“One Day at a Time” Is Not What You Think It Is
Why This Technique Works—Especially When You’re Dealing With Political Extremism
Last week in the group, we kept circling the same experience.
Different people were describing different relationships, but the underlying pattern was the same.
“I can’t stop thinking about it.”
“I keep replaying what they said.”
“I’m trying to figure out what they’re going to do next so I can be ready.”
Underneath all of it was a shared belief that if they stopped thinking about it, something important would be missed. They would be unprepared. They would lose some necessary advantage. As if the door to getting back their loved one from the grips of MAGA would open for a brief second and if they weren’t totally prepared, they would miss it and lose the chance forever.
First of all, that never ever happens. And second, thinking that it might is a typical reaction found in those living with or loving someone who is entrapped in ideological extremism.
When you are in close relationship with someone who is ideologically rigid or emotionally escalated, your body registers that environment before your mind has even had time to put its socks on. The the increase in rumination, once labeled obsession, is a nervous system attempting to create safety in an environment that does not stabilize.
Neurologically, what’s happening is not abstract.
Our brains are hardwired to protect us by constantly scanning for threat. This process—called neuroception, a term coined by Dr. Stephen Porges—occurs below conscious awareness. No one ever says “ Gee I think I will be on edge all day today”. Our nervous systems just go about detecting cues like tone of voice, facial tension, unpredictability, and contradiction, and categorizes our environment as safe, uncertain, or unsafe.
When the system detects unpredictability, it recruits it’s survival responses. That fight or flight part of the brain activates, dragging us, unconsciously away from our rational mind, from whence the good ideas and ah ha insights flow.
Two of the brain’s favorite go. to survival states are hyperarousal and what we might call cognitive time travel. Hyperarousal shows up as racing thoughts, urgency, rehearsing arguments, and attempts to solve, fix, or control the situation. Sound familiar?
Cognitive time travel refers to the mind looping backward to reinterpret the past (rumination) or forward to anticipate and manage the future (worry).
This is not dysfunction. It is adaptation.
The brain is attempting to reduce uncertainty by constructing a model: What happened? What will happen? How do I prevent harm?
The problem is that in the presence of political extremism, where our loved one’s beliefs have become rigid and not responsive to new information, this strategy does not resolve the situation.
Instead, it creates chronic dysregulation.
You end up living in mental simulations of the past and future, while the present moment—the only place where choice exists—goes unattended.
Enter “One Day At A Time”
When we talk about “one day at a time” in this context, we are not invoking a slogan.
We are interrupting a neurological loop and building the capacity for clarity and peace.
We are shifting activity away from recursive mental modeling and back toward present-moment awareness, where the prefrontal cortex can come back online, restoring discernment, inhibition, choice, and allowing insight and intuition to emerge.
If I am mentally in yesterday’s argument, I am not in contact with what is happening now. If I am preemptively fighting tomorrow’s conversation, I am also not here.
And if I am not here, I cannot choose a nonviolent response. I can only react.
I’ve presented this information hundreds of times and literally, as if on cue, this is the moment the ‘Yes, buts” show up.
“Yes, but I’m seeing my MAGA-involved relative next weekend. So I have to figure this out now.”
“Yes, but I don’t see what staying in today is going to get me.”
“Yes, but if I don’t tell them, who will?”
These are not trivial objections. They are the mind’s attempt to reassert control in a situation that does not yield to control.
So let’s take them seriously.
“Yes, but I’m seeing them next weekend.”
Nothing about that interaction will improve because you spent the entire week in a state of mental rehearsal and physiological activation.
From a neuroscience perspective, the brain does not rise to the occasion; it falls back on what it has practiced. Neural pathways strengthen through repetition. If you spend the week rehearsing urgency, argument, and fear, those are the states that will be most available to you when you are face to face. That means you will not have clarity, peace and discernment in the moment. And isn’t that what we are hoping for?
If, instead, we practice returning to center—coming back into our body, into this moment, interrupting the loop, and tolerating uncertainty—those pathways become more available in the moment of interaction, when we need them most.
We do not learn to regulate in the moment of peak stress. We rely on the regulation we have already practiced.
“Yes, but I don’t see what staying in today is going to get me.”
It gets you access to choice.
When you are pulled into past and future, you are operating from reactive circuits—pattern recognition, prediction, and defense. When you are in the present moment, the prefrontal cortex comes back online. Again, this is the part of the brain that allows for discernment, inhibition, and flexible response.
This is the difference between reacting from tension and responding with clarity.
That difference is not abstract. It is trainable.
“Yes, but if I don’t tell them, who will?”
This is where the work becomes more confronting.
Many people are not just trying to reach a loved one. Folks are attempting, in that one relationship, to counter an entire ideological system.
They are fighting for the relationship and for the nation at the dining room table.
In some cases, that may be useful.
In most cases, it is not.
If someone has already categorized you as a “liberal lunatic,” or some version of that, you are no longer a neutral messenger. You are part of the structure they are defending against. Under those conditions, more information does not create openness. It creates further entrenchment.
At that point, continuing to push is not persuasion. It is collision.
There can be a deep sense of moral obligation here, the belief that if you do not keep trying, you are complicit. But convincing someone against their will is not something you have control over.
It may not be in your purview. Even Jesus said you cannot be a prophet in your own land. And he should know. Whether folks are in a position to say something useful or not is what I help people explore in LeavingMAGA’s the free support group, or one on one in sessions.
It is possible that someone else may reach them. Or no one will. That is not something we can determine through force of will.
A more useful question is this:
Where can your energy actually create movement?
Where can you contribute to the world you want in ways that are not blocked at the outset?
Because energy spent trying to open a closed door is energy you are not using elsewhere.
This is where nonviolence takes on a more precise meaning.
It is not primarily about being nice or remaining calm. It is about maintaining contact with the present moment under pressure.
Martin Luther King Jr. described nonviolence as a way of “meeting physical force with soul force.” This is not passive. It is a form of controlled, conscious engagement that requires the ability to withstand internal and external activation without collapsing into retaliation or despair.
That capacity is built in the present moment.
Harriet Tubman’s work required the same kind of precision. Movement happened at night, decisions were made in real time, and survival depended on responding to what was actually occurring, rather than becoming consumed by fear of what might happen or rumination about what had already happened.
The contexts are different, but the principle is the same.
“One day at a time” is not about shrinking your life. It is about narrowing the field to where your power actually exists. It is about practicing presence when you ar enot under pressure so it is easier to access when you are.
It does not require you to resolve the entire relationship, determine the outcome, or predict whether the other person will change.
It asks only this:
What is mine to do today, in this moment, with clarity?
At the end of the group, I asked a simple question.
What is one thing you are willing to not carry for the next hour?
Not forever, and not because it has been resolved, but simply as a practice.
You could feel the shift in the room.
Nothing had been solved. The relationships had not changed. The uncertainty was still present.
But for a moment, people stepped out of the loop and returned to the only place where anything can actually change.
If you are in this kind of dynamic, your mind will continue trying to run the simulation. That is what it is designed to do.
The practice is not to win that argument.
The practice is to return, again and again, to what is here, to what is yours, and to what can actually be chosen.
Today.
If this is something you’re living with, you don’t have to figure it out alone. I offer one-on-one sessions (Link Here) and a free weekly support group through LeavingMAGA.org.