There is something exhausting about living in a time when the world can arrive on your phone before you have even had your coffee.
A war. A political argument. An armed attack. A devastating image. A celebrity controversy. Someone you know reposting something you find deeply upsetting. Someone else insisting that the thing upsetting you is being completely misunderstood.
And then the comments begin. And emotional contagion takes off.
One side speaks. The other responds. Someone gets angry. Someone doubles down. Someone demands an apology. Someone says the apology isn’t enough.
It can feel as though every disagreement has become a referendum on who is good and who is bad.
And if you are already anxious, grieving, lonely or overwhelmed, it can be remarkably difficult to look away.
Why current events can feel so personal
Our brains and bodies don’t necessarily experience distant suffering as distant.
We can know intellectually that something is happening thousands of kilometres away while our nervous system responds to the images, stories and uncertainty as though something important is happening right now.
Sometimes what brings people to therapy as “news anxiety” isn’t really about the news alone.
It may be grief.
Helplessness.
Fear.
Moral distress.
Loneliness.
Anger.
A sense that the world is becoming unrecognizable.
Or the exhaustion of constantly trying to figure out what kind of person everyone else is.
There is another layer, too. Social media isn’t simply a neutral window onto the world. Research increasingly shows how engagement-based feeds can amplify emotionally charged and moralized political content. A 2026 Nature study found that engagement-based feeds increased exposure to moralized and emotional content and heightened people’s perceptions of partisan animosity.
Outrage gets attention.
Certainty travels quickly.
Complexity takes longer.
But acknowledgement is slow
This is where I find Jessica Benjamin’s work particularly interesting.
Benjamin writes about acknowledgement, witnessing and what she calls the “doer and done-to” dynamic: the psychological tendency for conflict to collapse into two positions in which one person is the one who caused harm and the other is the one who was harmed.
You can see versions of this in couples.
In families.
And, at a much larger scale, in collective trauma and political conflict.
Benjamin’s concept of the failed witness describes what can happen when suffering is not adequately recognized. Her work argues for something different: a capacity to witness another person’s suffering without needing to erase your own experience or immediately decide who gets to occupy the position of victim or perpetrator.
That is an incredibly difficult psychological task.
It is also a slow one.
We want resolution faster than humans can usually provide it
Acknowledgement is slow.
Repair is slow.
Grief is slow.
Changing our minds is slow.
Learning enough about something complicated to recognize what we don’t know is slow.
Social media is very good at the opposite.
It offers the satisfying feeling of knowing exactly what happened, who is responsible, what everyone should do and what their failure to do it says about their character.
A recent controversy surrounding Macklemore’s removal from Ed Sheeran’s U.S. tour illustrates how quickly a complicated public disagreement can become a much larger argument about political expression, responsibility, neutrality and whose voices should be heard. This also happened on a smaller, more local scale, a public post with a video by a CBC journalist being confronted on his way into a religious institution. He was disciplined by the CBC and has now hired a lawyer to fight his case.
People can and do disagree profoundly about what those events mean.
The psychological question is what happens inside us when we encounter them.
Witnessing isn’t the same as solving
We can acknowledge suffering without having solved the political question surrounding it.
We can listen to someone’s grief without agreeing with every conclusion they have drawn.
We can care about one person’s experience without deciding that another person’s suffering doesn’t matter.
And we can disagree without requiring the other person to become a different human being before we will acknowledge that they are hurting.
That doesn’t mean every claim is equally supported or every position is equally defensible. Reality, evidence, responsibility and justice still matter — even though personal truths can muddy even that.
But there is a difference between asking difficult questions and becoming psychologically trapped in the need to establish who is entirely right.
Sometimes we lose the capacity to witness because we are too busy preparing our case.
What happens when we put the phone down?
This doesn’t mean becoming indifferent.
It doesn’t mean pretending the world isn’t happening.
It may mean recognizing the difference between responsibility and helplessness.
You can care without consuming every piece of information.
You can grieve without making suffering your entire identity.
You can take meaningful action without believing you personally have to fix what is happening in the world.
You can have difficult conversations without requiring immediate agreement.
And sometimes you can step away from the feed because your nervous system needs a break—not because you don’t care.
People sometimes come to therapy saying, “I’m anxious about the state of the world.”
And sometimes, underneath the news cycle, we find something much more personal.
A relationship that doesn’t feel safe.
A loss that hasn’t been grieved.
A fear about the future.
A family conflict that has become impossible to resolve.
A profound sense of helplessness.
Or simply the exhaustion of living in a world where there is more suffering than any one person can possibly hold.
Perhaps the answer isn’t learning how to care less.
Perhaps it is learning how to stay human while caring.
To remain capable of witnessing without becoming consumed.
To tolerate uncertainty without demanding false certainty.
To hear another person’s pain without immediately turning it into a battle over whose pain matters more.
And to remember that acknowledgement, repair and meaningful change rarely happen at the speed of a repost.
Sometimes the most important psychological work is slower than that.
And perhaps that is exactly why it matters.
If anxiety about current events, grief, relationship conflict or the state of the world is beginning to take up more space than you want it to, therapy can offer a place to slow things down and understand what is happening underneath the overwhelm.
I offer therapy for individuals, couples, families, blended families, and other relationships, and treat midlife and other life transitions, trauma, anxiety, grief, burnout, relationship challenges, from an attachment-based, trauma-informed, and relational perspective.
I offer both in-person therapy in Hamilton, Ontario, and online therapy across Ontario.
I invite you to reach out for a free 15-minute consultation.
Disclaimer: This blog is intended for educational purposes only and does not constitute psychotherapy, mental health treatment, or professional advice. Reading this article does not establish a therapist-client relationship. If you are experiencing a mental health crisis, please seek immediate professional support.
Verified client feedback and Professional Endorsements can be found on Luminos and Psychology Today
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