A Message from Organizing Director Jake Via

False Alarms and Real Ones

(July 10, 2026) — Last Sunday I was sitting on the patio of a Mexican restaurant in Milwaukee, out with my wife and some friends, casually enjoying tacos while a World Cup match blared in the background, when my Garmin watch alarm suddenly sirened that my heart rate was abnormally high. The same alarm that it sets off for a storm, a blaring obnoxious sound that says a tornado is imminent.

I looked at the number. It was high and climbing. I tried to breathe deeply and ran the ECG app, it said no afib but it also said in big letters “this cannot detect a heart attack.” Somewhere in the next few minutes, my brain — the reasoning tool I have built an entire career and worldview around — ran the symptoms and decided I was having a heart attack.

I went pale and broke out into a full sweat. My hands and fingers went tingly, then numb. Breathing became forced. I felt dizzy. Speaking became difficult. My wife called 911 while our friends checked the internet for the symptoms they saw. I thought, “This is the end, what should my final words be, if I close my eyes, they’re not opening again.”

15 minutes later, the paramedics arrived, hooked me up, and ran the checks while strangers at nearby tables pretended not to watch. Eventually my breathing normalized, and my skin color returned to normal, but I felt like I had a near-death experience similar to my motorcycle crash. The feelings were real, intense, and terrifying.

My heart was fine. What I had was my first-ever panic attack. Every symptom I recognized as cardiac was my own alarm system escalating in response to my fear of the watch alarm. My body started an emergency broadcast, playing on an increasingly loud loop that spiraled out of control.

What I didn’t know before this week was that roughly one in three Americans will experience this exact short-circuit of their reasoning at some point in their lives. One in three. It wasn’t a rare glitch but a very common failure mode of this machine we call the human body. Which means, if it hasn’t happened to you, it has almost certainly happened to someone close to you.

Naturally I’ve been sitting with this experience all week, a false near-death experience that felt every bit as real as my last actual near-death experience. And while this might have been my body taking a test run, it didn’t come out of nowhere. There is so much happening and what I can’t and won’t tell you is that the dread you might be feeling is another false alarm.

A long time ago I taught Outdoor Education and I lived on a sailboat for a few years, both times of life heavily relied on being in tune with the natural world around me. Ever since, monitoring climate change has been my dark hobby. The hobby that probably isn’t healthy but I can’t look away, I feel like I must bear witness while helping how I can on a personal level.

The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, aka the AMOC, the great ocean conveyor that regulates climate on both sides of the Atlantic is measurably weakening, and recent research keeps suggesting the cautious models were, uh, well they were the wrong ones to believe. Some researchers now warn a tipping point could be crossed in the next few decades, and that’s a shutdown that can’t be called back.

Beyond climate change, Christian nationalism has become a well-oiled and organized political project with its hands on a lot of the controls, changing laws that have major impacts. Human rights are being violated, right now, all across our country by ICE, the private prisons and jails they contract, and by an administration that treats cruelty as something to celebrate.

And the systems of reason we depend on — courts, science agencies, a shared sense that facts exist — are under sustained attack, while at the same time our own inner reasoning is being flooded daily by an information firehose engineered to keep us alarmed.

So, no, these alarms that are blaring are not false. And if you’re paying close enough attention that your body sometimes turns them into physical responses — I see you. As of Sunday, I am you.

On that patio, I learned that a nervous system in full panic can’t do anything. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t reason. I couldn’t have helped anyone, including myself. The system that evolved to save my life had taken me completely offline. And it strikes me that a lot of us are living a slow-drip version of that same state. Doom-scrolling is basically a slow-feeder for a panic attack, one activist video at a time. The threats are real, and as humanists we often feel that we must bear witness but all of that consumption adds up into a state of real dread. It can take the color out of the blue sky and suck the breath right out of us. In my case, literally.

Part of why this is so hard is that we’re running on ancient physical equipment. Our threat-detection system was tuned for dangers that were local, immediate, and actionable: the predator, the fire, the storm on the horizon. Alarm was supposed to be brief and coupled to action. We see the threat, we respond, we resolve, we rest. But the modern information firehose breaks every link in that response chain. We now perceive threats that are planetary in scale, decades in duration, and mostly beyond any one person’s reach. It’s all being played at a volume no nervous system has evolved yet to carry. There’s no “resolve and rest” step, the alarm never stops and there’s only so much any of us can take. We simply haven’t evolved to metabolize this. So, if you feel overwhelmed, you aren’t broken, you’re a perfectly good human brain living in an environment our systems weren’t evolved for.

So what do we do about it?

Well, for starters, I didn’t get through Sunday alone. My wife was beside me, steady when I couldn’t be. Our friends were working the problem. Paramedics did their patient, competent work. The internal alarm didn’t quiet because of reasonable logic, it quieted because I wasn’t facing it by myself.

And the healing this week has looked the same. When I shared what happened with our team at the AHA, I braced a little – it’s a vulnerable thing to say out loud at work. What came back was a chorus of “me too.” Several of them had been exactly where I was: the racing heart, the certainty something was terribly wrong, the confused relief afterward. And every “I’ve been there” took a little more of the fear’s weight off. That’s what camaraderie with people we trust actually does: when we share the hard stuff instead of carrying it privately, we overcome it and move forward together.

Carl Rogers, a founder of humanistic psychology and, I’m proud to say, AHA’s Humanist of the Year back in 1964, wrote “What is most personal is most general.” The feelings we’re most certain are ours alone, too strange or shameful to admit, turn out to be the most widely shared things about us. To know that though, we have to share them out loud. We have to be vulnerable.

Science says that human nervous systems regulate poorly in isolation and far better in company. We are creatures who often borrow calm from each other. Coming together is how we’ve always dealt with fear too big for one person to handle alone. You name the frightening thing out loud, someone across the fire nods, and suddenly the loneliness becomes togetherness.

But togetherness alone isn’t a cure. Remember the broken chain: see the threat, respond, resolve, rest? Community repairs the seeing part. It lets us look at hard things while feeling safe. The next step is what repairs the rest of the chain, when we respond. Our agency can be an incredible antidote to dread and collective action is even better. This is what our chapters and communities really are, underneath the potlucks and speaker series: the mutual aid, the day of service, the meeting where you sign up for something concrete to do together. Those aren’t pleasant extras to humanist life. They’re the “respond” step, taken with like-minded and valued people you can trust. They’re a way we can take in all the ick and still stand up to face the day.

I don’t have a tidy ending, because my Sunday didn’t have one. What I have is this: My brain is a terrible self-narrator, and so is yours, but the cure has never been a better brain. It’s other people — reasoning together, checking each other’s math, holding each other’s fear and joy. Humanism has never promised that our hope will turn into good fortune. It promises us a method and a community to work it with.

We have major hills in front of us. Some of them we won’t overcome, and I think we know that. But nothing about being humanist has ever required guaranteed wins, it requires something to believe in, somewhere to belong, and something worth fighting for. On Sunday my body sounded a false alarm and the people around my table brought me back. The alarms sounding for our world are real ones, and the answer is the same. Pull your chair up to a table, say the scary thing out loud, and then pick up something — anything — and get to work. That’s the whole method. If we all do that, our tomorrow will be just a bit brighter than yesterday.

High Fives,
Jake