Finding Ways to Regulate in Uncertain Times

By Zoe Jacoby, MSW Student | January 30th, 2026

We are living in an era where the world can be witnessed at our fingertips. We see one article or post about the joys of humanity and the next about the atrocities, while many of us are experiencing both in our daily lives. There’s no one right way to survive in political violence and social injustices, but we each must find a way. What I’ve found helpful for myself, clients, and the community has been sitting with the emotions, allowing for rest, and cultivating joy and community.

Witnessing our Emotions

I’ve gone through my own journey of battling between two extremes: feeling everything at once or being so consumed and detaching from it all. I often see these extremes reflected in my community. However, as humans, we can’t survive living like that.

Instead, it can be helpful to witness and sit with our emotions without being consumed or detached from them. This starts by permitting ourselves to feel them. This can look like naming the emotions, “this is grief,” or “This feels painful”. Oftentimes, we’re feeling our emotions in our body before we’re able to conceptualize them in our mind. So, without judgment, notice where you feel it in your body (chest, throat, gut), describe the sensation (heavy, tight, buzzing), and witness its movements. During this, your mind may wander, trying to find meaning or feeling more consumed by the feeling and thinking “I am grief.” This would be a good time to gently come back to noticing and grounding. This may look like pressing your feet into the ground beneath you, placing a hand on your heart or belly, or feeling the support of the bed or couch you’re sitting on. You may try narrating what you’re experiencing. “I’m noticing grief” or “Fear is present, and I’m sitting with them”. This helps us to sit beside the emotion without being consumed by it or identifying as it. One of the most important parts of this exercise is to acknowledge and validate those feelings or parts coming up, like “You’re allowed to be here”, “You make sense”, or “I’m not abandoning you”. This can be especially helpful if you are used to minimizing your pain or staying functional at all costs. When you are done, do something regulating like taking a warm shower/bath, going on a walk, or listening to soft music.

Ultimately, many emotions, especially grief, don’t want to be fixed or pushed away – they want to be witnessed.

Resting without Guilt

Many of us struggle to rest without guilt, which means even when we feel like we’re resting, there may be an internalized shame narrative happening at the same time. There are also many different types of rest that we may need, but don’t know about. Because of this, we’re often not truly resting. Allowing for rest honors the limits of our nervous systems and reminds us that restoration is not a luxury, but a necessity. Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith found seven different types of rest to be revitalizing.

• Physical Rest – for the body

• Either passive (sleep, lying down without your phone or TV) or active (gentle movements, massage, stretching)

• Mental Rest – for the thinking mind

• Brain-dump journaling, turning off notifications, repetitive, low-demand tasks (coloring or knitting)

• Helpful when you’re feeling overwhelmed, foggy, or ruminative

• Emotional Rest – for emotional labor and masking

• Taking breaks from caretaking roles, allowing yourself to cry, spending time with people you don’t have to mask or perform for

• Helpful for helpers, trauma survivors, and neurodivergent folks

• Social Rest – for draining interactions

• Saying to plans, silencing group chats, spending time with people who feel regulating

• This may mean fewer people or different people

• Sensory Rest – for sensory input

• Dimming lights, wearing comfy clothes, breaks from screens, silence, or soft music

• Helpful for neurodivergence, anxiety, or overstimulation

• Creative Rest – restoring imagination and curiosity

• Looking at art, reading, being in nature, drawing without expectation or perfection

• Spiritual Rest – connecting you to meaning or purpose

• Prayer, meditation, time in nature, community, connecting to values

• I personally like to sit with trees. Because trees take in carbon dioxide and produce oxygen, I like to imagine that they take in my fears and grief and reshape them into hope and joy.

Finding Joy or Glimmers

In my opinion, finding joy is the most crucial step to feeling alive! I often call little moments of joy glimmers. You may have heard this on social media or from a therapist. This term became popularized when a Clinical Social Worker, Deb Dana, applied polyvagal theory to trauma treatment. A word that is more common is triggers, which are cues of danger that activate our fight, flight, or freeze responses. Glimmers are their opposite or counterpart, meaning cues of safety, connection, and regulation that activate our parasympathetic nervous system. Noticing and cultivating glimmers actually help to regulate the nervous system, increase our ability to tolerate stress, and expand our capacity to engage in healing.

Glimmers can look like any micro moments that spark joy and/or evoke an inner calm. Glimmers aren’t always about feeling happy, but instead about noticing when things feel a tiny bit better than they did before. There are many different types of glimmers to look out for. One is sensory glimmers, like warm sunlight on your face, the smell of coffee or rain, or the weight of a blanket or hoodie. Or they may show up as more relational, like shared laughter, a pet choosing to sit on you, or someone remembering a small fact about you. They can also show up internally, like naturally taking a deep breath, feeling proud even if it’s for 2 seconds, or realizing an emotion passed on its own. Maybe they’re more meaning-based, like doing something that aligns with your values, or feeling connected to a cause or community. Hold onto these moments, and over time, we are able to remember and relearn what safety feels like, one small moment at a time.

I’ve also turned to those who have been able to find joy and hope despite living through generations of historical trauma. Through reading and hearing from Black, Hispanic, and Indigenous authors, activists, artists, etc., grieving, finding joy, rest, community, and nature are what really keep us alive. So, lastly, I’d like to share a few books that have been helpful to me over the years.

• Braiding Sweetgrass – Robin Wall Kimmerer

• Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good – adrienne maree brown

• All About Love – bell hooks

• Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto – Tricia Hersey

• Sister Outsider – Audre Lorde

• My Grandmother’s Hands: Radicalized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies – Resmaa Menakem, LICSW

Cultivating Community

Humans are an interdependent species, meaning that we need each other to survive. We are wired for connection; our nervous systems literally regulate through other people. When the world feels unpredictable, being witnessed, supported, and understood helps our bodies move out of survival mode and back into regulation. When we share our load, our distress becomes more tolerable, and our capacity to cope expands. It’s important to remember that humans have survived as a species because we relied on one another by sharing resources, knowledge, and care. At its core, cultivating community is an act of care and resilience. 

Think about your capacity and needs right now. Maybe you feel called to be a part of a larger action, so finding a social issue you connect with or joining local community organizers may feel helpful to you by being a part of change within systems and governments. Instead, maybe you want to feel more connected to your local community, and joining a mutual aid group may feel more helpful because you are directly supporting others and seeing that impact by sharing skills and resources, and knowing they will do the same for you. Maybe both of those feel overwhelming right now, and you want to focus on building a stronger foundation in your neighborhood or friend group. This could look like getting to know the people around you better and creating more reciprocal relationships. Start to notice skills or passions you’re good at and offer those to others. Maybe you’re good with kids and can offer to babysit for your neighborhood a few times a month for free, or you’re good at cooking and have the money to make extra servings of dinner for the family across the street. Even small acts, like checking in on a neighbor, sitting with someone’s fear, or gathering for conversation, reinforce that we are not alone. 

In uncertain times, our resilience depends on how well we care for ourselves and one another. Together, these practices support healing, sustain hope, and remind us that even in uncertainty, we are not meant to endure alone.