With information coming at you in every direction, its easy to get burned out.
The world isnt falling apart, it just feels like it is sometimes.
News outlets are very aware of this.
They want to draw in readers and viewers, so reporting on a tragedy helps them cultivate an audience.
Why resist the urge to look?
Negative thinking, after all,isnt inherently bad, right?
In particular… negative news can affect your own personal worries.
Even worse, you may begin to drain yourself of compassion completely.
Compassion fatigue is a gradual lessening of compassion brought on by secondary traumatic stress.
Even in your personal life, the fatigue can cross over andmake your compassion can run dryover time.
You cant change the externals.
Its just not necessarily making the front page.
Its just important to keep a level head and recognize that youre only being shown half the story.
For example, say youve realized that news stories of kidnappings drag you down the most.
The longer you bottle it up, the longer youll carry it with you.
So access your support connection and start a discussion.
For example, the recent San Bernardino shooting hit my friends and I pretty hard.
Sometimes escaping a negative news-induced funk is as simple as talking it out.
Irvine, recommends you start byavoiding binging on news to begin with.
That means watching something else on TV when every news channel is covering the same tragedy.
Change the channel, close your web internet tool, and take a break.
Ask yourself, What do Ineedto know?
Sometimes just seeing that there are good things being reported can be enough to keep a positive perspective.
Youll feel better about the world, and yourself, in no time at all.
Photo via Getty and remixed by Tara Jacoby.
