The midterms are stressing us all. Here are five ways to calm down.

30 October 2026 at 17:06

The madness of the midterm elections is upon us, and many of us are struggling. We’re doom-scrolling and compulsively refreshing polling data. We’re losing sleep.

As someone who has hosted a wellness podcast for more than a decade, I’ve been thinking about how to manage this stress — for myself and others. Here are five common misconceptions about how to stay sane in insane times, as well as some workarounds. Please take what works for you and leave the rest.

Misconception No. 1: Self-care is self-indulgent

If you are someone who worries that taking time for yourself is selfish, please know that it’s actually a public service. It can equip you to better respond to a world on fire.

Happiness expert Gretchen Rubin has some advice I love: “Treat yourself like a toddler.” In other words, make sure you eat well and get enough sleep. Engage in the practices that work for you — meditation, exercise, socializing — and do it guilt-free. Not only do you deserve rest, but self-care is also good citizenship.

Here is a super-quick practice that helps to regulate my nervous system year-round: Take three deep breaths. It sounds deceptively simple but can be quite powerful. I especially like “straw breathing”: Deep inhale through the nose, then slow exhale through pursed lips, as if you’re blowing through a straw. For me, the relief is immediate. Repeat as often as necessary.

Election anxiety? Deepak Chopra’s tips for managing election stress October 24, 2024 / 04:31

Misconception No. 2: ‘Acceptance’ means complacency

“Acceptance” can be a tricky term. It means acknowledging what is happening — in the world and in your own mind — as a first step toward taking action. It’s hard to fix a problem if you aren’t seeing it clearly. So instead of wasting energy being at war with reality, accept it, then act.

Another practice that might help comes from the eminent meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein. Next time you’re in the throes of anger, anxiety or another difficult emotion, drop these words into your mind: “It’s OK.” This doesn’t mean that everything is OK. Instead, it means that it’s OK to feel whatever you’re feeling right then. When confronted with difficult emotions, many of us reflexively self-medicate (with, say, alcohol or shopping). The radical move is to feel your feelings, notice that they come and go, and make a sane choice on the other side.

Misconception No. 3: ‘Surrender’ means resignation

“Surrender” is another term that can be tricky. If acceptance is seeing things clearly, then surrender is recognizing what is in your control and what is not. It’s easy to hear surrender as a synonym for resignation or passivity, but it’s simply a way to conserve your energy for the areas where impact is genuinely possible.

Different traditions have ways of describing this. In Stoicism, they talk about “controlling the controllables.” In Buddhism, it’s “non-attachment to results.” AA has its serenity prayer. The core idea is that you can work hard on issues that matter to you while also recognizing that, in the end, the results are largely out of your control.

Practice: Next time you notice yourself in an anxiety spiral, use it as a moment to inquire. Is there a useful action I can take right now? If not, maybe just drop this word into your mind: “Surrender.” This move has saved me a lot of unnecessary suffering.

Misconception No. 4: I need my anger in order to stay in the fight

Given the corruption, the Iran war, the ballroom — it’s perfectly understandable that many of us find Trump 2.0 infuriating. Further, anger has its uses. It can help you identify problems and can be motivating. In my experience, however, when I am operating on uncut outrage, I inevitably burn myself out.

Try this: In moments of anger or anxiety, see if you can tune into what’s beneath these emotions. When you dig, you will likely find caring. Or, to use a less comfortable term, love. Love for your country, for your family, for yourself. For me, love is the cleaner burning fuel. Let it propel you forward.

Misconception No. 5: To stay informed, I need to compulsively check the news

No question, the stakes are high in these midterms. But does this mean you need to doomscroll in every free moment? In my opinion, no.

So how do you draw the line between staying informed and driving yourself crazy? It’s both highly individual and also more art than science. I recommend doing some personal exploration. How much news can your nervous system metabolize before you start to glitch? If you go for more than two straight hours, do you find yourself typing in all-caps on Bluesky? My friend Sebene Selassie, a meditation teacher, has a policy of “no news before noon.” (Sorry, Joe and Mika!) My own policy is to not look at my phone for the first and last hours of the day.

A practice: Savor the good stuff. The people who design social media algorithms benefit from keeping us in a perpetual state of fear and outrage because those emotions keep us scrolling. If you put your phone down and step outside, you’ll see tons of good stuff. People raising children, volunteering and engaging in small acts of decency. Tuning into this doesn’t negate the world’s problems, but it does put them in a larger frame. Personally, I like to take a warm shower and make a list of all the things that I am grateful for from the day. I find it retrains my mind to scan for the positive.

If you’re looking for constructive ways to consume news, I recommend the MS NOW membership app. It provides both news and tools to regulate your nervous system, so that you can then take the appropriate action. To me, that is a solid recipe for citizenship: Information, regulation, activation. Remember: The world is insane, but you don’t have to be.

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’Tis the season to shop Ukrainian: Kyiv Independent launches 2026 Holiday Gift Guide

The Kyiv Independent

By: Kyiv Independent

30 October 2026 at 16:28

The Kyiv Independent has launched its 2026 Holiday Gift Guide, a curated selection of 80 items from Ukrainian brands and creators that showcase the country's creativity, craftsmanship, and cultural heritage.

Patrick Stewart played the kind of heroes we needed — and still need

MS NOW

By: Jesse J. Holland

30 October 2026 at 16:16

American culture has always prized macho heroes who solve problems with their fists. John Wayne didn’t talk down the bad guys. Rocky Balboa settled his troubles in the ring. John Shaft pulled a gun, got the girl and looked good doing it. Sherlock Holmes — literature’s most celebrated thinker who prized his wits over his knuckles — still ended up grappling with Moriarty at Reichenbach Falls. Even America’s premier spaceman, the perfectly coiffed, rule-breaking, heart-taking Captain James T. Kirk of the USS Enterprise, loved a good fist fight.

But Patrick Stewart was the king of the nerds, the hero who didn’t need to out-muscle the room. From “Star Trek: The Next Generation” to “X-Men,” the slim, balding English Shakespearean actor shattered the stereotype that the science fiction — or comic book hero lead — had to be a muscle-flexing, gun-toting, womanizing cad. He could be a futuristic French starship captain, his commanding voice booming, “Make it so.” Or a paralyzed mutant whose penetrating, kindly stare made us believe that, no matter what, things under his watch would be OK.

When Shatner’s Captain Kirk was done, nobody expected Stewart’s Jean-Luc Picard to be the man in the center seat. Reportedly, even the creator of the franchise, Gene Roddenberry, had doubts and had to be talked into hiring the stage actor.

Stewart died Wednesday at his home in Los Angeles at 86, and the world suddenly feels a little less sure of that.

When William Shatner’s Captain Kirk was done, nobody expected Stewart’s Jean-Luc Picard to be the man in the center seat on the Enterprise-D. Reportedly, even the creator of the franchise, Gene Roddenberry, had doubts and had to be talked into hiring the stage actor.

Picard read poetry in a smooth baritone, drank Earl Grey, fed his goldfish and sent the cowboy diplomacy back to the previous generation. When the Enterprise faced a crisis, the question wasn’t who would shoot first. It was who would think hardest, and who would be brave enough to be wrong out loud.

Stewart’s toughest scenes proved the point. In the episode “Chain of Command,” Picard, who’s been captured, is tortured for days and told to say he sees five lights when there are only four. He won’t. Stewart played it with a quiet, shaking defiance, and it remains one of the great portraits of courage in television, with not a phaser in sight.

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Stage giant Patrick Stewart, of ‘Star Trek’ and 'X-Men' fame, dies at 86. –
— Phil Lewis (@phillewis.bsky.social) 2026-10-29T19:48:50.486Z

Stewart made us believe in the alpha diplomat who preferred negotiation to confrontation but was no less a hero and icon than Captain Kirk

I’ll confess I never got Kirk’s “Star Trek” and haven’t seen most of those episodes. That was my father’s science fiction. But I have seen every hour of Stewart’s “Next Generation,” and it’s a big reason I’m a science fiction aficionado, comic book fan and author. I go to comic book conventions and book expos now, but I started with Star Trek conventions, and I still order my tea like Captain Picard: “Earl Grey, hot.”

As Professor Charles Xavier in “X-Men,” Stewart gave us a mentor in a wheelchair whose power was based not only on his mind but on his endless patience and hopefulness. The “X-Men” were, at heart, a story about outsiders asking whether the world will make room for them, and Stewart’s Xavier answered with a steady hand and a warm gaze. Opposite his real-life friend Ian McKellen’s Magneto, he helped give comic book movies one of its defining rivalries: two old friends who loved the same persecuted people and disagreed about how to save them. Many fans and critics have long heard echoes of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X in their argument, and Stewart never let Xavier’s patience soften into passivity.

I’ll confess I never got Kirk’s “Star Trek.” That was my father’s science fiction. But I have seen every hour of Stewart’s “Next Generation,” and it’s a big reason I’m a science fiction aficionado, comic book fan and author.

In “Logan,” he gave us a Xavier whose great mind was failing him, a performance that is hard to watch given what we know now about his struggle with Alzheimer’s and Lewy body dementia. In it, the proud, knighted Shakespearean actor is willing to be so raw, so vulnerable, so damaged onscreen, realistically fighting the ravages of age and yet clinging on to what heroism he could. He was ailing, and still giving us the best Professor X he could.

Stewart’s legacy is bigger than his performances. He spoke openly about the abuse he witnessed in his childhood home and was a passionate advocate for survivors of domestic violence. In announcing his death, his family’s statement recalled his work for refugees, veterans’ mental health, human rights and animal welfare, including his cherished foster pit bulls. The gentleness we saw on screen was not an act.

His velvety voice at the beginning of “Star Trek: The Next Generation” telling us that our adventures would take us “where no one” has gone before — not where no “man” has gone — signals a new future where everybody is included: men and women, the bookish, the balding, the thinkers, the disabled, the negotiators, the kindhearted, the patient, the different.

Much of science fiction imagines a humanity that has gotten past its worst instincts, and Stewart’s Picard embodied that promise. His authority came from his character, not conquest. For a generation of readers and writers who wanted to push the genre to imagine something bigger than the old model of heroism, Stewart gave us that permission.

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