Building an Aligned Life During Crisis: A Framework for Holding Both
- Vanessa Marquez-Kramme
- 2 hours ago
- 7 min read
🎧 Prefer to listen? This blog post is available in audio format below.
Note: This audio was created using AI voice technology (ElevenLabs) as part of my commitment to accessible content. I wrote every word, but used AI to narrate it so I could offer this format without burning out.
Trying to build a personal development business right now—while ICE terrorizes my community, while Venezuela burns, while I'm supposed to post 15-second reels about living an aligned life—feels like that scene in an action movie where the main character falls into a trash chute, and the walls start closing in. You're either escaping by dumb luck or die trying.
How do I build not only a personal brand but an aligned life—a life that allows me to think positively, dream big, and have the fire to go after them—when my community is under attack? When I feel like I'm under attack?
I don't have a complete answer. But I know we need to name what's happening before we can move forward.
The Tension: When Everything Feels Tone-Deaf
Here's the specific tension I'm sitting in: I want to show up and create content about building an aligned life. I want to talk about dreams and goals and becoming who you're meant to be. But I'm also processing all these emotions in real time, trying to figure out how to do both without losing my mind or my integrity.
The tension is heavy because right now, that content exists on the same platforms that are feeding us violence—yes, they're also keeping us informed about what's happening in ways that traditional news stations often don't, but we're hooked to the scroll like a tornado alarm going off 24/7. And that creates a problem because social media is built on brutal context-switching.
GRWM. ICE raid video. Cat video. War footage. "Build your dream life!" post. Cute baby. Deportation. Lunch inspo. Mass shooting. Your friend's "perfect" vacation.
This is the violence of the algorithm—sometimes the content itself, always the context-switching whiplash.
We as humans, made of flesh and nervous systems and not made out of chips, were not built to process killings and war and oppression and then immediately think about what we're having for lunch or click into a Zoom meeting or watch a funny meme.
Did you know that more than half of U.S. adults now get their news from social media at least sometimes, turning these platforms into constant sources of both information and emotional shock. Studies show that negative news headlines and high-emotion content—fear, anger, outrage—increase physiological arousal, altering skin conductance and heart rate variability.
Our nervous systems shift into a more activated, threat-responsive state. We're not imagining this heaviness; our bodies are literally responding to the bombardment.
The rate at which we consume content is absurd. The doomscrolling, the screen time, the sheer capacity of those fairly new behaviors to dysregulate our nervous system—it knows no limits. And we're feeling the effects.
Heavy social media use and mindless scrolling are strongly linked to higher levels of anxiety, depression, poor sleep, and mental fatigue—especially when we're passively consuming rather than intentionally engaging.
Research on doomscrolling during crisis periods shows that people who spent more time immersed in negative news reported higher anxiety, distress, and depression, and lower overall well-being.
And it's not just our mood: doomscrolling late at night disrupts sleep through blue light exposure and emotional arousal, reducing melatonin production and increasing vulnerability to depression.
Mental health professionals are warning that this continuous, high-volume exposure to negative media is contributing to rising rates of anxiety and depressive symptoms, particularly when people feel unable to unplug.
Studies of media overload show that repeated exposure to violent or distressing content keeps the amygdala—the brain's fear center—overactive, forcing the prefrontal cortex to work overtime, which leads to fatigue, shutdown, and ongoing dysregulation.
All of this to say, we don't have pockets to stop, drop, and process anymore. We live with half-processed emotions, unmetabolized triggers, and a lot of impotence because most of us feel like we can't do as much as we want to do. We have to think about our loved ones and stay safe for them.
In another context—a conversation over coffee, a phone call with a friend, even a therapist's office—we could hold space for both the weight of what's happening AND conversations rooted in joy and hope.
But these algorithm-driven conversations happen without control of the context. We don't know what someone just saw 30 seconds before they land on our content or what they'll see 30 seconds after. That's why personal development content feels tone-deaf right now—not because the work doesn't matter, but because the context-switching is brutal.
The First-Gen Weight: Compounded
For first-generation folks, this isn't just "the world is on fire." This is intrinsically connected to us as humans.
We're carrying a specific weight on top of the normal tension between doing what our families and society told us we should do, and doing what we want to do.
Let's name it:
Fear for our safety, our families, our friends.
Every time I see a police car or a tinted window car, I freak out.
Survivor's guilt.
Maybe you can get away with more because you live in a nicer neighborhood or have more connections in the white world.
Hypervigilance.
A constant state of threat assessment our nervous systems were never meant to sustain.
Impotence
Wanting to protest, to do more, but having to think about safety—yours and your loved ones'.
This activates ancestral trauma, plus actual current threats in our streets, and the pressure to assimilate and belong in the country we call home.
Did you know that research with first-generation Latino immigrant youth shows significantly elevated rates of anxiety and depressive symptoms linked to migration stressors: trauma, discrimination, and documentation worries? Psychologists describe that chronic exposure to discrimination, fear of authorities, and pressure to assimilate adds to everyday stress and can erode mental health over time. These acculturation challenges show up as hypervigilance, constant threat assessment, and emotional exhaustion—especially when safety feels conditional or precarious.
No wonder we're walking around like Luisa from Encanto meets the over-caffeinated guy from Futurama—holding the world on our shoulders while moving at impossible speed.
There is a lot of stuff going on that is just not mathing for us. We weren't built to face all of these things at once.
The Either-Or Trap
Here's the trap I find myself falling for: You either care about what's going on in the world and give yourself fully to it until your nervous system crashes, or you forget about everything and just build the life of your dreams.
Both options feel wrong.
Hearing "just focus on your goals" while people who look like you are being hunted feels violent. But completely abandoning your dreams and aspirations because of the messed up things happening feels like losing ahead of time.
This isn't an either-or. It never was.
Building an Aligned Life During Crisis Is Resistance
Working on yourself while staying aligned with your values—which means caring deeply about the injustices happening if you're still here reading—isn't escapism. It's a parallel line of showing up for what you believe in while building a better scenario for yourself and others.
Taking baby steps toward building an aligned life during crisis while also taking steps to show your discontent—shopping differently, calling your reps, checking in on your people, asking your workplace to drop vendors who contract with ICE like I did with Hootsuite—becomes a blow to the systems that keep us in fear, that keep us anxious, that keep us surviving instead of thriving.
According to the Museum of Protest's guide on activism and movement longevity, personal resilience practices—like self-compassion, boundaries, and community care—are not just "self-help" but strategic tools that help activists and engaged citizens keep going despite repeated setbacks. Research on resilience and meaning-making suggests that having a sense of agency and purpose during a crisis is linked to better mental health outcomes, helping people cope more effectively with stress and maintain hope. When activist communities intentionally organize rest, mutual aid, and mental health support, they create infrastructures of care that make sustained resistance more possible and reduce individual burnout.
The more we work on ourselves and realize that what we have to give is valuable, the more we show up authentically, raise our voices, and share what's burning inside us. When we do that, we create ripples. We model what it looks like to refuse the either-or trap. We show others that it's possible to hold both the weight and the hope, the grief and the goals, the fear and the fire. That's how we create a different picture—not by pretending everything is fine, but by building lives that prove we refuse to be small.
Building a life aligned with your values so you can show up for those values is one of the biggest personal acts of resistance available to us. If your values are inclusivity, justice, and critical thinking, building a life that showcases those cannot be wrong.
Permission
You and I are not alone in this tension.
As someone creating this content, I'm not sharing reflections about building an aligned life from an empty positivity place. I'm sharing because this is how we ensure we keep living, keep making choices that change the macro-level systems.
As someone consuming this content—maybe wanting to eat better or move differently or build something different for yourself this year—it might feel weird to engage with personal development work while everything feels like it's burning.
But going after your goals while taking steps of resistance is the whole point.
The work you're doing to be a more aligned version of yourself matters.
Especially now.
A Manifesto
Creating personal development content and showing up online is not in opposition to feeling everything about what's happening in this country.
They co-exist.
Sharing my journey brings me closer to my authentic self.
When I do that, I grow.
My courage expands.
That expansion allows me to show up more emotionally regulated
because I'm confident in who I am.
That confidence lets me make bolder choices
about how I show up for my values.
That lets me speak up and help where I can,
how I can, without compromising my safety.
With or without papers, people of color are inherently less safe right now.
When we step into our power and build lives for ourselves,
we build emotional resilience and the ability to make aligned choices.
This is resistance.
This is survival.
This is how we keep going.
Want your own version?
Download the fillable Resistance Manifesto, plug in your own tension-giving goal, and make it yours. No email required, just fill in and use it however you need.
Comments