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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