

Sarah lives in a Phoenix suburb with a lawn she keeps green and a master's degree hanging in the hallway. She ran marketing for a company that changed hands twice. She is not gullible. She has never been gullible in her life.

She told me the phrase never sounded like hatred to her. "Take our country back." She heard it and something in her chest unclenched. Not because she wanted anybody hurt. Because for the first time in years, somebody had said out loud that something had been taken.

That is the part most people skip past when they try to understand the drift. They go looking for stupidity or cruelty, and they miss the plain human thing sitting right in front of them.

Psychologists have a name for it: loss aversion. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky found that losing something hurts roughly twice as much as gaining the same thing feels good. Fifty dollars gone stings more than fifty dollars found delights. Extend that past money and you get status threat, the particular ache of feeling that your place in the world is slipping while everyone tells you nothing is wrong.

Here is why this matters. Any message built on what you are losing will hit harder than a message built on what you might gain. That is not manipulation on its own. It is just how the equipment works. But somebody who understands the equipment can point it wherever they want.

Sarah was not persuaded by an argument. She was recognized by a grievance. Those feel almost identical from the inside.

I spent decades as a counselor and a coach, sitting with people at the worst hour of their week. I never met a person who went wrong because they were dumb. I met people who were tired, unseen, and quietly grieving something they could not name. When someone finally named it, they followed the naming. Most of us would.

There is a beehive at the edge of my yard. When a hive senses a threat to what it has stored, it does not hold a discussion. It defends. Bees are not stupid for that. They are built for it. So are we. The trouble starts when someone learns to trip that alarm on purpose.

So the useful question is not "how could she believe that." The useful question is gentler and much harder: what did I think I was losing, and who offered to give it back?

Answering that honestly is not a confession. It is a map. It tells you what you actually value, which is the only ground solid enough to stand on when the next voice comes along promising to restore it for you.

Curiosity is a quiet act of courage. Sarah's story is in the book, along with John, Carl, Dana, and Carrie, people who found their way back. Not to a party. Not to a label. To themselves.

For more content like this, get Reversing the Drift on Amazon → amazon.com/dp/B0FXYPSPZQ

The Bee That Cannot Survive Alone (And Neither Can You)

I keep bees. Out behind the house, in Indiana, where the light goes gold around seven in the evening and the whole yard hums.

Here is something beekeepers know that most people don't. Take one healthy honeybee out of the hive, give her food, give her water, give her warmth, and she will still be dead in about a day. Nothing attacked her. Nothing went wrong with her body. She died of being alone. A bee is not really an individual. She is a piece of something larger, and separated from it, she stops working.

I think about that a lot now.

In Staying Strong in Unsteady Times, there's a woman named Carmen who says something I have heard, in different words, from hundreds of people over decades of counseling work. She says, "I feel like I'm trying to hold up a building by myself."

Her friend Miguel noticed the flip side. On days when he really connected with certain people, everything else worked better. The news was the same. The problems were the same. He wasn't. He said, "I don't think we're supposed to do this alone."

He's right, and there's science underneath it.

Most of us learned exactly one stress response: fight or flight. Threat comes, you swing or you run. That's real, but it's incomplete, and part of why it's incomplete is that for a long stretch of the twentieth century the stress studies were done mostly on males.

In 2000, a psychologist named Shelley Taylor and her colleagues named a second response. They called it tend-and-befriend. Under threat, humans also reach. We gather the vulnerable close, and we seek out our people. It isn't a softer, lesser version of courage. It's a distinct survival strategy, and across human history it has probably saved more of us than fighting ever did.

Which means the impulse you keep talking yourself out of is the healthy one.

You know the impulse. It's ten at night, your chest is tight, and you think of someone you could call. And then you think: they're busy, it's late, I should be able to handle this, I don't want to be a burden. So you scroll instead. You take in more of the thing that hurt you, alone, in the dark.

I have watched that pattern break people who were not fragile. Strong people. Capable people. The ones everybody else leans on.

This is why I say in the book that community isn't a luxury. It's a biological necessity for sustainable resilience. Not a nice-to-have after you've handled your business. The actual mechanism by which humans survive long trouble.

I was in the room in 1971 when Jesse Jackson founded PUSH. What I remember is not the speeches. It's the ordinary fact of a lot of people deciding to be in the same room on purpose, week after week. That is what lasted.

So here's the small thing, and small is fine.

Pick one person. Not a network, not a group, not a movement. One. Contact them this week without a reason. No agenda, no crisis, no favor to ask. Just: I was thinking about you, how are you actually doing.

You are not a bee. But you are not built for the empty jar either.

If you want the fuller framework, including what "enough" connection actually looks like when you're depleted, that's what the book is for. Read the first chapter free, and see if it sounds like your life.

For more content like this, get Staying Strong in Unsteady Times on Amazon.

The Question I Was Afraid to Ask Out Loud

I do my thinking on foot. There is a stretch of road near my house in Indiana where the corn gets tall enough by August that you cannot see past it, and I walk it most mornings with a song stuck in my head. Somewhere on that road, a few years back, a question came up in me that I did not want.

I will not tell you what it was. It does not matter. What matters is what I did with it, which was nothing. I set it down and kept walking. Not because I had an answer. Because asking it felt like betraying people I love.

Here is what I have learned about that feeling. It is not a character flaw. It is a survival response.

Psychologists Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, and Tom Pyszczynski developed something called terror management theory. The short version: human beings know we are fragile, and we know the world we have built can be taken from us. When that awareness gets stirred up, by a death, a lost job, or a country that suddenly feels unrecognizable, we do not reason our way back to calm. We reach for whatever makes us feel permanent. Our worldview. Our group. Our certainty.

That is not weakness. That is a nervous system doing its job. But it has a cost. When certainty is the thing holding you up, a question feels like somebody kicking out a support beam.

In Reversing the Drift, I write about a man I call John. Fifth-generation Kentucky farmer. He worked as hard as his father and his grandfather did, and he still watched forces he could not see or name come for the land. He felt invisible. Then a voice on a stage said, in so many words, I see you. And something in him unclenched.

You can guess what happened next. Every question about that voice landed like a threat, because it was one. Not a threat to his politics. A threat to the only hand that had reached for him.

I spent a lot of years as a counselor sitting with people in exactly that spot. What I noticed, over and over, is that the question never actually leaves. It waits. It comes back at three in the morning, or in the middle of a sermon, or when a grandchild asks something innocent at the kitchen table. The mind is patient that way.

And here is the part I want you to hear. Asking the question now does not mean you were a fool for not asking it sooner. It means the fear has loosened enough for you to breathe. That is not betrayal. That is your own honesty catching up with you.

You also do not have to ask it in public. You do not have to announce anything, or apologize to anyone, or argue with your brother-in-law at Thanksgiving. You can just let yourself wonder, privately, on a road where the corn is too tall to see past.

Curiosity is a quiet act of courage. It always was.

If you are somewhere in that, I wrote a whole book for you. It does not shame anybody. It walks alongside.

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When Confidence Stopped Sounding Like Truth

Carrie had a routine. Every morning, the same radio host, the same voice filling the kitchen while the coffee brewed. For years he was the steady presence in her day. He was sure about everything, and that sureness felt like solid ground in a world that kept shifting under her feet.

Then came the morning that changed things. The host announced, with total confidence, that the election had been stolen. Carrie paused. No votes had been counted yet. Not one. She sat with her coffee going cold and a single question rose up that she could not push back down: how could he know that already?

It sounds small. It was not small.

That was the first time Carrie wondered whether confidence and truth were the same thing. For years she had treated them as if they were. If he said it with enough certainty, it must be solid. That is not a character flaw. It is how most of us are wired.

In Reversing the Drift I call this referential authority. Some of us believe things based on the evidence in front of us. Most of us, most of the time, believe things based on who is saying them. We trust the pastor, the host, the friend who always seems to know. There is nothing wrong with that. We cannot personally verify everything. We have to lean on trusted voices just to get through the day.

The trouble starts when someone learns to perform certainty. A confident voice can fill the same space in your mind that a true voice would, and your nervous system does not always tell the difference. Certainty feels like safety, especially when everything else feels unsteady. That is exactly when we are most vulnerable to mistaking the sound of confidence for the substance of truth.

What broke the spell for Carrie was not an argument. Nobody lectured her. Nobody called her stupid. It was a question that came from inside her own mind, at her own kitchen table, on her own timeline. How could he know that already?

That question is a quiet act of courage. It does not require you to throw away everything you believe. It does not require you to switch sides. It only asks you to notice the gap between how sure someone sounds and how much they actually know.

If you have ever had a moment like Carrie’s, a flicker where the certainty stopped landing the way it used to, I want you to know something. You are not being disloyal. You are not falling apart. You are paying attention. And paying attention is how the journey back to yourself begins. Not to a party. Not to a label. To yourself.

That is what this book is about. Not shame, not contempt, just understanding for people who are starting to ask the quiet questions. If it happened to you, you are not stupid. You are human.

Reversing the Drift is available now, and the first chapter is free. If Carrie’s morning sounded familiar, start there.

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Confidence Is Not Evidence

Was there ever a moment when you trusted someone's confidence more than you checked their facts?

Sit with that one for a second. Not as an accusation. As an honest question, the kind you can only really answer when nobody is watching.

I ask because I have my own answer, and it isn't flattering. I spent years as a counselor learning to read people, and I still got caught by this. A voice that never wavers feels like a voice that knows. We are built to read certainty as competence. It is an old wiring, and most days it serves us. The problem is that the same wiring can be played.

In Reversing the Drift, there is a woman named Carrie. For years she listened to the same talk radio host every single day. He was warm, he was sure, he felt like a friend who happened to be smarter than the news. Then one afternoon he announced the election was stolen, and he said it before a single vote had been counted. Carrie stopped. How could he know that already? It was the first time she wondered whether confidence and truth were actually the same thing.

They are not. And noticing the gap between them is one of the quietest, bravest things a person can do.

Here is what was really happening under the surface. There are two ways we decide what to believe. One is evidential: show me the proof and I will follow it. The other is referential: I believe it because of who said it. A pastor, a host, a friend, a father. Most of us run on referential authority far more than we admit, because checking everything yourself is exhausting and trust is efficient. None of that makes you foolish. It makes you a person who relies on other people, which is most of being human.

The drift exploited that. It did not need to win the argument. It only needed to be the most confident voice in the room, repeated often enough to feel like common sense. When the trusted voice and the verifiable fact start to point in different directions, referential authority asks you to side with the voice. Carrie's whole story turns on the moment she could not do that anymore.

You do not have to burn down everyone you have ever trusted. That is not the work. The work is smaller and steadier: when something matters, ask where the confidence is coming from, and whether anything underneath it would survive a second look. Curiosity is a quiet act of courage. It does not require you to be cynical. It only asks you to tell the difference between a person who is sure and a fact that is true.

So I will leave you with it again. Was there ever a moment when you trusted someone's confidence more than you checked their facts? If one came to mind, you are not behind. You are exactly where the journey back to yourself begins.

If any of this sounds like something you have lived, the first chapter of Reversing the Drift is free, and there is no contempt waiting for you in it. Only understanding.

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"Take Our Country Back" Didn't Sound Like Hatred. That's the Point.

Sarah had a master's degree and a career in marketing. She lived in suburban Phoenix. By any reasonable measure, her life was successful.

But somewhere in the middle of it, she started feeling invisible — not to her family, not at work, but in the larger cultural story. The one being told about whose concerns mattered, who the future was for, whose voice counted in the national conversation. The world was accelerating in directions nobody had asked her about, and she didn't know where to put that feeling.

Then she heard the phrase: "Take our country back."

And here's the part that's easy to misunderstand: it didn't sound like hatred to Sarah. It didn't register as an invitation to exclude anyone. It sounded like someone had finally looked her direction and said, I see you. Something was taken from you. You matter here.

That feeling — the relief of being seen — is where the drift begins.

Psychologist H. Stephen Glenn spent decades studying what he called the three core needs: the need to feel significant (I matter to something larger than myself), capable (I can handle what life throws at me), and influential (my presence changes things). When those needs go chronically unmet, we don't get more careful and cautious. We get more susceptible — to whoever shows up first with an answer.

Strongman politics is extraordinarily good at meeting counterfeit versions of all three. You matter — the elites are trying to silence you. You're capable — the system has been rigged against you, not because of any failing in you, but because they've tilted the table. And together, we're powerful enough to change it all.

None of that is true. But it feels true to someone who's been starving for recognition.

Sarah didn't drift because she was secretly hateful. She didn't drift because she was naive or uneducated. She drifted because she was reaching for something real — acknowledgment, belonging, the sense that her life was meaningful in some larger story — and someone appeared offering to provide it. The offer was fraudulent. The hunger was not.

This is why I resist the framing that treats the drift as a moral failing. Not because people who supported Trump bear no responsibility — they do. But because "you should have known better" doesn't explain anything. It doesn't help us understand how intelligent, decent people drifted. And it guarantees that anyone who's starting to question — quietly, privately, not yet ready to say it out loud — will stay silent. Nobody's going to admit they're reconsidering if reconsidering means joining the people who think they were fools.

Reversing the Drift is my attempt at a different kind of conversation. One that begins with: I understand why it made sense at the time. And then asks: now that you can see it more clearly, what does the way back look like?

Not back to a party. Not to a label. Back to yourself.

Sarah eventually found her way. The quiet questions she'd been pushing aside started getting louder, and she let herself listen. That's all the drift back requires — a willingness to ask the questions you've been avoiding.

That's the book I wrote for people who are starting to wonder.

📖 Get it on Amazon → amazon.com/dp/B0FXYPSPZQ

What Are You Running On?

There’s a question I keep coming back to, and I want to offer it to you: What are you actually running on?

Not as a spiritual question. As a practical one.

In my years as a counselor and coach, I watched people hold up under extraordinary pressure. And I watched people collapse under pressure that, from the outside, didn’t look nearly as heavy. The difference was rarely ability. It was almost always fuel: the source of meaning keeping them going.

Viktor Frankl, who survived three years in Nazi concentration camps, wrote that “those who have a ‘why’ to live can bear almost any ‘how.’” He wasn’t writing about comfortable people in stable times. He was writing about people who had every reason to give up.

But not all whys are equal.

In Staying Strong in Unsteady Times, I draw a distinction I keep returning to: sustainable versus depleting sources of meaning. It sounds simple. It isn’t.

Rage feels like a why. Outrage feels like fuel. And for a while, it is. The problem is that it’s sprint fuel in a marathon. I’ve watched people burn bright for months, furious and activated, posting every day, fighting every fight, and then one morning they couldn’t get out of bed. Not because the situation improved. Because they’d burned through everything they had.

Revenge is the same way. So is bitterness. So is the daily score-keeping of who’s winning and who’s losing.

What actually sustains people over time looks different. It looks like love, for a person, a community, a place. It looks like legacy, doing something you believe matters beyond your own lifetime. It looks like contribution, even small contribution, to something bigger than your own anger. It looks like justice understood as a long project, not a daily verdict.

Rosa, a woman I write about in the book, has been an activist for fifty years. She marched for civil rights in the sixties, organized against Vietnam, fought for women’s equality, resisted Reagan, pushed for LGBTQ+ rights. When a younger organizer told her she was burned out and didn’t understand how Rosa was still going, Rosa said: “I stopped expecting to win in my lifetime. I’m part of a relay race, not a sprint.”

That is sustainable.

Here is a simple audit worth sitting with. Think about what is driving you through these unsteady times. Is it anger at a specific person? The need to prove something? Or is it something that connects you to people you love, work you believe in, a future you are trying to help build?

Both get you through today. Only one gets you through the years ahead.

If you find yourself running on fumes, it might not mean you need more willpower. It might mean you need better fuel.

Staying Strong in Unsteady Times explores this and much more, practical frameworks for building resilience when the stress is not temporary and the finish line is not visible.

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The Man Who Hid in the Bathroom

 He had coached his kids' baseball team for years. Through bad calls, losing streaks, kids crying in the dugout. He never raised his voice. Mike was the steady one — in his family, in his neighborhood, in every room he walked into. That was just who he was.

So when he found himself sneaking away from his sister's birthday party to sit on the edge of the tub in her bathroom — just breathing, waiting for something nameless to pass — he didn't know what to make of it.

His wife Janet was changing too. She'd stopped hosting her book club. Stopped watching the movies they used to love. She'd look out the window at her garden and feel nothing. The same garden she'd tended for fifteen years. The one that used to get her outside on a Saturday morning before she'd even had coffee.

One evening they sat across from each other at the kitchen table and Mike said the quiet part out loud: "Are we losing our minds?"

No. They weren't losing their minds. But something real was happening to them — and it didn't have a name they recognized, which made it worse.

In Staying Strong in Unsteady Times, I spend a lot of time with people like Mike and Janet — functional, capable, deeply decent people who've started to feel like they're failing at something they used to do effortlessly: just being okay.

The researcher Aaron Antonovsky spent his career studying what keeps people healthy under extreme stress. Not what makes them sick — but what protects them. He found that people who stayed grounded had a strong Sense of Coherence: the world made enough sense to them, they had enough resources to cope, and enough meaning to keep going.

What's happening to a lot of us right now is that all three of those are under pressure simultaneously. The news cycle doesn't make sense. We feel powerless to change anything. And it's hard to hold onto why it matters.

Mike, hiding in his sister's bathroom, wasn't weak. It was his nervous system doing its job — trying to find fifteen minutes of quiet because it had been carrying months of sustained alarm with no clear resolution.

The first thing I want Mike and Janet to hear — and maybe you, if you're somewhere in that story — is this: You're not broken. The situation is.

There's a difference. And once you see it, you can actually start to work with what's real.

If you're in the middle of that kind of exhaustion right now, this book was written for you. Not to fix you. To meet you where you are and help you find your footing again.

Get Staying Strong in Unsteady Times on Amazon:

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When Coping Isn't Enough

Daniel had done everything right.

He'd set up information boundaries so he wasn't drowning in the news cycle. He'd learned the physiological sigh — that double inhale through the nose, long exhale through the mouth — the one the neuroscientists say actually calms your nervous system. He'd even started setting his phone down at 9pm. By any reasonable measure, he was coping.

But every morning, he lay in bed staring at the ceiling asking the same question: What's the point?

Not despair — nothing so dramatic. Just hollow. Functional but hollow. And increasingly, a quiet, unsettling question: Is this what resilience looks like? Just… endless coping?

His sister Elena had burned through her outrage months earlier. "I used to believe we could make a difference," she told him. "Now I'm not sure why I bother." He understood. He didn't say what he was thinking: Me neither.

Daniel is one of the people I write about in Staying Strong in Unsteady Times. He's composite — a mix of clients, colleagues, and a version of myself I've known well. And he represents something I hear constantly right now: a particular kind of exhaustion that the usual tools don't touch.

Because Daniel's problem wasn't a coping problem. It was a meaning problem.

Viktor Frankl survived the Nazi concentration camps. He watched people around him die, saw men and women stripped of everything — family, possessions, dignity, safety. And out of that experience, he developed a simple, devastating idea: meaning isn't a luxury we add when life gets comfortable. It's the engine that keeps us going when life gets impossible.

"Those who have a 'why' to live," Frankl wrote, "can bear almost any 'how.'"

Daniel had the "how" covered. He was executing the coping strategies. But he'd lost track of the why — and without it, even good functioning feels hollow.

I've paid attention to this pattern for a long time. I was 14 when JFK was assassinated. I volunteered for Robert Kennedy's campaign in 1968, and was working that campaign when he was killed. What I noticed then — watching the adults around me — was that the ones who stayed steady weren't the ones with the best coping strategies. They were the ones who still believed their actions connected to something that mattered.

That's different from optimism. It doesn't require certainty. It just requires a thread back to purpose.

Frankl described three pathways to meaning: through the work we do and create; through love and the beauty we experience; and through how we face suffering we cannot escape. At least one of those pathways is available in any moment. The question is whether you're using it — or just white-knuckling through the day.

If you feel like Daniel — if you've got your strategies in place and still feel strangely hollow — that's not a failure of resilience. That's information. Your nervous system is telling you something important is missing.

The good news: meaning isn't something you wait to receive. It's something you orient toward. Even small moves count.

You're not broken. The situation is.

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Your Feelings Aren’t the Problem. They’re the Data.

When my anxiety spikes after reading the news, my first instinct is usually to tell myself to calm down. Maybe yours is too. Maybe you’ve tried breathing exercises, journaling, yoga, cutting back on screen time — and found that none of it quite worked the way it used to.

There’s a reason for that. And it’s not because you’re broken.

Here’s the reframe that changed how I think about it.

Imagine you’re in a building and the smoke alarm goes off. You don’t think: This alarm is overreacting. I should fix the alarm. You think: Where’s the fire?

Your emotions work the same way.

When you feel anger, fear, grief, or disgust about what’s happening in this country right now — those aren’t malfunctions. They’re not signs that you need to be fixed. They’re alarms going off because something real is happening. Your nervous system picked it up before your conscious mind did.

Viktor Frankl, who survived Auschwitz and spent his life studying how people stay psychologically healthy under extreme conditions, put it plainly: your inner emotional responses are information. They deserve to be read, not suppressed.

The psychologist Aaron Antonovsky studied Holocaust survivors who had maintained positive emotional health — a finding that startled his colleagues. What protected those people? Part of the answer was something he called comprehensibility — the capacity to understand what was happening to them, to make sense of it, rather than be overwhelmed by chaos. Knowing what you’re feeling is a form of comprehensibility. It keeps you grounded.

So here’s the practice. Next time the alarm goes off — the anxiety, the rage, the helplessness — try to listen to it instead of muting it. Ask: What is this feeling telling me?

Anger: Something important is being threatened or violated.

Fear: My body senses real danger, and it wants me to pay attention.

Grief: Something I valued has been lost.

Disgust: My moral sense has been crossed.

None of these are problems. All of them are data.

The goal isn’t to eliminate the feeling. It’s to read it clearly, understand what it’s pointing at, and then decide — consciously — what to do with that information. That’s very different from either drowning in it or pushing it away.

In Staying Strong in Unsteady Times, I call this the smoke alarm reframe — and it’s one of the most immediate tools I know. It doesn’t require anything except a moment of attention and a willingness to take your own inner life seriously.

You are not overreacting. You are not too sensitive. The situation is what it is. Your feelings are the appropriate response to it.

The work is to let them inform you — not overwhelm you.

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They’re Flooding You on Purpose

There’s a moment a lot of people have described to me — and you might recognize it.

You sit down to read the news, or scroll your phone, and twenty minutes later you feel like you’ve been hit by a truck. Not because of one thing. Because of everything, all at once. A relentless, dizzying cascade of crises, each one displacing the last before you’ve had time to react.

You’re not imagining that. And you’re not broken because it overwhelms you.

There’s a name for it. Researchers and political analysts call it “firehosing” — the deliberate strategy of flooding people with information, crises, and contradictions so fast and so relentlessly that they can’t process any of it clearly. Can’t hold a thought long enough to form a response. Can’t organize. Can’t decide what actually matters.

It is a strategy. It is intentional. And knowing that changes everything.

I’ve spent two years writing Staying Strong in Unsteady Times, and one of the most consistent things I hear is some version of this: “I used to feel like I could handle hard news. Now I feel like I’m drowning before I even start.” That’s not weakness. That’s what firehosing does to a human brain.

Here’s the thing about a firehose: it’s not designed to make you feel any particular way about any particular issue. It’s designed to overwhelm your capacity to feel anything clearly at all. When you’re saturated, you’re reactive. When you’re reactive, you’re manageable. You lash out or shut down, and either way you’ve been neutralized.

The antidote isn’t numbness. It isn’t avoidance. It’s recognition.

When you feel that wall of overwhelm hit, try naming what’s happening. Not the specific news story — the pattern. Say it out loud: “This is firehosing. This is designed to exhaust me. I’m not obligated to process all of this right now.”

That one sentence moves you from inside the flood to outside it, even briefly. You’re no longer drowning in a hundred simultaneous crises. You’re watching a strategy. And from that position, you can ask a better question: not “Which crisis do I tackle first?” but “What actually matters to me today? What is one thing I can pay real attention to?”

Viktor Frankl wrote that between stimulus and response, there is a space — and in that space is our freedom. Firehosing is designed to collapse that space. Naming it helps you get it back.

One thing, clearly seen. That’s where clarity starts. That’s the beginning of resilience that actually lasts.

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