Touch some grass, go to therapy and stop watching the news.
this post was submitted on 04 Jan 2026
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Step 0:
Take 3, intentional, deep breaths.
Inhale for 5 seconds, hold for 5 seconds, slowly exhale for 5 seconds.
Do three of em.
Step 1:
Accept that one day, maybe soon, maybe in the fairly distant future:
You Will Die.
No avoiding it. None of us make it out of here alive.
... really try to actually come to grips with that.
There's no reward or punishment at the end, its not a judged competition... it just stops, everything goes away, and you go away.
Game over.
Its not fair or unfair. It just is.
Step 2:
Understand that while you are amongst the realm of the living, some things are within your control and others are not, and precisely which things land in which of those categories could change a good deal depending on who exactly you are, what you do or don't have access to, where exactly you are, etc.
Maybe it makes sense for you to try and build up a bit of an emergency food and water supply, a method of generating power, staying warm or cool, etc, in case shit hits the fan.
Maybe it makes more sense to establish some kind of bug out plan and procedure.
Maybe, it just makes the most sense to just accept that if you're in a very important / very dense area....well, one day, you might just evaporate.
Unfortunately, withot knowing more about you and your situation, I can't really say which three of those is the framework of a better approach, or if something entirely different would make more sense.
But for any of those... don't kick yourself for ... things you didn't do or prepare for in the past, don't expect to be able to suddenly just 'solve' this 'problem.'
Beyond being terrible for your mental health and just aggrevating the panic spiral, trying to do those things is ineffective, not productive at even attempting to 'solve' the 'problem'.
Break it down into bite sized chunks that are manageable, that each, on their own, put you in a generally better position than not doing them.
Don't dive headfirst with crazy expensive shit, start with the basics, as if you were preparing for a 3 day emergency from like a tornado or flood or local/regional grid failure or earthquake or hurricane.
Yeah, nukes and war don't play by all the same rules as those, but a lot of the basics are the same.
Basic food and water supply, basic medkit, flashlight, hand crankable emergency radio, thermal/moon blanket, solid set of clothes, two sets of undies and socks, decent backpack, decent multipurpose knife, probably some all purpose gloves, solid shoes, solid all purpose coat that you can either open up and air out, or stuff more layers underneath to stay warm... some means of starting a fire...
... these days probably a battery bank/solar charger for a phone... if you're a lady or gonna be with one or some: tampons...
... make sure you've got important ids and documents somewhere secure and ready to go, if you need to go...
... definitely doesn't hurt to have a couple hundred in cash, smallest bills as you can, just in case some electronic payment system goes down and you need to pay for something.
Pretty much most of that shit can fit into a normal backpack, and if you can put that together, you're doing way better than being totally and completely unprepared.
You don't, you have no direct control over world events.
You have a choice, you can either join an activist group and maybe get some comfort that you're doing something or take a break and focus on getting the most out of life.
In the 80s, we had nuclear attack drills in school. In the 50s, suburbanites with a very guilty conscience built fallout shelters in their backyards.
It's good to stay informed but try not to let it impact your day to day mental health. Consider that we've been under threat of mass nuclear war for about 80+ years now and haven't been in a full scale one yet.
There's little that you're able to actually influence so as ignorant as it may sound, try to avoid worrying about it. If it happens, it happens, you won't feel better for having worried about it and there isn't much you could plan for anyway.
Focus on the things and people that matter to you and take each day as it comes on the basis that nuclear war is not happening.
Move to Washington D.C. or Cheyenne Wyoming, if you're inside the blast radius then you won't have to live to see the world end.
I suggest playing around with this.
https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/
it's a nuclear weapons detonation simulator.
You need to understand that it's profitable for the media to overly dramatize what nukes can do. Modern media profits from fear. In reality the destruction is very localized. Think of an area you are knowledgeable. Does the media portray anything you do correctly? As long as you are not in major target city or military base you will be fine. I had a 20 minute commute to the base I worked on. Turns out my house was outside the blast radius if the base was nuked. It wouldn't even break the windows.
FYI: I use to work for the army, I was on the peripheral of their prep for nuclear war. When you actually dig into the effects, it just a big boom. Meanwhile you have trucks and rail cars full of toxic material and poisonous gas driving through your town every day and for the most part nothing ever happens.
As long as you are not in major target city ... you will be fine.
That seems pretty complacent tbh.
First of all even just the top 30 cities in the US are home to about 41 million people. Which seems a lot of folk to simply write off.
Also, the destruction of the major cities would cause huge/complete economic, social, infrastructural and legal collapse for the rest of the country.
Plus, even for those outside the immediate blast radius, there'd be the massive environmental impact of pollution to land and water, not least the potential for a nuclear winter killing off crops, and then animals.
Turns out my house was outside the blast radius if the base was nuked.
Without knowing the size of the bomb, how could you know you would be outside it? Not that blast radius is all that matters anyway.
So you didn't even look at the link I provided?
It lets you select the warhead size and whether it is an air burst or ground burst. Also since the Cold War ended, most countries, except china, have opted for smaller warheads and better precision. Most rogue states can only manage a fission bomb not a fusion devices, the same goes for India and Pakistan. And a fission device is what is used as a tactical nuke by the major powers. It is what Russia is threatening Ukraine with.
So the most likely device to go off now, is about the same yield of one of the original ones used on Japan.
The doomsday scenario you describe will only happen if every nuclear armed power everywhere unloads their entire arsenal all at once. If that were to happen you still will not need to worry, because you will be dead. But I put that as a very low probability event. Putin doesn't want to die, Trump doesn't want to die, Xi doesn't want to die. Nobody is going to go there.
Am I overreacting
Yes.
Totally understandable in the world with the dopamine fueled news cycles running on fear.
But, nuclear war is very unlikely, that's why Putin is threatening it every other week, he knows he won't do it, and other leaders know that too. It's meant to terrorise people.
Help Ukraine to grind down russia so that eventually we can denuclearise them (remove the Kremlin and let the russians have another try at democracy would be nice too) is IMO the closest any regular person can do today.
I agree that things are looking bleak, but im still hopeful for the future.
Nuclear war is a possibility, but very unlikely.
I think basic preparedness in these troubled times is just sensible. Not "prepper" stuff, but enough water and caned foods for 3 days or something.
Other than that just build local, off-line relationships.
The good thing is that I'm too old to go to war and my kids to young for that. Instead we'll be part of the smithereens that you see in the background behind an obviously disturbed reporter. I'll probably be a smudge in pinkish red color.
Well either you move to somewhere you're guaranteed a Nuke won't affect you, or you build a bunker. If you can't do either of those then you accept the fate that you will have no control over anything
Acceptance of mortality. Acceptance that it could happen at any time. And knowing that there are many, many potential causes that are entirely out of one's control.
I don't run around in fear about brain aneurysms.
If this is in response to the capture of Maduro specifically, then yes, you are overreacting. Trump seems to only be interested in being a bully picking on those weaker than him, which excludes nuclear powers.
Well, I had the realisation that the human race is a cancer to the planet, nukes might just be the chemotherapy the planet needs to survive. I was getting really distraught about the environmental crisis and concluded that nuking everything might be a way out. It gave me an odd sense of peace
Most countries have some kind of "disaster preparedness" suggestions, be they for earthquakes, floods, tornados, WMDs, etc. A lot of these suggestions overlap: have a stock of food, know where important documents are, think about where you'd shelter, etc.
There will probably not be an extinction-level event. But at some point in your life you may experience an emergency where you need a stock of food, to know where your documents are, to have a place to shelter, etc. So maybe it'd help you out to make plans for what you'd do in case of a general emergency/disaster.
Here are a couple useful documents that were made in the US:
Wish I could upvote this five times.
OP, you have an emergency management agency of some kind for your area. They will have all kinds of info on how to prepare for any disaster (and they even know what kinds of disasters are most likely to affect your area).
If you're in the US, try Google county name and emergency management agency or state name emergency management agency. Follow their socials! Check out their webpages! And please please sign up for whatever alerting/notification system they use to update residents on ongoing/evolving events.
I'd never actually watched this before but the advice is perfectly reasonable. They're talking about if you're on the periphery of the impact zone to protect against flying debris such as glass mostly, and secondarily against some hot winds. Obviously there are many situations where you're fucked no matter what, but if you do survive you don't want a bunch of neck or torso lacerations from flying glass on top of everything else.
Read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stability%E2%80%93instability_paradox
More countries having nukes makes nuclear war less likely
We lived through the Cold War in the '80s. It seemed like a very real threat and eventually even though nothing really changed until the wall came down, everyone kind of got used to it and went on as best we could.
Like we have more recently with Covid. That's still there and hasn't gone away. It's still as serious a threat as it was at the beginning. You know how you'd mostly forgotten about it but not really? Same deal.
If you can't form or find a community, find distractions.
And if you find out where the first bomb's going to hit, let me know because I want to be under it.
The only thing you can do is move away from a major city. and after that you can't do shit. So don't worry about it. it's fine
check out that movie Dead Man's letters. it's really good.
Come visit Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, At least you'll learn what happens...
Except you really don't. Hiroshima was a tiny bomb compared to what's currently aimed at you.
A thermonuclear missile can start a fire storm, that's a fire that creates it's own weather patterns. This fire storm will be the size of a US state. From a single missile.
Each state has dozens of missiles aimed at it, just waiting for the launch order.
The same sort of devastation will hit all of Europe, Russia, China, and basically the entire northern hemisphere.
It doesn't matter if you're in a hardened bunker either, because you'll just cook alive inside. That's if your bunker survives at all, because there's no bunker on earth that can survive a direct hit. Not under the White House, not NORAD, not even most deep mines.
And since every single nuclear power is "launch on warning", we're likely fucked. At any time, we are less than 30 minutes from complete extinction.
But since there's literally nothing we can do about it, I just don't think about it.
Play fallout
Something that has helped me recently:
"The only thing that is guaranteed is that nothing will stay the same."
I think @DesertCreosote@piefed.blahaj.zone gave you a great breakdown, and I’ll add a little more.
I’ve worked with military technologies before. Unfortunately, I can’t give away many details for relatively obvious reasons. However, I can tell you with absolute confidence that in the case of a ICBM with a nuclear warhead being launched, there is a close to 0 chance it will ever land on Earth. In fact, ICBMs are almost entirely useless technology nowadays.
A nuclear warhead may also be delivered via plane, a la WWII. This too, is largely a nonissue. The odds of a plane getting deep enough into a country while carrying a weapon like that while under the level of surveillance that is currently going on are again, close to 0.
There’s a reason nobody has dropped any Nukes yet. It’s not because anyone is afraid of the consequences. It’s because it’s so close to impossible for it be an actual threat.
With all due respect regarding your desire for discretion, you're going to at least have to make an argument here, rather than an unfounded claim. Why will an attack with ICBMs be unsuccessful?
Yeah, Israel was able to launch a shit ton of Missiles into Iran, and some of the Iranian Missiles hit Israel, even through the Iron dome, the tightest missile defense system in the world.
- The tightest missile defense system in the world in public knowledge
- The actual system that is used for ICBMs wasn’t activated because these were considered “friendly” missiles by that system.
ETA: 3. Those missiles didn’t have nuclear warheads on them, so the good system wouldn’t have really cared even if they weren’t friendly
(X) Doubt.
Sure, missiles coming in from Iran were probably considered "friendly" by Israel...👍
Yes, the good system will magically discern which of the missiles are nuclear tipped when the time comes.
Also, it won't be missiles raining down once the shit hits the fan. It will be MIRVs. Good luck catching all of those with the secret, ultra capable ABM system that has been deployed to all likely target locations!
If you're willing to spend the money, a combination of THAAD, Patriot, and perhaps an Arleigh Burke or two parked off the coast might be able to catch a good number of warheads headed for e.g. NYC or DC but you cannot possibly cover every place in the country all at once.
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Yes you are overreacting. What country do you live in? Is there a military facility next door to you?