Earlier this week, Leah had a plan: go to sleep. The decision about whether the United States would bomb Iran was not hers to make or to stop. She was exhausted. She got into bed. And then she lay there in the dark for hours, caught in a loop — what will this mean, what will this mean, what will this mean — until the timeline passed and the decision was made. She went to sleep with a pit in her stomach and woke up feeling almost hungover from the anxiety she'd been carrying through the night.

This episode is for anyone who had a week like that.

Drawing on neuroscience of the stress response and why the body cannot distinguish between immediate and distant threat, psychological research on productive versus unproductive worry, and the evidence base for co-regulation and somatic awareness as genuine tools for navigating collective fear, ...