November 2023 Newsletter | Coping with the Sadness of the World

October 31, 2023

The world has become so small that it can fit in the palm of your hand. On a train, in line at the grocery store, or in your bed: you can read about events happening everywhere, all the time. And because news outlets tend to focus on negative events, like man-made and natural disasters, we live in an age where it is easy to feel overwhelmed by the state of things.

Feeling sad about what happens to others is essential to who we are as people. Our ability to sympathize and empathize is a part of our socialness and compassion between people helps our species survive. But our knowledge of the world’s heartache has grown as technology has advanced; while centuries ago we were faced with only the difficulties of our immediate village or town, now we have a whole world to feel for. 

We’ve discussed before how to stay connected to news and events without reaching an overwhelmed state using CBT skills like attention retraining and setting limits on engagement with sources of discomfort. But if you have already reached a point of feeling overwhelmed, there are some tools you can learn to use to reach a calmer state of mind.

Addressing Negative Automatic Thoughts and Feelings

Automatic thoughts and feelings are something we’ve discussed often. As the term suggests, they are thoughts and feelings that happen so quickly that we don’t really perceive them happening. They are our instant, invisible reactions to a situation. The “automaticness” of them is what makes them so tricky—it’s tough to change something that you aren’t really aware of. 

For example, let’s say you read a news article about a war, an article that focuses on the disastrous harm that children are experiencing, and your reaction is a deep sense of guilt: the article makes you feel that you are a terrible person. You can no longer focus on what you should be doing, you can only sit there, feeling miserable. You may feel that this is the right thing to do: afterall, if people in the world are experiencing such a terrible thing, shouldn’t you feel bad about it? 

If your response to learning about something awful happening to someone else in the world is to sit there, immobilized, feeling bad about yourself, you’re not helping anyone. Your negative thoughts and feelings about yourself will not help those experiencing the war, they will only serve to keep you feeling bad. 

Through CBT, you can instead learn to identify these negative automatic thoughts and work to change your thinking pattern so that learning about the difficult experiences of others does not leave you paralyzed by grief. 

Relaxation Techniques

Relaxation techniques are useful tools for when we feel overwhelmed. It doesn’t help anyone else if we are making ourselves more anxious and stressed out. We can actually do more for others if we are calm: we will be more focused, more creative, less frustrated, and less tired if we allow ourselves to relax. 

Some relaxation techniques include meditation, exercise, progressive muscle relaxation, and focused breathing. 

Humans will always face things like conflict and nature-caused crises. That we can feel so deeply for people we don’t know, who are so far away from us, is a beautiful thing about us. We can do the most for those in need if we don’t allow the news of their suffering to crush us, but instead keep relaxed and clear-minded so that we are in the best state possible to help them.