I've Been Through 9/11, 2008, and the Pandemic. This Feels Different.

I've been doing this for 24 years.

I started my first day of clinic on September 11th, 2001. I made it through the end of the dot-com bust. The housing crash in 2008. I had two kids 13 months apart (that stress was personal, not global). The pandemic. Riots. All of it.

This week feels different.

I don't know how else to say it. It feels deeper. Spiritual. Subconscious. Almost like a universal subconscious shift that everyone's picking up on whether they realize it or not.

And I don't like it.

What's Different This Time

Previous crises had boundaries. Economic collapse. Health crisis. Political chaos. They were massive, but they were contained within specific domains.

This one feels like all of them at once, plus something underneath that nobody's talking about openly.

It's not just fear. It's the sense that the ground itself is unstable. That the rules we thought governed reality don't apply anymore. That the institutions we relied on—even if we didn't trust them—are either breaking or have already broken.

My patients are picking up on it even when they can't articulate it. "I just feel off." "Something's wrong but I don't know what." "I can't shake this feeling."

That's not anxiety in the traditional sense. That's your nervous system accurately reading the collective field you're embedded in.

Why Your Nervous System Is Responding Like This

Your nervous system doesn't just respond to your immediate personal environment. It responds to the collective field you're embedded in.

When everyone around you is dysregulated, your nervous system mirrors it. This is what Rupert Sheldrake calls morphic resonance—fields of information that biological systems communicate through. Collective stress affects individual physiology through mechanisms we're only beginning to understand.

Your brain has mirror neurons. They're designed to help you read social cues, predict behavior, and stay safe in groups. But they also mean you unconsciously absorb the emotional state of everyone around you.

When the collective field is chaotic, your HPA axis (hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal axis) responds to ambient threat levels whether you consciously recognize them or not.

This is why "just relax" doesn't work right now. You're not just processing your personal stress. You're processing the collective stress of everyone in your field.

Your adrenals are bearing the load of both your individual stress and the collective dysregulation around you.

What's Actually Happening Beneath the Surface

Here's the uncomfortable truth nobody's saying out loud:

This isn't a temporary crisis we're waiting to end so we can go back to normal.

This is a phase transition.

The old systems are breaking. The new ones haven't formed yet. We're in the in-between space. That's terrifying for nervous systems designed to predict, control, and find stability.

The Epstein files. Government corruption on full display. ICE raids. Institutional collapse. Economic instability. None of this is shocking anymore. But the cumulative weight of it, the relentless nature of it, the sense that there's no bottom to how bad it can get—that's new.

And your body knows it before your conscious mind does.

Your adrenal glands are trying to produce enough cortisol to handle continuous threat. The science behind the adrenal gland explains how this system works, but the short version is: it's not designed for sustained crisis without resolution.

The Mechanism: Social Contagion of Stress

Stress is socially contagious.

When you're in a room with someone who's anxious, your cortisol levels rise in response. When your social group is collectively dysregulated, your nervous system adapts to match the ambient stress level.

This is an evolutionary survival mechanism. If everyone in your tribe is on high alert, there's probably a good reason. Your nervous system doesn't want to miss the memo.

The problem is we're no longer in small tribes. We're connected to millions of people through screens, most of whom are also stressed, anxious, and dysregulated. The signal-to-noise ratio is broken. Your nervous system is trying to respond to ambient threat levels from the entire internet.

It can't keep up.

This is why limiting exposure to news and social media isn't "burying your head in the sand." It's recognizing that your nervous system wasn't designed to process global-scale threat information 24/7.

What To Do When Nothing Feels Stable

You can't think your way out of nervous system dysregulation. You have to regulate the body first.

Here's what actually works when everything feels unstable:

1. Create Anchor Points

Routine. Ritual. Structure. When everything else is chaos, create predictable patterns in your immediate environment.

Same wake time. Same meals. Same movement practice. Your nervous system needs something it can count on when everything else feels unpredictable.

2. Tend Your Immediate Circle

You can't fix the world. You can take care of your family, your close relationships, your local community.

Draw that circle tight. Invest there. Let the rest of the noise fall away.

Focus on what's within your sphere of actual influence. Everything else is just information you're consuming but can't act on.

3. Physical Body Regulation

Breathwork. Movement. Sleep. Protein at every meal. These aren't luxuries. They're survival tools right now.

Your nervous system is stuck in sympathetic overdrive. You have to force it back into parasympathetic rest.

Five minutes of box breathing. A 20-minute walk. Eight hours of sleep. These things matter more than ever when your baseline stress level is already maxed out.

4. Limit Exposure to the Collective Field

Turn off the news. Delete social media, or at least put strict time limits on it. Stop absorbing everyone else's panic.

You need information. You don't need immersion in collective dysregulation.

There's a difference between staying informed and mainlining anxiety from millions of strangers.

5. Find Something Bigger Than Yourself

Faith. Purpose. Service. Something that anchors you beyond your immediate circumstances.

This is not the time to be untethered. Find what grounds you spiritually, philosophically, or through service to others, and hold onto it.

When everything feels meaningless and chaotic, meaning becomes your most important survival tool.

The Only Way Out Is Through

I can't tell you when this feeling is going to lift. I can't tell you the world's going to stabilize tomorrow or next month or next year.

What I can tell you is this: the only way out of this is through it.

And the best way to get through it is with your nervous system balanced, your adrenals functioning, and your body nutritionally sound.

You can't control what's happening in the world. But you can control whether your body has the resources to handle it.

That means:

• Testing your adrenal function properly (cortisol rhythm, DHEA, pregnenolone)
• Supporting what's depleted with the right supplements for your specific pattern, not generic protocols
• Fixing your nutrition so your body has the building blocks to produce the hormones and neurotransmitters it needs
• Regulating your nervous system daily so you're not running on fumes

This is not optional anymore. This is survival preparation.

You Need a Foundation That Can Handle What's Coming

I started my practice on 9/11. I've been through every major crisis of the last 24 years.

This one feels different because it is different.

The dot-com bust was economic. 2008 was financial. The pandemic was a health crisis. Those all had clear boundaries and eventual resolution points.

This is a systems-level breakdown. Multiple domains collapsing simultaneously with no clear end point. That's what makes it feel so destabilizing. There's no light at the end of the tunnel yet because we're still in the tunnel.

Your nervous system evolved to handle acute threats with clear resolutions. It didn't evolve to handle sustained ambiguous threat with no resolution in sight.

But you can build resilience. You can support your body's stress response systems. You can create stability in your immediate environment even when the larger world is unstable.

The world's not going back to normal. Normal is gone.

The question is: are you going to fall apart with it, or are you going to build yourself strong enough to handle what's next?

Put the man together. The world will take care of itself.

If you're experiencing symptoms of chronic stress, adrenal exhaustion, or nervous system dysregulation and you're in the Frisco, Texas area, our practice specializes in comprehensive adrenal testing and Applied Kinesiology evaluation. We can test what's actually depleted and build a targeted protocol. Schedule an appointment to start building the foundation you need to get through this.