are you feeling the overwhelm?
There are times when the wider world feels particularly difficult to live in. One distressing event follows another, and even when something begins to settle, our attention is quickly drawn towards the next conflict, political upheaval, humanitarian crisis, act of violence, natural disaster or other situation unfolding somewhere in the world. We can be sitting safely at home, going about an entirely ordinary day, while being continually reminded of how much fear, uncertainty and suffering exists beyond the boundaries of our own immediate lives. I find that exhausting.
It's one of the reasons I stopped deliberately consuming mainstream news many years ago. I don't generally read newspapers either, and while I haven't completely withdrawn from world events, I no longer feel the need to immerse myself in continual coverage in order to be aware of what is happening. Important stories still reach me, and at one point I chose to receive a more neutral-style news summary that allowed me to keep up with significant events without continually moving from one news report to another.
That balance matters to me. I find much mainstream news coverage heavily weighted towards conflict, crisis, fear and what is going wrong, and when I consume too much of it, I feel the effect emotionally and energetically. I can be informed about something relatively quickly, yet continue reading, watching and absorbing more and more coverage long after that additional information is giving me anything useful. At that point, I'm no longer simply informed. I'm immersed. I've learned that there's an important difference between the two. I want to know enough about the world to remain connected with it. I don't, however, want to become so consumed by everything happening within it that I lose my own sense of steadiness.
Caring Without Carrying Everything
When world events feel overwhelming, we can respond in all sorts of ways. We can become emotionally consumed by what we're seeing. We can keep watching, reading and checking for updates, perhaps because something feels too important to look away from, and yet the more we take in, the more helpless we begin to feel. We can also go in the opposite direction and want to shut everything out because we simply cannot absorb another distressing story. And sometimes caring itself can begin to feel like a responsibility. We see so many situations in which people need help that we can feel we should be responding to all of them, speaking about all of them, understanding all of them or somehow doing something about all of them.
I don't believe there's one correct emotional response to a troubled world. Something happening thousands of miles away may genuinely upset me. It may frighten me or make me angry. Inner peace doesn't require me to override those feelings or pretend that I'm serenely unaffected by somebody else's suffering. For me, inner peace is much more about creating enough steadiness within myself that I can remain open to the world without allowing everything happening within it to consume me.
That means recognising the difference between caring and carrying everything. I can care about something without following every development throughout the day. I can feel compassion for people affected by an event without watching distressing footage repeatedly to prove that I care. I can take action where there's something meaningful I can do without convincing myself that I'm personally responsible for resolving situations far beyond my influence. And I can step away for a while without that step somehow cancelling my concern.
Protecting My Energy
My spirituality also shapes how I understand this. I believe periods of turmoil and disruption can accompany significant collective change and awakening. When established ways of being are shifting, individually or collectively, I don't necessarily expect that change to feel comfortable or orderly. That doesn't mean I view war, violence, disaster or human suffering as spiritually positive or necessary. I don't need to assign a positive purpose to somebody else's suffering in order to find spiritual meaning within my own experience of living through turbulent times.
What I can decide is how I want to move through those times. For me, protecting my energy is part of that. I know how I feel when I've spent too much time absorbing frightening or distressing information. I can feel myself becoming increasingly unsettled, even though nothing has changed in my immediate surroundings. My attention has been somewhere else for so long that I've gradually moved away from my own centre.
So I pay attention to what I repeatedly expose myself to. That may mean choosing a particular point in the day to catch up with what's happening rather than checking continuously. Or it may mean being selective about the sources I give my attention to or recognising that social media is keeping me emotionally activated rather than meaningfully informed. And it may also mean noticing that I've already read the latest update, nothing useful has changed, and yet ten minutes later I'm checking again.
That continual pull towards one more update can be surprisingly difficult to interrupt, particularly when a situation is uncertain and part of us seems convinced that knowing more will somehow make us feel more in control. Usually, for me, there comes a point when it does the opposite. Protecting my energy isn't about turning away from necessary information. If something is happening locally that affects my safety or requires me to act, of course I want to know about it. It's about recognising when information has stopped helping me understand what is happening and started consuming my emotional attention instead.
Holding More Than One Place
Living abroad can add another dimension to this because ‘the world’ isn't always somewhere distant. We can find ourselves emotionally holding more than one country at the same time. Something significant may be happening where we currently live, while another event is unfolding in the country we came from. People we love may now be scattered across several countries, which means an event that appears distant on a map can suddenly feel intensely personal.
There can be a strange emotional split when something serious is happening back home too. Physically, we're continuing with an ordinary day in another country, perhaps working, shopping or making dinner, while part of our attention remains with people and places hundreds or thousands of miles away. I remember experiencing that particular sense of distance when I was much younger and at university in Dundee, Scotland. In November 1993, an IRA car bomb went off in the centre of the town where I was born. The bombing was non-fatal, however, my parents and grandparents were still living there, and suddenly something frightening was happening in a place that was home to people I loved while I was somewhere else entirely.
I could watch what was happening, listen for information and speak to my family on the telephone. I couldn't physically go there and be with them or support them, though. I remember that feeling of helplessness, of knowing they were there while I was in Scotland with very little I could actually do. I believe that was one of my earliest experiences of what it can mean to emotionally hold one place while physically living in another.
When something unsettling is happening in the country we're living in, we may be navigating it without quite the same familiarity with local systems, culture or sources of information that we once took for granted elsewhere. That means that living across countries doesn't necessarily make world events more overwhelming, sometimes it means emotionally holding more than one place at once. I've become increasingly conscious that I can't hold all of those places, all of those people and all of those events with the same intensity, all of the time. Nor do I believe I need to.
Returning to Inner Peace
When I first began thinking more deeply about how to remain connected with the world without being consumed by it, I turned, as I often do, towards my spiritual guidance. I asked the angels for guidance around creating greater inner peace while the outer world feels unsettled, and that became the basis of my Inner Peace oracle card reading. For anyone who feels drawn to that kind of spiritual guidance, the reading is there as an optional space to explore that question more deeply.
Inner peace, for me, though, also lives in much more ordinary choices. It can be deciding that I know enough about a particular event for today. It can be putting my phone down. Going outside. Spending time with somebody I love. Giving my full attention to the life immediately around me rather than mentally remaining inside events I cannot personally change.
Sometimes I ask myself whether there's actually something meaningful I can do. Perhaps there's an organisation I want to support, somebody I can contact, a practical action I can take or a conversation worth having. If there is, I can choose that action. If there isn't, repeatedly taking in more distressing information doesn't necessarily make my caring more meaningful. That's been an important distinction for me because it's very easy to confuse emotional exhaustion with engagement. I don't have to exhaust myself to demonstrate that something matters to me.
Where I Place My Attention
Gratitude is another way I personally return some of my attention to what remains supportive, meaningful and good within my own life. I'm not grateful for the suffering. Nor does noticing something beautiful in my own day somehow cancel out something terrible happening elsewhere. Gratitude simply reminds me that what is wrong in the world is not the entirety of my experience. There can be enormous difficulty somewhere in the world and kindness in my own day. There can be uncertainty and something that makes me laugh. I can be worried about an event I've just read about and grateful for the person sitting beside me.
For me, gratitude changes where I place some of my attention. It brings me back into relationship with the life I'm actually living without requiring me to stop caring about lives being lived elsewhere.
For anyone wanting to develop that practice more consistently, Start Monday with Gratitude is my year-long self-study gratitude experience, created to help make gratitude a regular part of everyday life. Within the context of world-event overwhelm, I see it as one way of deliberately allowing some of our attention to rest upon what remains present and supportive in our own lives when so much external information is directing us towards what is wrong.
And then I return to the wider world when I'm ready. That's the balance I'm continually finding for myself. Not ignorance. Not immersion. Awareness without feeling that I have to absorb everything. Care without believing I have to carry everything. Protecting my energy without turning my back on the world.
There will still be stories that affect me deeply. There will be events I follow more closely than others, times when I feel angry or frightened by what I'm seeing and days when protecting my inner peace feels considerably more difficult than simply deciding not to check the news again. Inner peace isn't a permanent state I achieve and then somehow maintain regardless of what happens around me. For me, it's something I return to. I can remain aware. I can care deeply. I can take meaningful action where something is mine to act upon. And I can also recognise when continually taking in more information is no longer helping anybody and is simply pulling me further away from my own centre.
I don't have to carry the whole world in order to care about it. Protecting my inner peace isn't turning my back on the world. It's part of how I remain present within it without becoming consumed by everything I cannot personally change. Which means that sometimes the most honest question isn't, How do I stop caring so much? It's simply: How do I care without carrying all of it?