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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