Ad copy

I raised my children to believe the world was basically good. Last year I stopped believing that myself. I haven't told them. I want to say first that I'm not someone who catastrophizes. That's not a defense — it's context. My husband would tell you the same. My children know me as the person who believed, sincerely and without performance, that things work out. That people are fundamentally decent. That the future, while uncertain, was worth building toward. I held that for sixty years. Sometime in the last eighteen months, I stopped being able to hold it. — It didn't announce itself. That's the part that's hardest to explain to my husband, who is still mostly okay, who reads the same news and watches the same things and manages to sleep through the night. For me it came gradually — a low-frequency shift in the background register of being alive. Not panic. Not depression. Something more like: the ground that I had always assumed was stable revealed itself, slowly, to be something I had simply never tested. I wake at 4am most nights. Not to a specific thought. To a feeling — formless, heavy, the particular weight of a fear that has no single object because its object is everything. Climate, politics, money, the world my grandchildren will inherit, whether any of the things I built my life around will still be standing. I lie there and I think: I don't know how to be this frightened. I have never been this frightened before. — My daughter called last spring and said: you seem different lately. Is everything okay? I said: everything is fine. I'm just tired. I'm sixty-one. I have two adult children who are trying to build lives in a world that feels genuinely precarious to me. They are anxious enough on their own. They don't need to know that the person who taught them that things work out has stopped believing it. So I keep it. I keep it and I lie awake with it and I carry it quietly because I am the mother and that is what mothers do. — I've tried the obvious things. Limiting the news — that helped briefly, then the anxiety found other routes. Talking to friends — useful, but half of them are in the same place and we end up amplifying rather than settling each other. Therapy — I went for three months and my therapist was kind and the insights were real and I still woke at 4am. What none of these things addressed was the physiological piece. My nervous system had gone into a state of chronic threat response. Not because of a single event. Because of an accumulated weight of information about the world, processed daily, that my brain was treating as immediate personal danger. The news about things happening elsewhere was landing in my body as though they were happening here. As though I needed to do something about them right now. My nervous system couldn't distinguish between information and threat. The more I read, the more threatened I felt. The more threatened I felt, the more I read — scanning, monitoring, trying to stay ahead of whatever was coming. That loop had been running for over a year. — My husband found Liven — he'd been reading about nervous system regulation after his own difficult year and mentioned it without pressure. The quiz asked things my therapist hadn't: not about my thoughts or my history but about my body. Whether I felt safe at rest. Whether I woke in threat. Whether my nervous system had a way to register that the danger it was detecting was distant and not immediate and not mine to solve tonight at 4am. Whether my nervous system had a way to register that. It didn't. That was the answer. It had no mechanism for the difference between knowing something terrible and being in danger of something terrible. It was treating them as the same. — I've been using it for two months. The 4am waking hasn't stopped entirely. But something has changed in what happens after I wake. The formless weight is smaller. The loop — the scanning, the monitoring, the urgency — is quieter. There are mornings now where I wake at 4am and the fear is there and I can feel that it's there and then, slowly, it settles back. Last week my daughter called and said: you sound more like yourself. I said: I'm working on it. She said: whatever you're doing, keep doing it. I haven't told her what I'm doing. Some things I still keep. But for different reasons now. — Liven has a quiz. It doesn't ask about the news or your politics or whether your fears are reasonable. It asks about your nervous system — whether it knows the difference between distant threat and immediate danger, whether it can stand down when the danger isn't here. I wish I'd found it before eighteen months of 4am. Link is below. 💙