How to Prepare to Protest When You Already Feel Worn-Out

A grounded, layered guide to help you rebuild steadiness and presence when protest asks more of you than you think you have left.

Oct 14, 2025

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Dear friends

With the No Kings protest taking place this Saturday, I’m setting aside my scheduled posts on chronic stress and burnout for a week so we can focus on something more immediate: staying safe. Many of you come here to understand political stress and learn how to steady your nervous system, but protest readiness is part of that same work.

Over the past six months, I’ve written several guides on protest safety that have been shared thousands of times — in fact, they’ve been the most-read pieces on Your Time Starts Now. Some of those guides are now out of date, and that matters given the way the government is currently framing dissent. Others remain as useful as ever, so I’ll be republishing them for newer readers while updating what needs revision.

I feel a duty of care to everyone who reads this newsletter, and that includes helping you prepare for the days ahead. Over the next few days, I’ll be posting updated guidance and new tools to help you stay safe, steady, and connected — starting today, with a new piece on the inner preparation that helps you stay steady in the noise and pressure of protest.

Days of Readiness

Chronic political stress, especially when it’s tied to ongoing injustice or democratic erosion, can leave your nervous system on constant alert. Preparing to protest under those conditions isn’t only about logistics; it’s about protecting your safety, stamina, and sense of agency.

As you prepare to protest this weekend, the goal is not simply to get yourself there. It is to enter that space in a state of coherence — with enough regulation, presence, and purpose that you can participate without tipping into collapse or dissociation.

Preparation begins before the day of the protest. It begins now, while you are still at home, still online, still reading and worrying. You can’t arrive grounded if your body is already running on adrenaline. The state you’re in before you leave will set the tone for how your body responds to everything that follows. So, if you have been living in a state of chronic political alert, your first task is to help your body remember how to downshift.

Over the next few days, we’ll build this preparation from the inside out — beginning with your body and widening from there.

Start with Your Body

The first layer is physiological. Physiological preparation means noticing what constant stress has done to your system. As I wrote here, when political tension never really ends, your body stops resetting to baseline. Instead, you live in a low-grade fight-or-flight state — wired, tired, scanning for bad news even in quiet moments. Your aim is not to suppress this vigilance, which evolved to protect you, but to bring it back under your own regulation. You can’t think clearly or make good decisions when your nervous system is running ahead of you.

That is why you begin with rhythm. Your nervous system responds to predictable, steady movement: walking, slow breathing, humming, stretching. All of these help teach your body that it can move at your chosen pace. Each time you practice that, you rebuild what psychologists call interoception, the ability to sense what is happening inside you. When you are able to read those internal signals, you can act before you are overwhelmed.

I’ve published a whole series of posts to help with this — all free for every reader. Go to the Your Time Starts Now homepage on the web (not the app), scroll down, and you’ll find a section called Regroup and Recover.

Food and hydration matter too. The chemistry of sustained alertness uses up what your body needs to stay balanced as cortisol and adrenaline — the hormones that keep you on guard — draw heavily on minerals and electrolytes such as salt, magnesium, and potassium. They also use glucose at a faster rate, so when you’re living in an ongoing state of vigilance, your reserves are constantly being drained.

When you eat erratically and supplement food with caffeine, you train your system to depend on short bursts of energy. Caffeine stimulates your nervous system further, and together, they keep you wired but brittle. Your goal this week is to feed your body for endurance. Regular meals with some protein and salt signal safety to your nervous system: food is here, resources are stable, the situation is manageable. This message may seem small, but it has real physiological impact. It brings down your baseline stress hormones and steadies your blood sugar, which in turn stabilises your mood and attention.

Hydration supports that balance in the same way. Dehydration intensifies the physical sensations of anxiety — racing heart, dizziness, shallow breath — because your body interprets low fluid levels as another kind of threat. Again, caffeine feeds into this. Drinking enough water, and replacing electrolytes if you’re exerting yourself, keeps your cardiovascular system from tipping into overdrive. This is not about comfort in the shallow sense; it’s about maintaining your internal equilibrium so that when you do enter a charged environment, your body can meet the moment without misfiring.

In this way, nourishment becomes part of political readiness. We are building the physical foundation for collective endurance, not just our individual wellness. Eating well, drinking steadily, and avoiding stimulants when you’re already tense is a way of refusing the depletion that unstable systems depend on. It’s a quiet form of resistance: feeding your body so it can hold its ground.

Sleep is another part of this layer. In the post I linked to above, we covered the way in which chronic stress interrupts deep rest, and why you wake tense and tired. But you can gently guide your body back into a rhythm that feels predictable.

Try keeping roughly the same bedtime and waking time for several nights in a row, even if you don’t sleep well at first. This rhythm helps your nervous system re-establish its internal clock, which governs hormones, digestion, and mood. Avoid screens for a couple of hours before bed, because the light and noise keep your nervous system active. Read, stretch, or sit quietly instead, letting your body recognise the cues that mean “this day is closing.”

This kind of preparation may sound simple, but it builds the physiological base from which all other forms of protest readiness grow. Your body recognises the signs of stress and knows what to do with them. Nourished and rhythmically regulated, you can hold tension without fragmenting. You can stand, walk, chant, decide, and respond from presence, because you have built the capacity to stay within yourself, regardless of what you’re facing.

Find Your Focus

The second layer is psychological clarity.

Chronic stress has a way of flattening everything so that every issue feels equally urgent, every task equally essential. That pressure to respond to everything at once is exhausting, and it makes it hard to think in sequence. Psychological clarity is the process of recovering perspective — deciding what matters most in this moment and where you are best placed to contribute.

So take a moment to define your role at the protest. That decision is as simple as choosing whether you are there to march, to observe, to document, or to support others. Each of those roles carries its own kind of responsibility and presence. Role clarity is about containment — setting a boundary around what is yours to hold and what belongs to others. Having clear boundaries reduces uncertainty, and uncertainty is one of the main accelerants of stress. When you know which role you are inhabiting, you can move through the day with less confusion and make fewer reactive decisions.

Having this focus also steadies group dynamics. A protest is a living system made up of many roles — speakers, medics, organisers, marchers, witnesses. Each part depends on the others to stay functional. When we enter that system clear on what we’re there to do, the whole becomes more resilient. Clarity won’t eliminate the tension, but it helps ensure that during tension we are productive rather than chaotic.

Don’t Go Alone

The third layer is relational safety. Political stress is often experienced as isolation — the feeling of carrying fear or anger alone, without any shared structure or support to hold it. Protesting can look like the antidote to that isolation, but the truth is that collective action can amplify stress if we enter it without support. The energy of a crowd, the noise, the unpredictability, the presence of police or counter-protesters — all of this can heighten you nervous system’s sense of threat. You may find your body tightening or your mind narrowing, even if you’re doing something you deeply believe in.

That is why it matters not to go alone. Pairing or grouping is not just about your physical safety — it’s about internal regulation, too. When we are stressed, our bodies look for cues from others to decide whether we are safe or in danger. This is known as co-regulation — the process by which one nervous system steadies another through contact, tone, and presence. You and a trusted companion can use that dynamic consciously.

Choose someone you trust to be steady and communicative. Before you leave, talk through what each of you needs in order to stay grounded. You might agree on a few simple signals — a touch on the arm, a phrase — that mean it’s time to pause, drink water, or move to a quieter area. Signals are not meant to be dramatic or secretive, but ways of maintaining connection in a sea of noise, or when words are difficult to find.

This kind of mutual awareness can be the difference between a moment of intensity and a moment of panic. When escalation happens, your body may start moving faster than your reasoning. Having someone nearby who can also recognise that shift and help you slow down gives your system a chance to reset. You do the same for them — regulation moves both ways.

Relational safety also extends beyond the event itself. People often feel the impact of protest not during, but later, when the body begins to process the adrenaline and the emotions it suppressed in the moment. So, plan to check in with one another afterwards. I’ll eb here to guide you through it on Sunday.

Going with others does not mean you must always stay in a tight group. It means you are part of a small, trusted network within the larger collective — a structure of care that lets you engage more fully because you know you are not carrying everything alone.

Meeting the Noise

The next layer of preparation is about how you meet the physical reality of protest itself — the space, the noise, the unpredictability.

Political stress heightens sensitivity. When you have been living for months or years in a state of vigilance, your body’s alarm system becomes quicker to react and slower to settle. That means environments that might once have felt energising — chanting crowds, sirens, music, movement — can now tip you into overload. This is not weakness or fragility, but your nervous system doing what it has learned to do under chronic pressure: scanning for danger and preparing to act.

Protests are full of sensory information. Noise ricochets between buildings. Voices rise and fall. There are flashes of colour, motion, and sound from different directions at once. Even if everything stays peaceful, the intensity alone can push your system past what it can comfortably process. Recognising this before you go allows you to plan to self-regulate rather than endure.

Plan to bring small things that help you manage your sensory load. Earplugs can reduce noise to a bearable level without making you feel cut off completely. Sunglasses can soften visual glare and give you a sense of privacy in a crowd. A scarf or light mask can help if dust, smoke, or proximity start to feel too much. Think of these not as barriers, but as tools to help you stay present without becoming overwhelmed.

Pay attention, too, to where you place yourself on the day. In any large gathering there are zones of higher and lower intensity — edges and open spaces tend to be calmer, whereas dense areas near speakers, drums, or police lines carry more charge. Choosing where you stand or walk is part of pacing yourself — you can move closer when you feel steady and step back when you need space to breathe. The aim is to modulate your exposure, not to withdraw.

Managing sensory input in this way helps you remain grounded in your own awareness. You remain able to notice what is happening, make decisions, and connect with others — all without your system tipping into shutdown or panic. In a protest, that steadiness is a form of safety not just for you, but for those around you.

Remember What You’re Protecting

Finally, there’s the emotional layer.

The emotional layer begins with intention. Before you think about the logistics of protest day, take time to remember what lives at the centre of your action. Chronic political stress keeps attention fixed on what is wrong — on the threat, the injustice, the erosion of what should be safe. Over time that state of vigilance can strip away the deeper sense of why you act at all. Intention restores that link. It’s what allows action to be guided rather than reactive.

Spend a few quiet minutes considering what you are protecting. Try to name it in clear, ordinary language: fairness, safety, care, dignity, the right to live without fear. These are not abstractions; they are living principles that your body recognises. When you hold them in awareness, your system begins to register direction instead of danger.

Once you have named what you are protecting, find an object that represents it — something small enough to carry easily, familiar enough to feel grounding, and unimportant enough that you could drop it without concern if you needed to. It might be a smooth stone with a word written on it, a length of ribbon, a coin, or a scrap of fabric. The point is not sentimentality; it is to create a physical bridge between meaning and presence. This object becomes a touchstone for coherence, a reminder of the steady line that runs beneath the noise of the moment.

Keep it somewhere you can reach on the day of the protest. We will return to it then.

In the Days Before You March

Everything you do in these days before the protest — the rhythm, the nourishment, the rest, the clarity, the grounding — is part of preparing your system to enter collective space without losing yourself in it. This is the slow work that lets you meet urgency with steadiness, without being swept away by it. As you move through the coming days, keep working with these layers. Remember that preparation is not a separate task from action; it is what makes action possible.

To help you feel as prepared as possible, I’ll be sharing something each day this week to support you. I may not be alongside you in person on Saturday, but I’ll be here to help you stay steady and grounded as you step into that space.

What You’ll Find Here This Week

Tomorrow:
Digital security is the foundation of physical safety. This updated guide will walk you through how to secure your phone for the No Kings protest, protecting yourself and your community from the risk of digital tracking and surveillance.
Thursday:
Conditions during a protest can change quickly. This updated safety guide for the No Kings protest will help you prepare for a range of possibilities, so you can make steady, informed decisions on the day.
Friday:
Overwhelm can strike without warning especially if the event is highly charged. This short, evidence-based grounding tool will help you steady your body and mind should you need to, while you’re at the protest itself.
Saturday:
During a protest, with so much happening around you, it can be easy to lose sight of why you’re there. This piece will help you connect with what matters to you and stay anchored as you move through the day.
Sunday:
Protests can stir both hope and grief. This post-protest landing plan will help your body process the adrenaline and metabolise the intensity of the day before.

If you’d like to stay connected as these pieces go out over the week, you’re very welcome to subscribe.

And if you think these posts might help others prepare, please share them — my up-to-date posts on staying safe during collective action are free for everyone to read and share.

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