This piece names what’s happening in the world right now — including war, institutional abuse, and collective grief. It also offers a way through.

If you’re feeling activated right now, there’s a reason. Actually, there are several. And your nervous system regulation in this crisis matters more than you think.

The United States and Israel are conducting military strikes on Iran. The Supreme Leader has been confirmed killed. Missiles are hitting neighborhoods, synagogues, airports across the region. Iran is retaliating — striking U.S. bases in the Gulf, hitting targets in Israel, launching drones at bases in Cyprus and Bahrain. Hundreds are dead. Servicemembers are dead. Civilians across more than a dozen countries are sheltering. This conflict is days old and already expanding beyond anyone’s ability to contain it.

The war in Ukraine grinds on with no resolution in sight. For the first time in decades, there is no nuclear treaty between the U.S. and Russia — the New START agreement expired in February with nothing to replace it. Venezuela saw direct U.S. military action. In Sudan, a civil war most people can’t even name has killed tens of thousands while the world looked away. In Myanmar, a military junta is losing territory to pro-democracy forces while we scroll past. Ethiopia and Eritrea are edging toward a conflict that could set the Horn of Africa on fire.

These are not isolated events. The global landscape right now is one of compounding instability — multiple active wars, accelerating proxy conflicts, collapsing diplomatic frameworks, and a level of geopolitical volatility we haven’t seen in a generation. There are more conflicts unfolding than I can name here, many of them barely registering in Western media. The world is not in a rough patch. It is restructuring, violently, in real time.

What They Hope You Scroll Past

The Epstein files are surfacing, and what they reveal isn’t just criminal — it’s a look behind the curtain at the people we were told to trust. Leaders. Influencers. People in positions of extraordinary power and visibility, engaging in acts so depraved that the mind resists processing them. This isn’t a scandal. This is the discovery that some of the people entrusted with shaping our world — our “parents,” in the psychological sense — were hiding monstrous things in the closet. Literally. And that discovery doesn’t just anger us. It destabilizes something foundational about how we understood the world to work.

The U.S. government recently demanded that AI technology be made available for mass domestic surveillance and integration into fully autonomous weapons — systems that could select targets and execute strikes without a human being involved. One company, Anthropic, said no. It argued that the technology isn’t mature enough for those applications and that safeguards were non-negotiable. The government’s response was to designate them a supply chain risk and effectively blacklist them from government use, stripping them of a $200 million contract. Another company, OpenAI, stepped in and said yes — claiming it had negotiated the very safeguards Anthropic was punished for demanding. We are in the earliest stages of artificial intelligence — a technology that is powerful, promising, and profoundly immature. Handing it to the military with fewer restrictions than the company that built it thought were safe is the equivalent of weaponizing a child and calling it progress.

And then there’s this: the government has directed the release of files on unidentified aerial phenomena — after decades of dismissing, ridiculing, and silencing anyone who asked. Disclosure is happening. But here’s the question no one’s asking: can a population that has been systematically pre-conditioned to hear “the aliens are attacking us” actually metabolize this information? Or does it just become one more thing that tips the collective nervous system further into fear?

Underneath all of it — something most people won’t consciously register — solar and geomagnetic activity is directly affecting your physiology. This isn’t metaphor. Research published in peer-reviewed journals has shown that geomagnetic storms disrupt circadian rhythms, alter autonomic nervous system function, increase systemic inflammation, and reduce heart rate variability. Your body is responding to the sun. Your nervous system is already activated before you even open your phone. And this morning — a blood moon. A total lunar eclipse. The sky itself is asking you to pay attention.

Right now, your attention is locked on the who. The leaders. The systems. The perpetrators. And that’s by design. Headlines are rotated for maximum activation. The things that should shake us to our foundations get two days of coverage and are buried under the next outrage cycle. The Epstein files surface and within 48 hours the algorithm has moved on. Disclosure is “happening” — but nothing has actually been released. The machine doesn’t want you regulated. It wants you reactive. Because reactive people don’t think. They scroll. They share. They stay locked in the cycle. And the cycle keeps the attention economy running.

What’s Happening Inside You Right Now

As long as your focus stays fixed on who did this, your nervous system stays in a loop it can’t complete. You can’t regulate a problem that lives outside your body. You can only regulate what’s happening inside it. So I’m going to ask you to do something counterintuitive. Turn your attention inward. Not away from what’s happening — toward what it’s doing to you.

So. Let’s name what’s actually happening inside you when you take all of this in.

Anger. At the systems, the lies, the sheer audacity of it.

Grief. For people you’ll never meet, dying in conflicts you didn’t choose.

Betrayal. The sick, sinking feeling that the people who were supposed to protect us were the ones causing harm.

Horror. At the things done to children, to women, to the vulnerable — by the powerful, for their pleasure.

And underneath those, the ones that are harder to name:

Helplessness. Because what can one person do about any of this?

Fear. For your own children. For the future. For what this world is becoming.

Shame. Maybe yours, maybe inherited, maybe both — because somewhere in you, you wonder if you should have seen it, said something, done more.

You may be feeling some or all of these right now. Or you may be feeling none of them.

Both responses are your nervous system doing exactly what it was designed to do. If you’re flooded with emotion, your system is signaling that it registers the threat, the loss, the violation. If you feel numb — if you read that list and it was like reading the weather — your system decided somewhere along the way that it couldn’t afford to feel this much, so it turned the volume down. Maybe all the way down. That’s not apathy. That’s protection. Underneath that stillness, something is there. It just needs a safer way in.

Either way, what comes next is the same.

A Breathwork Practice for Nervous System Regulation in Crisis

I’m asking you to do something. Whether you felt everything or nothing, this is for you.

What you just did is not small. Notice if anything shifted — even slightly. Maybe your shoulders dropped a fraction. Maybe the next breath came a little easier. Maybe you feel the same but something underneath is different. That’s your nervous system beginning to move toward regulation. Not there yet, necessarily — this isn’t a switch you flip with three breaths. If you need more, take more. Stay with it until something settles, even a little. The breath is moving your nervous system from sympathetic activation — fight, flight, freeze — toward ventral vagal engagement: presence, connection, clarity. The hum stimulated your vagus nerve directly, which is why the vibration travels through your body the way it does. You are changing your physiology. With your own breath. And you can keep going.

And if you’ve been running on numb for a while — weeks, months of scrolling through one crisis after another without letting any of it land — know that coming back online doesn’t happen all at once. The material moves when it’s ready. Be patient with what surfaces.

I need to be specific about what I’m saying and what I’m not.

I’m not saying calm down. I’m not saying your anger isn’t warranted, your grief isn’t real, or your fear isn’t rational. Every one of those emotions is a legitimate response to what is actually happening in the world right now. I am not asking you to feel less.

I’m asking you to be able to think while you feel.

Outrage Is Not the Problem

The problem is what we do with the outrage when we’re dysregulated.

When the nervous system is in a survival state — sympathetic overdrive, dorsal vagal shutdown — we lose access to the prefrontal cortex. The parts of the brain responsible for nuance, long-term thinking, creative problem-solving, and genuine empathy go offline. We default to binary sorting: good/bad, us/them, hero/villain. We attack. We shame. We perform our outrage for an audience instead of directing it toward anything that could actually shift the conditions we’re outraged about.

This isn’t a call to bypass your emotions. It’s a call to metabolize them.

If you’re still sitting with fear right now, don’t push it away. Take your breath to it. Find where it lives in your body and breathe there — slow, low, steady. You don’t have to understand it or fix it. Just let your breath be with it. That’s not weakness. That’s the beginning of integration.

If you’re sitting with rage, same thing. Don’t perform it. Don’t suppress it. Breathe into it. Let it be information, not a directive.

If you’re still numb — that’s okay too. You might sit with one item from the list above, just one, and see if anything stirs. Even a whisper of something. If it does, breathe into that. If it doesn’t, breathe into the stillness and trust that your system will open when it’s ready.

There is a difference between reacting from activation and responding from clarity. Both involve fire. One burns the house down. The other lights the way forward.

Why Co-Regulation Matters More Than Ever

And this is where co-regulation becomes not just useful, but essential — maybe more than it’s ever been.

However, nervous system regulation isn’t only an individual practice. Research in interpersonal neurobiology has shown that one regulated nervous system in proximity to others can shift the physiology of the people around it. Not through words. Not through argument or convincing. Through presence. Your vagal tone, your breathing pattern, your groundedness — these are not passive. They’re contagious. Mirror neurons and autonomic co-regulation mean that when you are anchored, you become a tuning fork.

This doesn’t mean everyone in the room suddenly gets calm. It doesn’t mean conflict disappears. It means the field shifts just enough for someone to think. For someone to pause before reacting. For a different conversation to become possible.

In a world this activated — with wars escalating, disclosures landing, trust collapsing, and our very biology being rattled by forces we can’t see — that might be everything.

The Most Radical Thing You Can Do

I’m not telling you to disengage. I’m not telling you to stop caring. I’m telling you that the most radical thing you can do right now is regulate your own nervous system and then — from that place — act.

And every time you do this — pause, breathe, choose response over reaction — you’re not just handling this moment. You’re building capacity for the next one.

Because the world does need changing. That much is clear.

Furthermore, we are eight billion citizens on this planet. Not subjects. Not audiences. Not content consumers scrolling through the collapse. Citizens. And the change that’s needed is not going to come from the systems that created these conditions. It’s not going to come from leaders whose public faces mask private conduct so disqualifying that, if we knew, we would never have handed them our trust — and whose hidden compromises shape the decisions that govern our lives without our knowledge or consent. The change is going to come from us.

So here is what I’m asking.

If it all feels aswirl right now — if the impulse is to do something, anything, just to stop feeling it — that is not the time to act. That urgency isn’t clarity. It’s discomfort looking for a discharge. And the world does not need more half-aimed reactions born from the desperation to stop hurting. We do not need rushed. We do not need half-thought. We need people who can sit with the fire long enough to let it become fuel instead of shrapnel.

And when you’re ready — when you can feel the fire without being consumed by it — let that response be something real. Show up at the town hall and ask the hard question, not from outrage but from clarity. Choose where your money goes with your eyes open. Stand next to someone who’s struggling and don’t turn away — and know that sometimes standing next to them looks like holding the space so they can act, resourcing the person who’s on the front line, or simply refusing to look away when everyone else does. Say no to what your gut tells you is wrong, even when it costs you. Build something — a conversation, a community, a practice, a family culture — that embodies what you wish the world looked like. Not every role is direct action. Some of the most powerful work is what makes someone else’s direct action possible.

Not from your wound. Not from your panic. Not from the performance of caring.

From the place underneath all of that. The one that’s still here after the fire. The one that knows.

That’s not spiritual bypassing. That’s leadership. And the world is asking for it.

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*If you want to go deeper into nervous system regulation, co-regulation, and building the internal capacity this kind of leadership requires — that’s the work I do. You can find me at rowan-wellness.com.*

Sheila Rumble

Sheila is a QHHT practitioner, breathwork facilitator, and the founder of Rowan Wellness in the Charlotte, NC area. Her work focuses on nervous system regulation, somatic integration, and helping people build the internal capacity to hold both their healing and their humanity. She is the author of the forthcoming book The Intersection of You and Me.

Images created with AI (Midjourney) • rowan-wellness.com