Balancing awareness with your own wellbeing
Launch library · evergreen read
Staying informed and protecting your own wellbeing can start to feel like competing goals, particularly during a period of sustained difficult news, but treating them as genuinely opposed usually leads to one being sacrificed entirely rather than the two being balanced sensibly against each other.
A workable balance usually involves boundaries rather than avoidance: staying informed on a schedule rather than continuously, choosing a small number of trusted sources rather than an overwhelming flood of them, and deliberately pairing hard news with something restorative rather than letting one difficult story lead straight into the next.
The aim is not to feel good regardless of what is happening in the world, which would be its own kind of avoidance, but to stay engaged in a way that can actually be sustained for years, rather than burning out after a few especially difficult weeks of constant exposure. Treated this way, staying informed becomes something closer to a sustainable habit, one built to last for years rather than to burn out after a single hard month.