When the News Cycle Lives in the Body: What Therapy Can Hold

There is a kind of morning where I open my phone before I have even reached for water, and within the first thirty seconds my shoulders climb. A headline. A policy. A name being argued about in a chamber I have never been inside. The body knows the news has come in before the mind has caught up.

If you have been waking up like this lately, what you are feeling is not a failure of resilience. It is a body responding to something that is actually happening.

Some of the people I sit with in my Vancouver-based practice, online across Canada, come in carrying political distress that has nowhere to go. Some are watching politics happen to other people. Some are not just watching. They are the ones being talked about. The body of someone who has been made into a political question knows the difference. The bracing is not abstract. The exhaustion is not theoretical. The fear has a target.

This post is for both, and for everyone whose body cannot stand down because the world keeps confirming the threat.

When the body cannot stand down

The nervous system did not evolve for headlines. It evolved for the kind of threat that can be turned toward, fought, fled, or finished. A bear, a flood, a fire. A thing that ends.

What it is being asked to do now is hold continuous, slow, scattered threat that has no end point. Each day brings another piece. The body does not know how to file that. So it keeps the alarm on. Just in case.

This is what doomscrolling actually is. It is not a failing or an addiction to bad news. It is a body trying to monitor what it cannot control, hoping that if it sees the next thing coming, it can prepare. Mostly, it cannot. But the scanning continues, because scanning is what the body knows to do when it senses danger and cannot find rest.

You may have noticed how this lives in you. Tight jaw on waking. A held breath you only catch when something releases it. A tiredness no amount of weekend can reach. Irritation that flares at small things because the bigger things have nowhere to go.

None of this means you are broken. It means your body is doing exactly what it was built to do, in conditions it was not built for. The work, when you are ready, is not to make your body stop responding. It is to give your body a place to come down for an hour, and then for two, and then for a little longer.

When you are the question being argued

For some readers, the political moment is not a backdrop. It is the foreground. Your healthcare. Your right to be addressed correctly. Your safety in changing rooms, on planes, in border lines. Whether the words you use for yourself will be allowed in classrooms.

Trans people in Britain, in the United States, and increasingly in Canada know this texture well. The journalist Shon Faye named it directly in The Transgender Issue: the framing of trans lives as an "issue" is itself the harm. Reduced to a debate, a talking point, a culture-war flashpoint, the actual material conditions of trans lives become harder to talk about, harder to fund, harder to defend.

What I have noticed in the room is that this kind of erasure does not feel like a debate when you are the subject of it. It feels like the slow, daily wearing-down of being asked to defend your own personhood while also paying rent, going to work, picking up kids, getting through the week.

This same texture lands on others too, in their own particular ways. Indigenous people watching land defenders criminalised. Disabled people watching supports cut. Racialised, immigrant, fat, neurodivergent, poor people whose lives keep being reduced to whether they cost the state too much. The shapes are different. The body's response, the slow erosion of being talked about rather than spoken with, is recognisable across them.

Why we say plainly that we are not neutral

Therapy has long been spoken about as if it should be politically neutral. As if the room where someone tries to make sense of their life should be free of values, free of position, free of any opinion the therapist holds about what is happening outside.

I do not believe that is possible. Pretending neutrality is itself a position, and one that often costs the people who already pay the most. To not name what is happening to a client's community is to ask the client to make themselves smaller in the room. To soften, sort, and translate so that the therapist does not have to.

My practice is rooted in anti-oppressive therapy, which is to say that I am not asking you to leave your politics, your community, or your reasonable fear at the door. They are part of what we work with, not something to be set aside.

What embodied and creative therapy can hold

When a body has been on alert for too long, talking it out of the alert often does not work. The mind can know that this hour, in this room, with this person, the threat is not present. The body is slower to believe it.

This is where embodied work earns its place. Not as a technique to be performed, but as a slow attention to what is actually happening in the body right now. A breath that finally lengthens. The weight of a foot on the floor. The release of a held shoulder. None of this fixes the headlines. What it does is offer the body its first real evidence in days, or weeks, or months, that being here is allowed. If you want a longer entry into how I work with the nervous system, body-first anxiety therapy sits alongside this post.

But sometimes the body cannot speak only through breath and weight. Sometimes the news cycle has flooded language so completely that even good words feel thin. This is where creative work matters.

Mark-making, colour, image, found objects, shape. The hand finding the page before the mouth finds the word. The news cycle does something to language. Even the right words start to feel like another piece of content. Working with image and texture lets the part of you that does not have words right now find a way to speak. The mark is not asked to mean anything in particular. It is asked to be made.

In session, this might look like a few minutes with crayon and paper, or sorting found objects from a walk, or cutting and arranging shapes with no plan. The point is not the artwork. The point is the part of you that has gone quiet starting to make a small move outward again.

What becomes possible

If you are tired, that tiredness is not a personal failing. The world has been making demands of your nervous system that no nervous system was built to carry alone. The fact that you are still here, still reaching for ways to keep going, is not nothing.

Therapy will not stop the news. It cannot promise that the political conditions you are watching will change in your timeline, or that the people being made into questions will be made into people again soon. What it can offer is somewhere your body learns it has a place to land, and somewhere the parts of you that have gone quiet can begin to move again.

That is small. It is also not nothing. Many of the people I work with say that finding even an hour of that, regularly, is what lets them stay engaged with the world without being eaten by it.