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Too much stress for too long deactivates our higher brain functions.

Dysregulation is contagious, but so is co-regulation.

Simple practices can bring our higher brains back online.

The distress we’re all feeling right now is our helpful alarm system to detect threats to our security and health. We need it to survive. And yet too much stress for too long dysregulates our nervous systems, regressing us all towards the harmful dynamics that created so much of our stress in the first place.

Right now, it feels like we’re tailspinning down a dangerous spiral. When most everyone is dysregulated, our reactivity creates an unsafe world. And without safety, everyone gets even more dysregulated, pushing us towards escalating disorder in all our interdependent systems, from the health of our bodies to our communities, countries, geopolitical relations, and ecosystems.

But no one is stupid or evil, even when we’re acting in unhealthy ways. We all just have times when we temporarily fry our abilities to respond more skillfully in favour of knee-jerk survival reactions. In these moments, our higher brain’s prefrontal cortex—the part that functions in complex reasoning, such as considering long-term consequences, values, other perspectives, and empathy—is deactivated by stress. Instead, we flip into the false refuge of certainty: We know we’re right, stick to our story, and shame and blame anyone who suggests otherwise.

Our nervous system’s regulation acts like an oven’s thermostat. We function best when we’re in balance and not too hot or too cold. But there are many situations that require us to turn up or down the heat.

In threatening environments, we want to notice and feel our emotions more so they can signal important information and guide our behaviors. When our emotional signals heat up to alert us to a potential threat, we become more activated, with louder body sensations, more alarming thoughts that match the theme of the emotion, and intense urges to act in line with the emotion’s message.

Depending on how sensitive our alarm system is set (based on our unique biology and adaptations to our past environments) and how much practice we’ve had in holding distress (such as with opportunities to learn and practice emotional regulation skills from the co-regulation of others), we can move into high levels of activation while still staying regulated. For example, we can be very hot with anger while using it in a skillful way to solve the problems it’s signaling.

Yet when faced with more stress than we have the capacity to hold, our nervous systems can dysregulate. We can’t rationalize with each other in this state. No amount of reasoning with facts, consequences, or hopes of understanding another’s perspective will convince a brain whose prefrontal cortex is deactivated. Instead, these strategies can get us more rigidly stuck in our stress responses if we feel more threatened in the process.

Adding to the challenge, dysregulation is highly contagious. Our alarm systems can be hijacked by those who are already regressed into these dynamics—or exploiting this vulnerability for their own gain.

In this threatened state, we don’t trust in "we" anymore. It’s every person for themselves. Instead, we can find ourselves acting in ways that can harm our collectives, such as seeking the dynamics of dominance that our fight mode might activate, or the indifference or dehumanization of being overstressed into freeze or dissociated states, or dividing and disconnecting from others in flight mode.

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While we need healthy boundaries about what behavior is not OK to protect our collective from harm, our divisions heal through contact and care, through showing up and allowing each other to see our vulnerabilities. If we create a culture of belonging, instead of shunning and shaming each other when our past conditioning or stress responses push us to act in unhelpful ways, we can acknowledge the uncomfortable mess of being human in a dysregulated world and try to co-regulate each other back into balance.

When we, as a group or individual, begin to dysregulate, we can work to solve the problems that our three subcortical threat networks of rage, separation distress, and fear are signaling. When our rage network is signaling a threat, we can work to regain a sense of agency (by ensuring a sense of autonomy, equity, and justice). When our separation distress network is signaling, we can work to re-establish a sense of belonging (by connecting within safe and supportive cultures). And when our fear network is activated, we can try to seek safety and consistent and clear boundaries and expectations.

We can also practice a wide variety of skills to help us bring our own nervous systems back into balance, such as practices that bring on our parasympathetic nervous system, like paced breathing, where we take slow belly breaths with a longer exhale, engaging in intense exercise, or dunking our face in ice cold water or using icepacks on our face to bring on our dive response (check with your health care provider if you have heart problems first that would make it dangerous to lower your heart rate or blood pressure).

Even mindfully labeling our emotional states can bring our prefrontal cortex online, such as recognizing that a wave of anger or fight mode is here right now. When we can learn to identify what state is passing through us, with compassion and care both for ourselves and others, we are more empowered to respond effectively, rather than feeling like we are driven by forces outside of our control. We can remember that these states are not permanent or personal. They are natural responses to potential threats in our environment. In this way, we can thank our emotional states for trying to keep us safe, rather than judging ourselves for having these survival responses.

At the same time, we can remember that our systems are designed to have many false alarms so we don’t miss any threats. So we need to also assess whether these alarms are speaking to present problems to solve, or simply identifying patterns from the past that remind us of danger, even when the present is actually safe.

While our dysregulation into the depths of hate, panic, and apathy is contagious, so is the light of compassion, connection, and hope. Just as we can all be hijacked by dysregulation, we also have the power to help each other co-regulate and come back online, revealing the light in each of us, one person at a time.

Sometimes, the most generous gift we can offer the world is to work to regulate our own nervous systems so we can lovingly recognize when one another has regressed into unhealthy dynamics and then support each other to return to health. Love is continuing to care for each other even when we’re acting in unhelpful ways.

Cheek, J. (2026). It's Not You, It's the World: A Mental Health Survival Guide for Us All. Collins: Toronto.

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