No, it's not just you, everybody is exhausted. And no, it's not getting better

Jim Beckerman | Bergen

Show Caption Hide Caption Everybody is Exhausted: Six tips to cope Licensed psychologist Joseph Springer specializes in the treatment of anxiety disorders. Here's his advice for coping with stress.

BERGEN COUNTY, N.J. — The chaos of life and its collision with technology and tragedy has more of us feeling drained, frazzled and emotionally overrun.

Put simply: We are exhausted.

What’s to blame? The list is long — and growing, experts say.

Wildfires, terror attacks, rising tensions with North Korea, racist rallies, political investigations in Washington, the non-stop barrage of presidential tweets, more and worse mass shootings from Las Vegas to Florida, a tsunami of sexual harassment accusations, the role of Russians in our elections, climate change, red state-blue state division and not one, not two, but three of the worst hurricanes on record — including one that nearly blew Puerto Rico out of the Caribbean Sea.

Put together, and it’s understandable why exhausted Americans are limping along and running out of gas.

More: Great Recession, 10 years later: Young professionals battled for scarce jobs

More: Work-related stress: Is your job making you sick?

Take a look at your friends and families. How many do you know who are sleepless with worry? Bleary-eyed from watching our favorite (and, too often, partisan) cable news outlets as pundits explain, blame and offer everything but what we want: More sleep and stress-ending solutions.

There’s a consequence to all this chaos, doctors and medical experts say.

It's not just you. Our series explains why we're all so stressed out and what we can do about it.

"I do see an increase in anxiety in my practice," says therapist Sophia Richman of Montclair. "Patients are more anxious. They're having anxiety dreams. There's a sense that there is some threat to them, an amorphous threat, and they wake up in a sweat. There is a sense of danger — that we're living in very dangerous times."

Indeed, 63% of Americans say the future of the nation is a very or somewhat significant source of stress for them, according to the recently released "Stress in America" report by the American Psychological Association.

Outwardly, it could be argued, life hasn't really changed for many of us. And that may be the final, cruel kindness. So far, the economy is booming, and day-to-day living goes on much as usual.

Those not directly affected by the last year's cavalcade of disasters — those not in the path of a hurricane or wildfire, who are not Muslim or Mexican or Syrian, who still have a job — have the surreal luxury of watching social institutions crumble, while not being personally affected.

Say this for an emergency: it often leaves you too busy to worry. And that, in the end, may be the real reason we're all so anxious. We have the leisure to be.

"I don't know whether we are overwhelmed, cowed into silence or just not cognizant of the danger," says Joe Chuman, professional leader of the Teaneck branch of the Ethical Culture Society, a humanist society that goes back to the 19th century. "But I have never been more fearful for our country than right now. My sense is that people may be just so overwhelmed by the reality, almost like a deer in a headlight, that they don't know how to respond to what I consider real danger. These are not normal times."

For some, the danger is immediate, and personal.

There's nothing free-floating about the anxieties of people targeted by travel bans, minority groups in the crosshairs of the Trump administration, or patients with catastrophic illnesses threatened by the loss of health care. Such fears are real, and specific.

"There's a lot of anxiety," says Larry Braverman of Project Literacy of Greater Bergen County, Inc. This adult literacy program, based in Hackensack, N.J., has many foreign-born students on its roster.

"We have a woman from Syria who's studying for her citizenship test; we've given her a tutor to help," Braverman says. "She's frantic because she has family back in Syria that she'd like to see, but she's afraid our country won't let her back in if she leaves."

Take a break

For others of us, not in immediate danger, our legitimate concerns are magnified and distorted by the fun house mirror of social media. Facebook, Twitter, and all the rest, keep us in touch with like-minded worriers, and keep our fears endlessly stoked.

"I think many of our folks are getting information-overloaded, always connected to their smartphones and tablets and laptops," says the Rev. Dr. David Bocock, pastor of the Cresskill Congregational Church.

More: Stressed? How a 5-minute breathing technique helps one mom find peace

More: Stressed? Who isn't? Here's how to conquer it

This year, Bocock has noticed, many of his parishioners are starting to put aside their devices. Perhaps not such a bad thing, he says.

"I think a lot of them are taking a break from it," he says. "Because everybody's on it, and everybody's friends all think the way they do. They're not really getting alternative views. So their fears are getting reinforced, whether they're conservative or liberal. [The fear is] driving them crazy, emotionally and spiritually crazy. So I think a few folks are just taking a sabbatical from their devices. Those who do experience this kind of peace they didn't have before."

So that's one way to deal with a world of anxiety: retreat.

Get involved

The other way is to engage, actively, with the world. Political activism, yes — but there are other ways to get involved. The arts, for instance.

"Artists are on the periphery of society, so we're looking at it from a critical perspective," says sculptor Gina Miccinilli of Mahwah. "We're commentators, and critics."

Her own response to the this year's superstorm of crazy: she went to Bkarzla, Lebanon, on the Syrian border, from August to October, to work with refugees. Specifically, to create art that spoke to their plight.

"I made a sculpture piece for the peace center," she says. "I had to register to go, since I was going into an active war zone. The government emailed me that they would not come to my aid if any issues occurred."

The kinetic sculpture she ended up creating there was a 49-foot, upside-down, dangling tree. "It's all about transplants, and uprooting, and identity," she says.

Even more than conditions in Lebanon, her piece was about conditions at home — America. "It was in direct response to my disgust here, to the rhetoric of hate and divisiveness and fear and ignorance," she says.

Change your view

There's one other way to stay sane in an age of madness. Perspective.

Decades ago, there was another year that left people feeling much as they do now: 1968, the year of the Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy assassinations, the year when police brutally clashed with protesters at the Democratic Convention in Chicago, the year of the Tet offensive in South Vietnam, of violent conflict in Northern Ireland, of riots on campuses and inner cities. Many, by December, felt that the world was coming apart.

Then, on Dec. 24, the spacecraft Apollo 8 became the first to go into orbit around the moon. Astronaut William Anders beamed back an amazing picture: the Earth, seen whole for the first time, a fragile blue marble in a vast expanse of black.

The "Earthrise" picture caused a sensation. For many, it seemed to put all the pain of the previous year into proportion. "Thank you Apollo 8. You saved 1968," someone telegraphed mission commander Frank Borman.

"It was a symbol of hope that everyone could gather around," Bocock says.

This year, on a smaller scale, we may have had a similar moment. On Feb. 6, America took a breather to view the launch and return of SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket. We saw it shoot up into the sky from the very launch pad from which Apollo 11 conquered the moon 49 years ago, watched it fling a Tesla car— a car! — out toward the asteroid belt, and then saw its booster rockets power down and return to base, as elegantly as a rocket ship in a 1950s sci-fi movie.

That afternoon, cable news networks on both sides interrupted their coverage of Trump — and coverage of his denouncers — to ooh and ahh over the magical sight.

Is there a lesson here? Perhaps.

Maybe, in arguably the most divided era in American history since the Civil War, there are still things we can agree on, a common future we can work toward. And some way to stop being exhausted.

"I do think we're a tenacious people," Bocock says. "I think we will survive. And I think we will become stronger, as we always have through adversity."

Follow Jim Beckerman on Twitter: @jimbeckerman1