How to keep your footing, and what to do when you get caught in a doomscroll.

I grew up in an idyllic landscape; Southern California in the 1970s. I had a penchant for ditching school and spending my day at the beach whenever possible. There are some rules I learned at the beach about keeping my myself grounded, not panicking, and respecting forces greater than me. I was unable to surf even though I wanted to, and I didn’t understand why until my later years.That taught me another lesson.

You see, my ankles are malformed, they look okay and generally work alright but they lack a normal range of motion. They can’t bend forward enough to surf, to ride a skateboard, to water ski, or to downhill ski. There’s a quote in a movie I can’t abide by an actor that I also don’t appreciate,it’s “A man’s got to know his limitations” – Harry Callahan in Magnum Force. For all my dislike of the source, that quote has been deeply informative for me since it came out. We all have limitations and we have to learn how to work with them, around them, or in spite of them. Since I didn’t value the above activities enough to do the required work to still participate, I let them go. Instead I pursued variations: body surfing and cross country skiing. Letting go, accepting my limits, and understanding my own priorities and goals helps limit my choices and makes challenges into manageable bites. I don’t have to do what others can do to meet my expectations for myself.

Now those expectations for myself have had to be tempered due to the sometimes sheer enormity and power of elemental forces. There are emotions that would give gravity a run for its title as an insurmountable force. There are experiences that can rival a sunrise and there are moments in life that can hit us like a rogue wave. We can have all the best intentions and the wisdom of generations tucked into our back pocket, but when you get hit from behind all you can do is hold fast, hold your breath, and let it wash over you. That is the mental image I get when my PTSD is getting triggered. It’s a black wave that I can feel coming up behind me, but there’s no running, no ducking, and all I can do is let it wash over me while trying to stay upright. Not all the forces that are greater than me, are emotional. It’s really quite a huge list and generally most everything is greater than I am. So I need to keep my expectations within reason. Hopes have no limits, neither do intentions, those are not the same as an expectation.

Since I am but one wee small human, not noticeable to things like time and tide, panic is always nearby and free for the taking. But panic is a flawed option. It disconnects our thinking brain from our survival brain. Generally those two parts of our brain don’t spend time together or speak the same language. I would panic quite easily when I was young. I’m not exactly sure which near death, incredibly risky, face my greatest fear experience over the years muted my personal panic button. Muted my panic button is kind of key here. I could disassociate with the best of them when lives needed saving, when the drift was heading for the cliff, or when I was getting attacked. But that panic was still there and piling up like leftovers in the back of the fridge. Hence the PTSD and that dark wave of emotion. Ignoring panic isn’t the best option. It really works much better if you can give your brain the option of thought right before you default to panic. That takes practice. A lot of people use mindfulness to learn how to do this and I’m sure it can work. I didn’t know about mindfulness but I did notice that there’s a split second when nothing happens before the path to panic, or any emotion, is chosen. That is the part I found most difficult to grasp and use for my benefit. It’s not 100 percent, but if you keep working it can get close.

It’s useful because it’s what keeps me grounded more than anything else. Not being able to surf, meant that I spent most of my time close to the sand. Where I grew up the edge of the continental shelf was fairly close to the shore and dropped off dramatically creating small but energetic waves. Those little waves don’t seem like much but one thing they do is pull at your feet and the sand under them. As a kid I learned that if I curled my toes into the sand and shifted with the movement that I wouldn’t get knocked down. Getting knocked down was mightily embarrassing to my 4th grade self. Due to those greater forces though, there were times when I did get knocked over, or had a wave crash over the top of my head when I wasn’t paying attention. When that happens the lesson was the same; don’t panic, find the ground because the bubbles are going to spin and the sand will too, remember the air is opposite the ground, head that way and hold your breath. Did I learn this the first time? Heck no! But all these things go from being a conscious decision to habit with use.

Getting caught in a doomscroll feels a lot like getting caught in the whitewater of a river. But, I think of getting out of it more like how you get out of a riptide. Realize and recognize where you are and what’s going on, then swim parallel with the coast until you have passed the riptide area. Swim back to your regularly visited shoreline. In other words, there’s absolutely nothing you can do about the content in front of you. It’s bigger than you. Leave the content and go search until you find something that lifts you up. Go watch cats knocking down dominoes. Don’t go back to where you were until you are ready.

Over the years, I’ve found the ground where I can dig my toes in, in myself. When I read my fellow humans despair, when I am offered the opportunity to see the bodies, I have to choose each time which path I take. The road signs I use are: is this just gossip, do I actually need to see bodies (after all these years I have seen too many to learn anything new from a picture), is this new information/facts, and is it something I can do anything about? Most of the news is gossip, meaning that it’s people predicting possible futures or people opining on issues rather than news of actual events. None of that helps me ground myself, or not panic. It doesn’t help for creating solutions because no real problems have occurred, yet. When it’s hot air, I take myself a good, long break. I now read some otherworldly fantasy novel, step outside, visit my pigeon, or some such endeavor that reconnects me with what’s important to me.