Turning on the TV news, seeing the news feed on your phone, or opening a newspaper can all feel pretty depressing and even traumatic these days. Whether it’s war, global politics, climate disasters, or people being horrible to each other in various ways, it can feel like an overwhelming negative spiral. All too often we see a disturbing image or headline and immediately turn away, shove it down below our conscious awareness and try to forget about it – only for it to fester among all our unprocessed traumas, both large and small.
A few years ago I had an experience running a monthly EFT tapping group called Tap the News where as a group we focused on bringing our feelings about news stories to light. Whatever the stories people brought, it tended to follow a similar pattern – we felt powerless, helpless and overwhelmed by the quantity and depth of suffering in our world. As we tapped through our feelings, we were able to come to a place of peace and acceptance – not to minimise or ignore other’s suffering, nor to give up and wash our hands of all meaningful actions, but to hold and accept that suffering with compassion and love.
If you feel overwhelmed and upset by the constant stream of negative news these days, here are some tips to help you.
7 Tips to Help News Overwhelm
1. Start with yourself. Find your own inner peace. Work through your own issues, whether using EFT, other therapies, meditation, or yoga. One peaceful heart spreads positive ripples to those around them in their family and community.
2. Cultivate compassion. We don’t help anyone by turning our attention away from their suffering. When we cultivate compassion for ourselves and others, it opens our hearts, moves stuck emotions and energy within ourselves, and spreads to others in a positive way. One way to cultivate compassion is to use the Metta Sutta, a Buddhist meditation on loving-kindness.
3. Pray or send good wishes. This can include using EFT by surrogate tapping, sending reiki or other energy healing, or simply sitting in meditation and sending good thoughts to a person, a country, or our planet. As well as helping yourself feel peaceful, sending good intentions towards others has a benefit throughout the network of human communities in our world.
4. What small action could you take? There may be some small changes you could make to help the earth and climate change (re-using, recycling, using your car less, etc.), join a protest about a cause you care about, write to your local political representative, support a charity with your time or money, volunteer in your community to help those in need locally, review your purchasing choices – trying to do less harm by buying less meat, buying local products, buying second hand where possible, researching retailers’ policies, and many others.
5. Stay grounded in the here and now. Walking in nature, connecting with people, doing something grounding like gardening, pottery, or crafts, can all help you to stay out of the negative news whirlwind.
6. Avoid too much news. Consider limiting your intake of news to something more manageable for you – whether that’s disabling news notifications on your phone, deleting news apps, avoiding the TV and radio news, only looking at news once a week, whatever suits you.
7. Focus on positive news. There are several “positive news” outlets that can be really uplifting to browse. On one such website just now I saw stories about people who volunteer to dive and pick up discarded fishing nets, people pursuing and keeping alive traditional crafts in danger of dying out, innovations in technology that will help reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, advances in cancer treatments, and many more.
Which tips resonate with you the most? Try to integrate two or three of them into your life today, and see the difference in how you feel and how others around you respond!
