James' World 2

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t’s February 2025. The world feels like complete chaos, and it’s hard to step away from the news. Maybe your body feels tight, and perhaps your mind is racing.

Take a deep breath, then keep reading.

It isn’t just you: lots of people have expressed that they have felt overwhelmed and burned out from the events of recent months. Disasters, including Hurricane Helene and the Los Angeles–area wildfires, served as the backdrop to a frighteningly tense presidential election. And the new administration has acted loud and fast, often in ways that judges are already declaring unconstitutional.

To a degree, the result feels familiar. News overload is nothing new; major crises such as September 11 and the early months of the COVID pandemic delivered a similar onslaught of rapid-fire headlines that were laden with fear and uncertainty. However, experts say the developments during these first weeks of President Donald Trump’s second administration are posing a very real mental health threat that people may need new skills to manage. Scientific American spoke with experts in psychology and beyond about what’s happening and how to stay calm and grounded through it.

What Is the ‘Flood the Zone’ Strategy?

Political strategist Steve Bannon, who advised Trump during his first term, has openly discussed overwhelming the media as a key priority to advance right-wing objectives. “All we have to do is flood the zone,” Bannon told Frontline in 2019. “Every day we hit them with three things. They’ll bite on one, and we’ll get all of our stuff done: bang, bang, bang.”

This approach is reminiscent of the “Gish gallop” tactic that Trump has used during debates to barrage opponents and fact-checkers with so many lies and half-truths that it becomes impossible to adequately address them all. Away from the podium and inside the Oval Office, it’s a strategy that harkens back to a predigital Soviet practice of producing huge amounts of disinformation meant to make people question reality, as many experts have noted. The Trump administration’s version of this tactic uses volume to create paralysis among the opposition, says Dannagal Young, a professor of communication at the University of Delaware. “It’s the sense that you are being overwhelmed by a tidal wave,” she says. “How do you push back against a tidal wave? You can’t.”

In addition to the sheer number of actions coming from the administration, many are also entirely unprecedented. Without historical U.S. parallels to work from, our brain is less able to calculate what these developments might lead to, and that can make processing the news even more difficult. “The chaos that ensues is really hard to make sense of because we don’t know the consequences,” says Kristen Lee, a psychotherapist and a teaching professor of behavioral science at Northeastern University.

But it’s not just the volume of headlines and the intellectual difficulty of understanding what’s happening that make current news overwhelming. The key, psychologists say, is the emotional weight of those headlines’ content—especially for people who find what’s happening in the U.S. today to be genuinely frightening.

Fear in the Brain, Fear in Societies

For someone worried about the administration’s policies creating tangible harm, each new headline can create a spark of fear—and fear is a remarkably powerful emotion. “Threat and fear take the priority in our brains,” says Arash Javanbakht, a psychiatrist and a neuroscientist at Wayne State University. “When you’re afraid, all you’re thinking about is what you’re afraid of.”

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The day my mom moved in, my 3-year-old spun in circles, singing, thrilled that her Gigi was back for what she assumed was just another visit. My newly walking 1-year-old wobbled after her, babbling, unaware of the shift that was about to redefine our home. In the center of the chaos, my mother smiled, her face and body not yet bearing the visible evidence of the lung cancer that was killing her. She had moved across the country to live with us, preparing to start treatment at our local hospital.

I had imagined this as a time of reconnection — a chance for her to become a steady presence in her grandchildren’s lives, for us to truly know each other as adults after years spent living so far apart. Instead, my days blurred into an exhausting cycle of diaper changes, nap battles, and doctor’s appointments, torn between being the mother my children needed and the daughter my mother deserved. I thought there would be space to simply be with her — to talk, to reminisce, to connect. But caregiving was never still. It was crisis management, the constant triage of needs.

Focusing on both my mom and my kids as much as I wanted to was nearly impossible

When I was focused on my mom, I worried I was neglecting my children; when I was with my children, I felt I was abandoning my mother. Guilt was the main feeling in those days; I never felt like I was fully taking care of or helping anyone who needed me in the capacity they needed. And certainly, I was not taking care of myself.

As the chemo took its toll and my mother grew weaker, my life slowed — necessarily, but unexpectedly. Even as she became less able to care for herself, she found ways to remain present for my children. From her bed, she read to them, her voice softer yet steady. She taught my daughter sign language and helped my son stack blocks into towers, cheering and laughing with him when they toppled over. Though I was busier than ever, life took on a new rhythm, one I had never allowed before. We moved at her pace, sitting longer, staying present.

Then, something would happen that demanded immediate attention. A broken plate. A toddler’s stomach bug. My mom’s fever. Decisions had to be made — should I call her doctor? Should I call 911? In addition to worrying about my children’s sleep, health, and development, I now had to consider what side effects of my mother’s treatment warranted an emergency. What should I do if she stops eating?

I was still trying to make sense of everything when I found myself upstairs, cleaning crayon off the walls, only to realize my mom needed to be rushed to the hospital, where they diagnosed her with sepsis. Why hadn’t I noticed how sick she was earlier? How did I not notice? These questions haunted me for a long time.

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The author (not pictured) was a stay-at-home mom with two toddlers while also caregiving for her mom.  Ray Kachatorian/Getty Images

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CLIMATEWIRE | The National Science Foundation went beyond the staff cuts demanded by the Trump administration in a move that set off a frenzied backlash at the science funding agency.

NSF fired about 10 percent of its staff at the end of Tuesday, removing 168 people who included most of the agency’s probationary employees and all of its experts, a class of contract workers who are specialists in niche scientific fields.

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On Saturday, August 19, 2023, two weeks after I turn seventy-one, I become a new father, again.

I’m not expecting, nor is Lisa, who’s sixty-seven. And while I’m  pleased to say that thirty years on we still savor each other head to toe and in several other positions, our reproductive job was over with when Judah was born in 1999, and we knew it. We had started late (I was married once before: ten years, no kids) and Lisa and I were past forty and craving it all—parenthood, love, redemption. Judah was our last shot.

Imagine that pressure—not on us, on him. Lisa and I were ready. I don’t know if any child is ready, but Judah caught on right away to the basics—cry, suckle, piss, shit—and took it from there. When I was the age he is now, in 1976, I was a geek in search of a carnival, drinking hard, writing poetry, welcoming my worst instincts every day. Judah’s working on a Ph.D. in chemistry at UCLA.

We followed him out to Los Angeles instead of aging out alone in New Jersey because we love him and he loves us. He comes by every Saturday for lunch, usually with Greta, his girlfriend. He arrives alone today, which in itself signifies nothing much, but his smile’s tight. There’s a . . . vibe. A doting, aging father feels these things.

We kiss, we hug, we sit. Lisa’s behind him, standing with her back to us, dishing red-lentil dal, grabbing spoons, asking how Greta’s doing.

“So?” I say once Lisa’s at the table.

“What?”

I see it in his eyes, steel blue, flecked with black.

He knows I see it. He favors the Brennans, Lisa’s people: lean, long-muscled, free of my flat feet and back hair, and quiet—but in one room, we share one brain.

I raise my brows.

He lifts his.

Of course. Like Lisa, he wants me to ask. Information withheld is power. Bad news he’d have dumped by now.

“Bub,” I say.

“Bub?” he says.

Not once has he ever called me Dad. We’re not pals, either. We are men and Bub works fine.

“Buhhhhb,” I croak, low. “What is up?”

He grins, eyes wide and wet. It’s not the jalapeños in his mama’s dal. He’s feeling . . . something. A lot.

“So I heard from this woman yesterday,” he says. “She’s pretty sure I’m her brother.”

Lisa, Judah, and me, the nuclear family stripped to its minimum with little space for secrets—we all know how this has happened. Over the years, I’d talked lightheartedly about my time as a sperm donor in the early 1990s and the possibility that my seed had spread without my knowledge.

It was during my first marriage, to a wonderful woman who didn’t want to be a mother any more than I cared about becoming a father. She earned a medical resident’s paltry stipend, and I raked in forty dollars a pop when a local alternative weekly found my columns to its taste. I was writing short fiction, too, and working on a novel and putting too many basics on credit cards.

A different man might’ve thought about getting a job. Fk that. I’ve known since age twelve that I was alive to write. It was a calling, not a career. I was about to turn forty, my wife had her medical degree and would soon make real money, so no, I wasn’t going back to selling shoes.

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COLLAGE BY JENS WORTMANN

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