The Subtle Art of Chillapse

There’s this thing humans do:

They get so scared about something bad that’s about to happen to them, they start to get nervous just thinking about it. Pretty soon, they’re so paralyzed by their own fear, they can’t do anything about it.

It’s called anticipatory anxiety.

For example, night owls like me hate waking up early. So when we run into a situation with no alternative, what do we do? Do we go to bed early and rest up? Of course not. We stay awake all night, dreading the morning appointment. Our actions make it all far worse than it would’ve been.

Now imagine something a thousand times worse than a morning appointment. You know, something like the collapse of industrial civilization, and possibly the end of all life as we know it. That brings on a wicked case of anticipatory anxiety, and the internet has given it all kinds of names to shame us for feeling something that’s completely natural to the human experience.

It’s funny how the alleged guardians of our mental health jump at every chance to pass judgment on everything we do, isn’t it?

The gurus have appropriated the phrase “doomscrolling,” originally a joke about a largely normal, even healthy mechanism for processing all the danger in our lives. In the original sense, people don’t doomscroll because they’re addicted to bad news. They doomscroll because they’re trying to keep up with threats and important information that pertains to their survival. It was funny at first because there’s so many threats now, it’s hard to keep up.

Leave it to the influencer crowd to take something normal, and find a way to make it look and sound abnormal and therefore something they can make us feel guilty about, largely for the sake of selling goop. As we’ve seen now, they’re perfectly willing to bash us for caring about problems we didn’t cause. The last thing in the world they want is for anyone to think about anything other than themselves. We’re more profitable when we’re selfish and tuned out.

And yet…

It’s true that you can’t dwell in doom 24/7. Your nervous system isn’t designed for that, and part of staying connected to the world means knowing when to take retreats from all the horrible stuff happening and relax. But how do you relax when you know the world is falling apart?

You chillapse.

I’m not trying to be cute. You know that moment in the first Avengers movie when the Hulk says, “I’m always angry.”

It’s like that.

Honestly, there’s no other way. Some of us can never forget the world is collapsing. We can never tune it out. We’re always thinking about it, even when we don’t think we’re thinking about it. Maybe the 2020s have rewired our brains, or maybe we were born this way, or maybe it’s a little of both. There’s a truth here from psychology, and it’s related to the notion of anticipatory anxiety.

It’s called the pink elephant problem.

See, the harder you try not to think of a pink elephant, the more you think about it. The same problem applies to happiness, by the way. Research has found that the very act of thinking about your happiness makes you less happy.

But how do you not think about collapse?

Simple, you stop trying.

When someone out there recommends the healthy way to approach doom is to stop reading about it, stop thinking about it, and stop talking about it, they’re not recommending anything that even remotely aligns with best practices in mental health. In my experience, any form of therapy means you face your fears and deal with them, and the point of counseling and treatment is to provide people with a safe place and safe methods to work through their emotions.

Telling someone to stop thinking about collapse isn’t therapy. Neither is pressuring them to pretend to feel happy.

It’s repression.

Repression might make us all easier to deal with, but it doesn’t solve our problems. Over time, it makes things far worse.

In fact, doomscrolling seems to resemble exposure therapy. Doomscrollers gradually develop a tolerance for collapse and make a place for it in their lives, so they stop reacting to with with so much fear. Many of us with trauma are familiar with a practice called self-triggering, where we deliberately expose ourselves to a trigger so we can manifest repressed emotions and process them on our own terms, rather than waiting for them to sneak up on us. This can be dangerous, and not something to do without planning, but it’s often worth it.

As someone who has self-triggered with everything from horror movies to art museums to process my complex childhood trauma, I’ve found the best way to “overcome” your doomscrolling is to get it out of your system. At least in my experience, I’ve reached a point where I know when I’ve consumed enough. I have an adequate sense of how bad things are.

Then I can sleep.

I’m obviously not a therapist or a psychologist, but I’m someone who lived through deep trauma and learned how to manage it. I did it to recover from a childhood filled with abuse, and I did it to deal with doom.

Over time, my doomscrolling has fallen off a good bit. It’s not because I avoided it. If anything, I went way through the looking glass, reading the history of doom all the way back to 536 AD, the beginning of the worst time to be alive. I know one day I'll have to face a painful mortality, regardless of whether or not the world is ending. I probably won't get to leave this life from a comfortable bed in the middle of peaceful dreams. Ultimately, death is death. One of my grandmas died at the age of 90, at her kitchen table, surrounded by family. One minute, she was talking. Then she nodded off. Then she was gone.

We should be so lucky.

My mom had a long painful death, and there’s a chance I’ll have one too. Until then, I drink espresso. I chill. I scroll. I read about collapse. I don’t mindlessly wheel through social media. I focus. I gather articles and books with specific questions in mind, and I share the answers. I talk with people online about collapse. I watch documentaries and YouTube videos.

I make plans. I make things.

When I do this, I feel calm. I feel relaxed.

I’m chillapsed.

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