Is It Time to Tune Out?

Source: BigStock/ AntonioGuillem

One of my favorite children's picture books tells the story of an exhausted mother of three rowdy children who wants a few minutes of quiet alone time. The book is called Five Minutes' Peace, and I like to give it to new parents because the book's lesson is one that every parent learns eventually: Sometimes, you need a little time to yourself to stay sane. It's a lesson we could all learn right now.

It's easy to feel overwhelmed these days. There's something to stress even the calmest person out, whether it's family, politics, war, the pandemic, or inflation. And no matter how much you want to be a good parent or a good person, you're not at your best when your stress level is always turned up to eleven.

If you've ever flown on an airplane, you know the drill: Put on your own oxygen mask before helping others with theirs. To be helpful, you must help yourself first.

Helping yourself to help others might mean tuning out your family for five minutes of peace by taking a long bath with the door closed. And sometimes, it means turning off the news and breaking news alerts on your phone. Now you might be asking: How does tuning out from the news help other people?

"If I don't keep up with everything going on, how can I be an informed citizen?" "If I don't know about all the causes of suffering in the world, how can I say that I care about other people?" Do those sentiments sound familiar?

If you're empathetic and care about what happens in your state, country, and people halfway around the world, watching or reading the news can start to feel like a duty. You might even begin to believe you're helping people simply by being aware of their plight. But by constantly staying tuned into every bad thing happening in the world, you'll burn out without helping anyone.

You may already be familiar with the concept of compassion fatigue, a condition often experienced by nurses, doctors, social workers, and others who work frequently and directly with traumatized people. It is:

Stress resulting from exposure to a traumatized individual.…the convergence of secondary traumatic stress (STS) and cumulative burnout (BO), a state of physical and mental exhaustion caused by a depleted ability to cope with one's everyday environment.¹

You may be less familiar, though, with compassion fade.

Compassion fade is what happens when a crisis seems so overwhelming that you begin to care less. "Compassion shown towards victims often decreases as the number of individuals in need of aid increases," wrote the authors of a seminal study on the topic. "'Compassion fade' may hamper individual-level and collective responses to pressing large-scale crises."²

The secondary traumatic stress from being constantly aware of all the suffering in the world can make you feel incapable of doing anything to help anyone, so you don't. In a way, caring too much can make you behave like someone who doesn't care at all.

You only have so much emotional bandwidth to care for other people's well-being. Whether you’re a busy parent, healthcare worker, or just keeping abreast of the suffering in the world, eventually, you’ll get burned out. You’ll reach the end of your ability to care. At that point, you may just shut down completely, lash out in anger, get depressed or anxious, and not be of any help to anyone, least of all yourself.

Is it time to tune out?

Tuning out might entail taking your five minutes of peace away from your boisterous family members, all demanding your attention. Or it might mean staying away from reading or watching news programs for a while. You can't help your family if your nerves are frayed and you feel so exhausted you might snap. If you're so overwhelmed with all the suffering in the world that you don't donate your time, money, or anything else you might have that people need, then you're not helping by paying attention. You're merely paying attention for its own sake.

It's time to put on your oxygen mask and take a few deep breaths.