Downbeat: We're Not Broken. We're Overstimulated.

Turns out our nervous systems weren’t built for nonstop headlines.

If you’re reading with coffee, consider a Like as a tip of the cap.

There was a time when stress showed up like a bad neighbor.

Occasional.
Loud.
Eventually gone.

Now it lives with us.

It wakes up early.
It scrolls late.
It sends push notifications.
It has opinions about everything.
And it never, ever turns the volume down.

Psychologists have started calling this feeling what it actually is: national trauma.

Not one big event.
Not a single catastrophe.

Just a steady drip of worry, outrage, fear, and uncertainty, delivered hourly, sometimes by the minute, occasionally before you’ve had coffee and definitely before you’ve found your glasses.

Our nervous systems weren’t built for this.

They were designed for saber-toothed tigers.
Short bursts of danger.
Run. Hide. Recover.
Then go back to foraging or whatever it was we did before calendars.

If you’re smiling right now, tap Like (I can’t hear you from the porch.)

Instead, we get headlines.

Endless ones.

Political chaos.
Economic anxiety.
Violence far away and somehow right next door.

The body doesn’t know the difference between danger on a screen and danger in the room. So it reacts the same way — tight shoulders, shallow breathing, restless sleep, and a low-grade buzz of unease that never quite shuts off.

Which explains a lot.

Why people feel tired even after sleeping.
Irritable without knowing why.
Numb and jumpy at the same time.

Congratulations.
You’re not broken.

You’re overstimulated.

---

Here’s the good news.

Right alongside this rise in collective stress, something else has quietly exploded: comedy.

Not “sit down at eight o’clock on Thursday night and hope the TV network picked something good” comedy.

Not “wait for HBO to bless a few comedians this year” comedy.

Comedy everywhere.

Clips, reels, podcasts, specials, sketches, one-liners.

Observations about grocery stores, aging knees, marriage, technology, and the mystery of why passwords expire every 90 days but memories don’t.

In the 1990s, comedy was scarce by design.

A handful of channels.
A few gatekeepers.
If you missed a special, you missed it.
If a comedian didn’t get booked, that was that.

Today?

Comedy has slipped the leash.

There are hundreds of stand-up specials floating around the streaming universe. Hundreds of thousands of comedy podcasts, many recorded in spare bedrooms, basements, and garages that once held lawn mowers and unfulfilled New Year’s resolutions.

On YouTube alone, tens of thousands of comedy-adjacent videos appear every single day.

Is all of it brilliant?

Of course not.

But that’s not the point.

The point is availability.

When the world feels heavy, you no longer have to wait for relief. You can find it in under ten seconds.

Someone is always making a joke about exactly the thing that’s driving you nuts.
Someone else is pointing out the absurdity.
Someone is reminding you that you’re not alone, you’re not broken, and you’re definitely not the only one reheating the same cup of coffee for the third time.

And here’s why that matters more than we admit.

Laughter interrupts the stress loop.
It tells the body, “You’re safe right now.”
It loosens the grip of fight-or-flight without requiring a prescription or a permission slip.

Psychologists say coping with national trauma starts with small things: limiting news intake, moving your body, staying connected, focusing on what you can control.

Comedy sneaks into all of those.

It creates connection.
It grounds us in shared experience.
It shrinks the problem just enough to make it manageable.

Comedy doesn’t deny reality. It reframes it.

It says, “Yes, things are weird, but look how weird.”
It turns dread into recognition, and overwhelm into perspective.

We’ve never needed comedy this badly.

And we’ve never had more access to it.

That doesn’t mean we should scroll endlessly or laugh our way past real issues. It just means that in a loud, anxious, overstimulated world, humor has become something essential: a pressure valve, a pause button, a reminder that being human has always been a little ridiculous.

The world is still messy when the joke ends.

But for a minute or two, your shoulders drop.
Your breath deepens.
And you remember something important.

You’re not carrying this alone.

### If it deserves an encore, Restack it and let it take another bow.

You don’t have to rush off, here are a couple of others you might like:

🎼 Downbeat: The Drones Are Winning

📝 Friday Takeaway: Mall Walkers Are the Navy SEALs of Retirement

🗄️BlackPapers Archive

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