By Nurul Suhaidi
Each week we have news themes curated straight to us on what to care about. What topic should we pick for the chat as the day goes by? We have never been aware of the appalling event as of today. Too common different issue emerges even before we can fully make sense of the news which travels first.
Knowledge and opinion are being justified in a lot of ways. From the grandiose to the small details we feel compelled to solve the world issue at once. What we have here can lead to a situation described as “compassion fatigue” where the caring becomes a negative cost while getting us to feel overwhelmed by it.
There is so much on our plate until we can no longer decide which one to pick – the real concern.
In the middle of the ongoing world recession now, the Corona virus epidemic that inherently affects public health and the global economy, is giving us enough anxiety.
Not to mention the constant bickering scene among Malaysian politicians. Watching one minute of any news is enough to drive me mad, and it is still a dismay.
Let’s recall in 2019, when the online community posting up red and blue social media’s header showing solidarity for Sudan and Kashmir, and later move on paying attention to Muslim concentration camps in China. But hold on, one should not forget Iran and the US… Oh how about the plastic ban? And the list goes on… This time, your mind is about to crash.
Don’t misread this, the turtle is important, being aware and well-informed of world crisis is vital, but the moment it blends into putting some internal outrage in us, it is safe to start by eliminating whatever unnecessary.
People forget about drinking with straw when faced with a struggle to make ends meet. We are going to be insane thinking about all the issues.
Thinking about it in terms of the effects
Testify what is the cause of this intuition that brings to us, to the soundness of our mind. Not because all of the issues are insignificant, but who can possibly care about all of them at once or all the time?
Here are some suggestions on how we can ‘soap’ out of it until we can figure out living in this era, for the sake of mental sanity:
1. Close your mental computer tabs and pick only a few that truly matter to you. The way to control our thoughts is by controlling attention. Double on the issues that only bring life longevity.
2. Reorganise your thought by dropping tons of distractions and focus on the outcomes you want to produce. While it is easy to still get distracted, at least find the healthy distraction as you go through.
3. Practice self-care, do journaling. Let’s say you have an idea, crazy idea, just write in down, that way will redeem your mental storage so you can store in something else, and get back to it when you want.
4. Boost your mental resilience. It is hard to expand our limits of empathy when our emotional attention has already been stretched too thin. The solid transformation only can be achieved when we don’t have a poor concentration toward the core.
5. Talk to intelligent people, make sure they are from different thoughts and background, they might counterpoint on something you haven’t considered before.
With the infinite sources of information drop, it has left me thinking of how the much-anticipated information is considered enough. Because in just a few moment or the next day from now, we will be shocked again by other news. ***