To be completely honest, I don’t know. I have no idea how to watch the news without getting desensitized and overwhelmed. So far, I just keep going and hoping that I don't stop caring.

But it’s hard. Let’s face it. It is so difficult to keep up with the news of the world and not want to just… stop. 

Look at everything that is going on right now: the Ukraine-Russian war is still going on, all the human rights issues in Israel and Palestine, protests in Iran, just global warming as a whole, all the laws against queer people popping up, the rising hate crimes. I could keep going on and on and on and on…

No matter where I turn, the news all seem to amount to the same. Injustice and oppression. People in pain. Thousands, if not millions, dead.

And it would be so easy to just turn off my phone. 

Just tuning out the news and putting on Netflix would be so easy. Scrolling through Instagram instead of through news stories would require minimal effort. In fact, reading the news as though it’s one thing requires more effort than just not being informed. 

So why don’t I? 

I keep asking myself that question. Every time I get overwhelmed, everytime I want to just ignore what’s happening in the world, everytime I feel the urge to just turn it off but don’t, I wonder why that is. It makes no sense. 

But it does. I think it’s important to be informed. I think it’s important to know what’s happening in the world. And I think if I don’t know what’s happening, there’s nothing I can do to change anything. And I can’t fathom a more hopeless thought than that. 

So I keep going. I keep watching the news and seeing all the reports on the pain, the injustice, the suffering, the deaths… I keep up to date with what’s going on with the small hope that maybe, I’ll be able to do something about it. But that’s never enough to keep me going. The chance that maybe somewhere along the way, I might change something? That’s difficult to hold onto. 

So if that’s not it, then what helps me? What keeps me from just completely disengaging? What stops me from just turning my phone off?

Well, I talk about it.

I talk with my friends, I talk with my family, I talk with my therapist, I talk to whoever wants to have those conversations with me. And in those talks, I give myself space to process everything: the news themselves yes, but also my emotions, my anxieties and the sense of dread I’m usually left with. 

Then, once I’ve given myself space to explore my own feelings, the conversations change. They are no longer about how the world sucks and everything is bad, but they start shifting into conversations of hope. Conversations of action. Conversations about how to change things instead of just letting them happen. 

And that makes it so much easier to handle. 

So no, I don’t really have a how-to guide on how to watch news without feeling overwhelmed. But I do have this: give yourself space, acknowledge the feelings and emotions and find people to help you process them. 

I promise that once you get out of that doom and gloom mindspace, things start looking slightly better. And that’s all it takes to make you feel like everything's not lost, and maybe we can still change things.