The Balanced Nest Podcast · Episode 12
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Our nervous systems were never built for this. And I mean that very literally. Not as a figure of speech, not as a cultural critique. The human nervous system evolved to handle the concerns of a small community, a local environment, the people and situations directly in front of you. Not every tragedy happening simultaneously everywhere in the world, delivered to your pocket all hours of the day with no off switch.
We were never meant to know all of this. And the fact that we do now, that we genuinely can’t not know it, is creating a kind of background dysregulation in a lot of families that nobody is talking about.
What Your Nervous System Is Actually Designed For
Here’s how the threat response is supposed to work. Something happens. Your nervous system mobilizes, heart rate goes up, focus narrows, your body gets ready to respond. And once the threat passes, you settle back down. That’s the full cycle. And that settling only happens when the threat is actually resolved and when there’s a clear end to the thing that activated you.
Digital news has no clear end. There’s always a new crisis, a new piece of information that requires your system to activate. So the settling never comes. Your nervous system stays activated. And over time, that becomes the new normal. You stop noticing how activated you are because activated is just how you feel.
So when you’ve been running at low-grade emergency all day and your kid spills something when you walk in the door… you snap. And the reaction doesn’t match the situation, but you don’t understand why. That’s why. Your system was already maxed out before the spill ever happened.
When I moved out and went to college I decided I was going to start watching the news like an adult. I started having bad nightmares and had to stop. As I got older and understood more about how news is designed to repeat the worst possible things and drill them into your head, it made sense. We are not built to absorb all of that. It is genuinely detrimental to your nervous system and your mental health.
You Bring That Energy Into the Room
A dysregulated parent who’s been consuming heavy content all day cannot show up the same way as a regulated one. Even if you don’t say a single word about what you’ve been reading or watching, you bring that energy into the room. Your kids are reading your energetic state constantly…your body language, your tone, how quickly you move, what your face is doing. When your system is activated they feel it, and it affects their system. Now the whole family is more activated than necessary for no reason anyone can pinpoint.
And on top of that, kids are being directly exposed to content that is genuinely beyond their developmental capacity to process. Not just news. Social media, rapid doom scrolling, the ambient awareness that the world is constantly on fire in some direction. They’re absorbing it without any framework for what to do with it. And a lot of us are passively letting this happen because it’s everywhere and it’s hard to contain.
What We Actually Do in Our House
When my kids were small I noticed pretty clearly that too much TV changed their behavior and attitude. I tried to keep it to older musicals with slower pacing, we watched Hello Dolly a lot, because the pace of kids’ TV today is genuinely overstimulating compared to what a developing nervous system needs. As they got older and wanted to pick their own shows, I could see how certain content activated them.
What made the difference was talking about it. When I’m cutting off a show because they’re acting a fool, I say it plainly: my job is to keep you healthy and safe. Your brain is not healthy right now. That’s not punishment, it’s information. And checking back in with their bodies after certain shows has been really informative…it gives the whole conversation language so they can eventually check in with themselves. They’ve gotten to a point where they’ll notice when something is affecting them and shut it down on their own.
Neither of my kids is on social media. I’ve been very open with them about what kind of weird things can show up on the internet and what to do when they do. We deleted YouTube Kids early because honestly the creepiest stuff was targeted directly at children. Regular YouTube with parental awareness has been better. We play Roblox together and I’ve been upfront from day one: you do not chat on Roblox unless you know that person in real life. I’ve told them exactly what kinds of people try to chat with kids online, why they lie about who they are, what they ask for. Yes, that information is a little scary. But I’d rather it come from me than from a situation we can’t take back.
Informed vs. Overwhelmed
I’m not saying to shut all the technology down or pretend the world isn’t complicated. I want my kids to understand that the world has hard truths. But there is a real difference between being informed and being overwhelmed. A lot of what’s being called “staying informed” right now is actually nervous system overload dressed up as awareness.
The question isn’t whether we know things. It’s how much, in what form, with what context, and what support is there for processing it afterward. Most of my friends know that if something major happens, they need to call me and tell me because I will miss it. I’ve made a choice to only let certain information in because the anxiety and emotional turmoil of constant exposure doesn’t make me a better parent. It makes me a more activated one.
For kids specifically, age-appropriate and context-appropriate are different things. Something can be age-appropriate in terms of content and still be completely inappropriate in terms of what it does to a developing nervous system. The goal isn’t locking everything down, it’s teaching them how to navigate it. Being present in what they’re consuming. Talking about what they’re seeing, how it makes them feel, what they think about it, and what’s actually in their control. That active processing together is what turns information into understanding instead of anxiety.
What to Do This Week
Audit your consumption. Not to feel guilty, just to gather data. Notice how much of your day involves things coming at you that activate your nervous system and what the ratio of activation to settling actually looks like. Create at least one genuine tech-free, news-free window each day. An hour before you check anything in the morning. An hour before bed. Let your system actually settle without new input coming in.
Be more intentional about what your kids are exposed to and when and with what context. When something big is happening in the world and your kids are already aware of it, have the conversation actively instead of letting them absorb it passively. What do you know about this? How does it make you feel? What’s actually in your control? That last question is the one worth sitting with. Because when we feel out of control, we go off the rails. Figuring out what’s actually in your control makes the rest more manageable.
And right now, before you keep scrolling, three deep breaths, feel your feet on the floor, wiggle your toes, and come back to your life, your family, what’s actually in front of you.
Come talk about this in the Balanced Nest community on Skool. I want to know what your relationship with news and social media actually looks like and what you’ve tried that’s helped. Comment CONNECT on any episode or go to skool.com/the-balanced-nest-1542.
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