The above image was made using stable diffusion with the prompt 'color line drawing of psychology reading a newspaper.'
While most people can tune out bad news, I'm continually exposed to it by my work. The news reports I summarize every week are often troubling and sometimes horrific. Although I'm to some extent inured to the negativity, there are times when the material I'm dealing with hits me like an emotional earthquake. In extreme cases, tears cloud my vision and I feel hopelessly overwhelmed. When this happens, I breathe deeply, allowing the emotional spell to overtake my senses before it eventually dissipates.
Some of the impacts of the bad news I read are more subtle. Over the years, I've become casual and even strident about the gravest of matters. On a somatic level, the stress of continual exposure to bad news is stored in points of bodily tension. I'm better than I used to be at processing and dissolving these tensions quickly, but they still show up sometimes.
One of the best ways to process disturbing information is to talk about it with another person. Sharing the burden of knowledge naturally alleviates some of the pressure of knowing. Another thing I've found helpful is putting the information into a more appropriate context. Everything that happens is part of a larger story, and that story is broadly positive if you zoom out far enough.
Of course, most people avoid this kind of stuff by avoiding terrible news altogether. They're deliberately unaware of society's great and ongoing failings. That's understandable. Good for them. But the rest of us would rather know what's going on.
Grief. Despair. Fear. Paranoia. These feelings and more are bound to come up when looking into any of the myriad interconnected societal crises now underway. While these feelings may be uncomfortable, they're totally healthy. The trick is to acknowledge and attend to the feelings without giving them any power. There are two analogies I use for relating with strong emotions.
First, feelings are like the weather. They're little more than the state that an internal landscape is in at a given time. This weather develops and dissipates by somewhat mysterious processes. We can respond to it however we want. And it inevitably changes.
Second, feelings are like children. They can be a source of the deepest love and joy and purpose. They will also cause trouble everywhere just because they don't know any better. Children are to be cherished, but they should in no circumstances be put in charge of a household or its finances. In most matters, they're beholden to us and not the other way around.
Another piece of the puzzle here is psychological resilience. In part because of the work I do, my psychological resilience is high. I can bounce back from reading about ecological ruin or crimes against humanity relatively quickly. Many people need more time to make sense of troubling information. Fortunately, there's nothing wrong with taking it slow.
Read my novels:
- Small Gods of Time Travel is available as a web book on IPFS and as a 41 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt.
- The Paradise Anomaly is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- Psychic Avalanche is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- One Man Embassy is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- Flying Saucer Shenanigans is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- Rainbow Lullaby is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- The Ostermann Method is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- Blue Dragon Mississippi is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
See my NFTs:
- Small Gods of Time Travel is a 41 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt that goes with my book by the same name.
- History and the Machine is a 20 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt based on my series of oil paintings of interesting people from history.
- Artifacts of Mind Control is a 15 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt based on declassified CIA documents from the MKULTRA program.