Chasing Safety

How fear tears us apart and how villages rooted in love, inclusion, and truth can bring us back together

I go through periods when I check the news way too often. Almost always, it’s after some national or global crisis (which seems to happen all the time these days). In those moments, all the healthy habits I’ve built to limit my news consumption and steady my nervous system (like minimizing doomscrolling or taking Sundays off) completely fall apart, and I end up binging the news.

And the thing is, I really don’t like checking the news. I actually hate it, but my brain insists on doing it. It’s as if I check just one more time, maybe I’ll find something that will help me feel like my family (and our country) is a little safer.

As a former addiction researcher, the parallels between this sort of compulsive behavior and addiction are not lost on me. Each new crisis feels like a relapse where I fall right back into old, unwanted, and unhealthy patterns. And, as I’ve written and spoken about before, research shows that this behavioral pattern is common. Media consumption of traumatic or violent events (like the Boston Marathon bombing, 9/11, and Covid-19) triggers distress, and this distress drives more media consumption after the next tragedy, driving a vicious cycle of more media consumption and more distress.

Why We Can’t Stop Scrolling

Back during my doctoral and postdoctoral work on addiction, I spent years immersed in the research on “liking” versus “wanting”—an idea introduced by neuroscientists Kent Berridge & Terry Robinson. “Liking” is the actual pleasure of something, while “wanting” is the drive to go after it again and again, even when the pleasure is long gone. Despite what most people think about dopamine, it’s actually less about liking and more about wanting. Dopamine is a key part of why we sometimes keep compulsively chasing things well past the point of joy.

Part of the reason doomscrolling is so irresistible is that our brain’s threat system and dopamine system are tightly linked, especially in environments that are uncertain or unpredictable. When we sense danger, our brain’s threat circuits kick into high alert. At the same time, our brain’s dopamine circuits push us to keep searching for answers when things feel unpredictable (Bromberg-Martin and Monosov, 2020; Jo et al., 2018; Charpentier et al., 2018; Vellani et al., 2020).

Evolutionarily speaking, this mechanism helped us survive. If you heard a rustle in the grass, your brain’s alarm system needed to stay on until you figured out what to do: fight, flee, or relax once you saw a cue that you were safe. But in today’s world, many of the “threats” we face (pandemics, wars, politics, gun violence) are abstract, ongoing, and far beyond our control. That means the alarm never really turns off, and our brain’s dopamine circuitry keeps urging us: check again, just one more time, maybe the next update will finally bring relief.

How Fear Gets Hijacked

This is exactly the biology that authoritarian political movements have learned to exploit. Like other authoritarian movements throughout history, our current leaders don’t just identify threats (the left, immigrants, the trans community, etc.), they also supply the missing safety cue: we will eliminate them. That message gives the brain the closure it’s been scanning for. It ends the uncertainty loop by providing a false resolution. And, for a nervous system desperate for relief, that resolution feels profoundly soothing, even if it’s a lie.

The Safety We Really Need

At the heart of it, we’re all just craving safety.

The problem is that scapegoating offers only the illusion of safety. It divides, destabilizes, and keeps us trapped in fear. What we need instead is a deeper, more inclusive kind of safety—one that’s rooted in love and makes space for everyone, regardless of our differences.

What we need are modern “villages” of safety: spaces and messages that soothe our nervous systems while emphasizing the truth (including the truth that vulnerable populations are not the enemy). We need collective belonging rooted in love, not fear, to help us step out of compulsive, threat-driven cycles, no matter where we fall on the political spectrum.

But this kind of safety doesn’t happen by accident. It requires leaders who know how to (and are willing to) create those conditions.

History offers a powerful example of this in Franklin D. Roosevelt. His now-famous “fireside chats” modeled what calm, reassuring leadership can feel like in crisis. Just eight days after taking office, in the depths of the Great Depression, Roosevelt delivered his first fireside chat to a country reeling from widespread bank closures and collapsing financial confidence. With banks shut under a national “holiday,” he used that first address to explain the banking crisis, outline the government’s plan, and invite the public’s cooperation as banks reopened.

What he gave the American public was exactly what they needed: a sense of safety in the middle of chaos.

That is exactly what we need now.

We need leaders and communities that don’t inflame cycles of fear, but help us step out of them. We need spaces that ground us in safety and connection, instead of throwing us deeper into panic.

Roosevelt showed how it’s done: tell the truth, chart a path forward, and create calm. That combination of honesty and reassurance is precisely what’s missing today.

At our core, we are all driven by a craving for safety. The only real question is whether we let that craving be hijacked by fear and soothed by division and lies, or whether we meet it in modern “villages” of belonging: places where love, inclusion, truth, and community help us regulate our nervous systems again.

What Comes Next

I’m excited to share that I’m teaming up with a partner on a new project. Together, we’re imagining how to build modern “villages” of belonging — not just in theory, but in practice — through stories, science, and community.

If you’d like to get involved, I’d love to hear from you. You can reply to this email, leave a comment below, or reach out directly at contact.dysregulationnation@gmail.com.

More coming soon.

Stay calm, stay connected, and stay regulated.

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