Reclaiming Sanity in an Insane World

This isn’t another article on the US-Iran war, the collapse of the American empire or climate destruction. In addition to examining the crumbling world around us, I like to talk with readers about self-preservation and survival. Part of that requires regaining agency in an uncontrollable, unpredictable world.

We have an evolutionary compulsion to gaze outward. Our brain prioritizes a negativity bias because, in ancestral environments, the watchful tribe survived outside threats. In the digital age, the threats are constant and everywhere, and our biological programming triggers the amygdala to maintain a constant vigilant state with no cue for completion.

I am a news junkie. It is addictive, especially for someone who tries to create a global mosaic out of disparate pieces of information. I constantly search for new pieces of the puzzle, which never gets completed. While this has served me well over the years, helping me anticipate risks to my personal well-being, it has also put me in a constant state of worry.

Uncertainty about the world compels me to seek new outside information. I seek clues to build predictability, but in doing so I uncover new sources of unpredictability. Without ever reaching a state of stability, I am addicted to the dopamine hits pushed by the evolving news cycle.

The consequences of my vice manifest physiologically. Exposure produces anxiety and learned helplessness. Research shows that news increases cortisol reactivity and trauma delivered through screens destroys health because nothing is ever resolved.

Performative Reality vs. Honest Signals

Uncertainty goes beyond actions. Even when an physical action is clear, like the US/Israel attack on Iran, motivations are not. Society, politics, and business are all performative. Truth is hidden by ulterior motives. Individuals manage impressions, projecting a persona while hiding everything else from view. Often, the players themselves aren’t aware of their own motivations.

We are part of this game, manufacturing our own persona for work or social interaction. This social masking is laborious and, for some, exhausting. Yet we participate because the environment requires our performativity to manipulate perception rather than transmit truth. Whether delivering or receiving, parsing truth from deception elevates stress and removes emotional safety. Yet, many of us must do so to put food on the table.

At the macro level, this manifests as an epistemological crisis. Synthetic media and propaganda destabilize shared realities. Algorithms amplify disinformation to stoke outrage. Epistemic vices saturate the public sphere and discourage thinking, pushing the psyche toward cynicism. Yet we don’t stop seeing new information. Nor should we stop.

While it’s exhausting to parse through an infinite supply of misinformation, propaganda, and unknown unknowns, we must. Or, at least, I think we must. How else would we be aware of the world crumbling around us? Helpless to much of it, it’s enough to drive one mad.

Everyone needs a counterbalance to the madness and untruths we face hourly. Building a personal locus of control (LoC) is critical to achieving this.

An external locus of control attributes outcomes to fate, luck, or external, often irrational, entities. Individuals with an external LoC experience helplessness during political shifts. Julian Rotter’s research links an external LoC to depression and psychopathology.

In contrast, an internal locus of control attributes outcomes to personal actions and decisions. Cultivating an internal LoC builds a buffer against a world of untruths and the uncontrollable. Individuals with an internal LoC demonstrate self-efficacy by focusing on variables they control. Redirecting attention toward activities under your control shifts one’s aura from vulnerability to agency.

This came to me as I was playing with my dog the other day. There’s no bullshit when I’m with my dog. I know what she wants and she knows what I want. Our actions shape results. Her emotions are clear: worry, fear, excitement. Despite what some skeptics about dog behavior say, I can even tell when she’s apologizing to me. My dog lives in the truthful moment, providing an antidote to the opacity of the external world.

Dogs require commitment and energy, but the psychological drain doesn’t exist like when navigating the outside world. I can drop my defenses and focus on what is in front of me and exists under my control.

There’s some science behind this: Play stimulates oxytocin, muting the amygdala, reducing blood pressure and cortisol. Dogs provide regard, merging friendship with caregiving. The relationship remains rooted in a system of inputs and outputs. The relationship is within my LoC.

Transitioning from consumption of uncontrollable stimuli to direct participation helps create individual agency. While I think it’s important to understand the world around us, it’s also important to insulate the psyche by immersing in highly controllable activities and relationships.

High-agency activities are good for the soul. You don’t need a dog to do this. Here are some others I’d suggest, all of which happen to be important in a collapsing world:

Gardening: Horticulture engages a physical reality that is highly responsive to your inputs, such as water, soil, and sunlight. The activity expands into harvesting, preserving, and cooking, the fruits of which can be enjoyed by the people around you. This life-giving relationship with the earth builds agency and self sufficiency. Research by Christopher Lowry shows that soil exposes individuals to Mycobacterium vaccae, which triggers serotonin. Gardening engages fascination, experimentation, and allows attention to recover.

Fitness: Health equals autonomy. The body operates as a biofeedback system, and pressure on that system builds strength and endurance. This truth resists manipulation. Eat the right (and right amount of) foods, lift some heavy things, practice mobility, walk. That’s pretty much it. Exercise counters stress by releasing endorphins and BDNF, preparing the nervous system for the psychological stress of the uncontrollable world. It takes time to see aesthetic and physical results, but once you do it’s an enormously motivating sense of achievement. And it’s all within your control. 

Craftsmanship: Manual work forces engagement with reality. After my transient ischemic attack a few years ago, my doctor suggested matching my mental work with physical work. In the workshop, the feedback is binary - either the engine starts or it doesn’t. This simple, transparent judgment provides uncomplicated clarity. Moreover, whether sculpting, drawing or repairing, craftsmanship builds knowledge and supplies a truthful reality, offsetting the outside world of uncertainty.

Epistemic Agency: Learning and intentional deep reading (i.e. reading for the purpose of learning something, rather than simply catching up on the latest crisis) reclaim control. Reading demands focus and engages the prefrontal cortex. Literature activates the Default Mode Network, which acts as the brain's internal autopilot. This system engages during self-reflection and processing memories, which reduces heart rate. Learning skills promotes neuroplasticity and resilience, and mastery fosters deep epistemic agency. It allows individuals to control belief formation without algorithms, propaganda, or politics.

Many activities with a high LoC can lead to a flow state that comes with mastery. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi defines flow as a state of total absorption in an activity. In flow, the individual merges with the task and action becomes effortless. Time loses its standard meaning and self-consciousness disappears. 

Flow results in better performance but it is also triggered by mastery. Like walking, the activity becomes something you just do without thinking. This highly satisfying state regulates emotions by quieting the amygdala. 

Achieving flow requires specific conditions. One must balance the difficulty of a task with their skill level. If the task is too easy, boredom results. If the task is too hard, anxiety spikes. Flow exists at the equilibrium of skill and difficulty, requiring clear goals, immediate feedback, and the removal of distractions. A perfect cure for the outside world.

To reclaim agency, stop looking for truth in the noise. Start finding it in the soil, your body, your hands, and the presence of those who cannot lie to you. Turn your gaze inward to the variables you control. Only then can you withstand crumbling world without losing your mind.

Thank you for reading.

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