Your Thursday Three Things for April 9, 2026
The World Is Asking You to Panic. Here's What to Do Instead.
This week on Men Talking Mindfulness, (A Focus Now Training Podcast) Will and I talked about something that’s been sitting heavy on a lot of people lately. The US-Israel campaign against Iran has spread into a regional conflict. The Straits of Hormuz are disrupted. Gas prices are climbing. And if you’ve been anywhere near a news feed or a social media app in the last few weeks, your nervous system already knows something is wrong, even if you’re sitting safely at your kitchen table in Colorado (Like I am now as I write this).
This newsletter is about what that does to your mind and body, why the panic is partially by design, and what you can actually do about it. Because cooler heads don’t prevail by accident.
Why the Word “War” Hits the Body Before the Brain
I was stationed in Bahrain for a stretch in 2014-2015, not deployed, actually stationed there. While there, I got put on an emergency security alert email list. I have tried to unsubscribe from that list for eleven years. Can’t do it.
So I’ll be sitting here in Colorado and my phone buzzes with a shelter-in-place alert. Incoming missiles. Find a bunker. And something in my body responds to that, even though I’m on the other side of the planet. That’s not irrational. That’s your nervous system doing exactly what it was built to do.
The nervous system doesn’t process perceived danger and actual danger differently. If you see headlines about bombs and casualties and regional escalation, your body starts scanning for threats the same way it would if the threat were real and close. The brain reads the emotional intensity of the information and responds accordingly. And the media knows this, which is why the language of war coverage is always immediate, always urgent, always designed to feel like it’s happening right outside your door.
Ok… brace yourself. We’re about to get a little woo-woo for a second. Will described it well on the show. The root chakra in yogic tradition, called Muladhara, sits at the base of the entire energy system and governs survival, safety, food, shelter. When that base gets rattled by news like this, it doesn’t just affect your mood. It disrupts the whole system above it. You don’t feel grounded because, from your nervous system’s perspective, the ground isn’t safe.
What Fear Does to Your Thinking
Here’s what happens when the threat response activates. Blood moves away from the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for complex reasoning, and toward the extremities. You get faster and more reactive. Your capacity for complex thinking drops. And critically, something else disappears too: curiosity.
Curiosity is a function of a calm nervous system. When you’re in survival mode, curiosity goes offline. You stop asking “what am I missing?” and start asking “who do I blame?” You stop wanting to understand the full picture and start looking for the fastest, simplest explanation that confirms what your gut is already telling you. Then you find the media source that gives you that explanation on a loop, and your echo chamber deepens.
This also affects empathy. When fear activates, we shrink our circle of concern. We protect ourselves, our family, our tribe. The people outside that circle start to become abstractions. They get “othered.” And once people are othered, the cruelty that gets directed at them stops feeling like cruelty. It starts feeling like defense.
And unfortunately, that’s just how we’re wired. But it can be worked with.
Manufacturing Consent
In 1988, Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman published Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. Walter Lippmann had introduced the underlying concept back in 1922. The argument is this: corporate media manipulates through structure not secret coordination. Ownership, advertising dependency, sourcing relationships, fear of legal and political consequences, and a rotating fear ideology. Chomsky and Herman identified these as five filters. Together, they shape what gets reported, how it gets framed, and what gets killed quietly before it ever runs.
The fifth filter is the most relevant right now. Chomsky called it the enemy filter. Originally it was anti-communism. After the Cold War, the war on terror replaced it. Today the enemy filter is whatever the designated threat is, and it serves a consistent purpose: a society in fear is easier to manage. People in survival mode don’t ask hard questions. They demand protection. They accept costs they would never accept if they were calm and thinking clearly.
Knowing this makes you harder to manipulate. You can still form opinions about what’s happening. But when you understand the architecture of the media environment you’re operating in, you make more deliberate choices about what you consume, how often, and from how many different sources.
Mindfulness - It’s an Active Practice
I want to address something directly. There’s a version of this conversation where it sounds like we’re saying: don’t care about the war. Retreat into your breath. The world is what it is. That’s not what we’re saying.
But mindfulness is actually deeper contact with reality. It means noticing what’s happening on the outside with more clarity, and simultaneously paying attention to what’s happening inside you, because those two things are connected. When you’re activated, your read of the external situation gets distorted. Mindfulness creates the gap between the stimulus and your reaction, and in that gap, you can choose your response instead of just executing your reflex.
Seth Hickerson introduced us to a framework he calls STEA: Stimulus, Thought, Emotion, Action. When something triggers you, the reflex is to move immediately from stimulus to action. Mindfulness builds the capacity to slow down and notice the thought and the emotion before the action. In a gunfight, that gap doesn’t exist because it doesn’t need to. In a conversation about geopolitics, or in a hard conversation with your team, that gap is everything.
What You Can Actually Do
Check the news once, intentionally. Not compulsively. If something significant changes, you’ll hear about it from the people around you before you hear about it from a push notification. Choose a time of day, check once, then put it down. The dopamine loop of compulsive checking is an intentional feature of the platform, not an accident. It was designed to keep you coming back.
Distinguish between understanding and endorsing. You can be curious about why people on the other side of a conflict believe what they believe without endorsing the violence or agreeing with the policy. If you can’t describe how the other side sees the situation, you don’t fully understand the conflict. And if you don’t fully understand the conflict, your opinions about it are based on half the information.
Ask more questions than you make statements. In conversations about this, the people who come in with the loudest declarations are usually the most activated. Ask what they mean. Ask what they’re afraid of. Ask what they’d consider a good outcome. The questions do more work than the arguments.
Regulate before you talk to your kids. They read your nervous system before they hear your words. If you’re activated when you explain what’s happening, they absorb the activation before they absorb the information. Get calm first. Then ask them what they’ve heard and what they’re wondering about. Let them guide the conversation.
There’s MUCH more beyond the paywall below but for those of you who may not be paid subscribers, we still wanted to say thank you!
This episode came out of Will and I watching the news too much and feeling the pull of it ourselves. We’re not above any of this. The tools we talk about work. They also take practice. Give yourself some grace for the moments when your nervous system fires before your mindfulness does.
If you’re working on the kind of clarity and leadership that holds up under exactly this kind of pressure, my new book DIAL in Your Leadership: 4 Non-negotiables for Leading with Clarity, Trust, and Purpose is out now. Get it here: https://geni.us/dial And be on the lookout for Will’s and my book, Mindfulness for A**holes!, coming out later this year.
Stay grounded out there. Text MTM to 33777 to get this newsletter delivered, or find us at newsletter.focusnowtraining.com.
As for this week’s episode
Audio: pod.fo/e/3f5fb6 — available now
Video: Valor Media Network on YouTube Thursday, or watch now on the Focus Now Training Substack
MORE BELOW THE PAYWALL FOR PAID SUBSCRIBERS!
