Read this if you're tired

“My world’s on fire” is a free, biweekly newsletter about disasters from journalist Colleen Hagerty. I understand news about disasters can feel a bit overwhelming (particularly these days), but my aim with this dispatch is to help you feel a little bit more at ease by equipping you with in-depth reporting and insights about our unpredictable world. If you find value in my reporting, please subscribe and share to support this new venture.

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A few weeks back, I talked about the idea of “disaster fatigue” following predictions for extreme weather months ahead.

Since then, Louisiana declared a state of emergency over Tropical Storm Cristobal.

Wildfires have burned thousands of acres across California and Arizona.

And it’s not even technically summer yet.

Of course, if you don’t live in the areas impacted, you might have missed those headlines. There’s been more than enough to keep you occupied, with the unprecedented wave of protests across the country, spiking cases of coronavirus, and June presidential primaries.

Or, maybe, you just took some time to tune out from the news altogether. It’s something many experts suggest doing when it feels like there’s just too much, and it certainly can help refocus your priorities and just generally clear your head.

But it’s also not always an accessible solution. For many in this moment, when policies impacting health and safety are changing incredibly quickly, totally unplugging or ignoring current events might not be possible or even safe.

So, for this week’s newsletter, I wanted to look at ways to stay engaged and informed without becoming consumed by the headlines flashing across your screens.

“The complexity is – how do you stay compassionate and caring about the bad things that are happening without swamping your own emotions and either getting angry or just giving up?” explained Dr. Mary McNaughton-Cassill, the expert I turned to for help. She’s uniquely suited to speak about this struggle, as a psychology professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio, the author of multiple books about stress management, and a volunteer with the Green Cross Academy of Traumatology, where she provides support for first-responders and communities following disasters.

Her responses, which I’ve edited for length and clarity, offer context on disaster fatigue, insight into why this current moment feels different, and a bit of practical advice in case you find yourself on the brink of the sort of burnout she describes.

As a “some personal news” note, be sure to read to the end for some additional links on the subject and an update on future newsletter editions!

Recognizing disaster fatigue

“Disaster fatigue, or compassion fatigue, happens when you are overwhelmed by lots of images, stories, or evidence of bad things happening to people. When that happens, it can become so disturbing to you that you need a way to escape.

One route is to disconnect, try to ignore it. Another is to blame the victims, or somehow try to find a way that it's not really as unfair as it appears.

And a third way is to get somewhat hopeless. In the distant past, we had ‘fight or flight’ responses – people respond to stress in their environment with a physical action. Now, we're living in a world where the vast majority of the bad stuff that we see is through the media. It's not in our own world, it doesn't affect us directly, and we really feel like we can't do anything about it. As humans, feeling hopeless is not a good place to be in. It makes people depressed; it makes them anxious.

We're in a country that does not like to talk about mental illness – there's still a huge stigma around being vulnerable or reaching out for help. But I think that's one of the messages we have to give people now, and both talk about it more to make it more normal to be stressed and to seek help, and to be educated on the signs.”

Why the coronavirus crisis feels different than most natural disasters

“When a hurricane or a fire hits, the damage is very, very visible. With this virus, for the vast majority of people, there was no impact point. So, it's very hard for people to continue to think of this as a major crisis when there's nothing visible to indicate that. You know, you look at your house and your city, and things look normal.

My daughter runs a summer camp, and she lives in a county north of San Antonio, and I don't even know if they've had 10 cases of COVID-19 yet. In a community like that, it's very easy to say, ‘Oh, it's never coming here, it's not gonna happen,’ right? And yet, we know that there are other rural communities that said that and are now getting slammed, so it's like a storm that keeps on rolling.

When you go to a disaster shelter, people are standing there with nothing – they've lost their house and their car, but they already feel like the worst is over, and they can already start talking about recovery and moving forward. What’s making people crazy right now is we don't know if the worst is over and no one knows when recovery starts.”

How to address your disaster fatigue without tuning out

“When people want to change behavior, there's a set of steps we have them do. Okay, you feel like the news exposure you're getting now is upsetting you. You don't want to necessarily get no information, but the first step would be to create a baseline, keep a little record for a few days.

Doing that often gives you a sense of what's helpful and what's not. For example, it probably is good to check in on a trusted news source in the morning to figure out what's going on. It probably doesn't help to check back every hour all day.

Once you've done that, I tell people to think about what kind of media exposure works for you. For me, I don't like really graphic visual images, and it's better to consume my news either by reading articles or listening to the radio.

So, figuring out what kind of source works for you, how often you need it, and then, also, focusing on modification. Set a goal – okay, I'm not gonna check my phone every hour, I'm going to rely on updates in this way instead. Actually become conscious of how to change that behavior.

When we're talking about disaster fatigue in the sense of people observing disasters through the media, I also often argue that the solution is to take action – you can donate blood or donate food or do something.”

Keep reading...

• More from Dr. McNaughton-Cassill about the impossibility of tracking time during the coronavirus shutdowns (New York Times)

• Find yourself losing hours sifting through headlines social media? You’re probably doomscrolling (Wall Street Journal, h/t @karenkho, whose nightly “doomscrolling” check-ins help!)

• Understanding the physical response to disaster or “crisis” fatigue (Wired)

My dog, Scarlett, modeling a very different type of fatigue

Newsletter news

I’ve been so encouraged by the response I’ve gotten to the newsletter so far that I’ve decided to make it a weekly thing! Every other week, you can still expect deeper-dive dispatches like this one, with Q&A’s, exclusive reporting, and some background to what you might be seeing in the news. In the in-between weeks, I’ll be sending a shorter newsletter filled with suggested links to read/listen/watch (sort of like this one).

As always, I’d love to hear any tips, story ideas, or suggestions you have – find me on your social network of choice (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram), via email ([email protected]), or hit the button below to leave me a note here.

Thank you for becoming an early part of this community, and a special thanks to all who have shared this newsletter with their networks. Here’s a little something for reading to the end.

Colleen