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Overwhelmed by the news? Try compassion training

Facing a deluge of distressing news, many people experience "empathic distress," leading to disengagement. However, research points to compassion as a constructive alternative.

By Debbie Ling, 360info
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A man holds a burning newspaper | Photo by Arvin Latifi for Pexels | Credits: https://www.pexels.com/license/

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Continuous bad news is causing people to disengage. Compassion may hold the key to staying informed and trying to fix our troubled world.

War, famine, and poverty are on the rise. Hearing about it every single day at home, online and on your phone is enough to make you want to hide.

And many have.

The rate of people actively avoiding the news at least part of the time is skyrocketing. A report by the Reuters institute found around 36 percent of people believed that interacting with the news lowered their mood. Cost of living, dangerous diets, a climate crisis, generational divides — all day, all night, all forced into your brain. The sheer scale of media present in our pockets is causing an overload of information, intended to evoke an emotional response. It is having a numbing effect on the way we see the world and what issues we care about.

Brain imaging research tells us there is a limit to the amount of empathy humans can deal with. Empathy allows us to "feel" other people's emotions and is an important social skill, but it has a downside. In many cases, feeling others' pain so acutely, so often can lead to "empathic distress". Empathic distress is when a person who witnesses other people's suffering wants to avoid or withdraw from the situation.

A key brain imaging study showed that when people were shown foot

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