Caring for the World Without Losing Your Mind

There are days when I catch myself taking in a little more news than I probably should. Something starts to tighten — in the chest, the shoulders, the gut. Or a mentee comes to me carrying something that feels bigger than their own life: world events, suffering happening far away and close to home, a political moment going in a direction they didn't want, the ordinary weight of relationships and work all pressing in at once.

This is part of an ongoing series I've been sharing on healthy caring versus overcaring, and how we might work with that dynamic in a more sustainable way. As long as it keeps being useful, I'll keep adding to it. What I want to look at here is something specific: how do we stay present to a world that's often genuinely hard to be present to, without going under?

Preparing Before You Take It In

When I read the news, I try to show up with open questioning first. If I go in looking for some fixed truth, a final answer, a solid reality to land on, that's what spins me out the most. And let's be honest: world news these days is mostly bad news. I don't think a lot of good news gets many clicks. So I try to prepare for that. I'm probably going to meet something difficult, and I want to stay a little skeptical in a healthy way.

I should be clear about what I mean by skeptical. It's not that I don't believe something is happening. It's more about staying aware of how it's being framed, how it's being talked about. Most of you reading this know exactly what I mean.

So before I open the news — or before someone wants to talk through something hard and I just need to be present and listen — I prepare my nervous system. I prepare my body for some discomfort. That's honestly the first thing I do to care for the world without losing my mind. It's my go-to.

Caring Less Is Not the Same as Not Caring

For some people, and I recommend this for mentees who find this especially hard, preparing might simply mean consuming less news, less online content. I want to be careful here, because that can sound like giving up. It isn't. It doesn't mean we don't care. It means we recognize we're still learning how to care in a way that's sustainable, for ourselves and for others.

When we bring compassion to ourselves, we're not turning away from anyone else. Self-compassion becomes the base — the ground our strength, our compassion, and our wisdom stand on when we do show up in the world. A wiser, healthier kind of care grows out of that.

Care and Carrying

I've talked before about healthy and unhealthy care. I want to offer a slightly different framing now: care versus carrying. As in, carrying something.

This is something I like to attune to in the body — the constrictions in the nervous system, certain emotions coming up, anxiety, all of it. And attuning doesn't mean fixing. It means allowing some space for those things to be there. It's okay that they're present, to a degree. I don't have to immediately shove away a constriction or an uncomfortable feeling. It's more about letting it be there and noticing what I'm actually carrying.

This is a big one. Because what I've found is that when we're easily triggered by world events, by the news, by some unexpected change in our lives, often it isn't that single event doing it. It's everything we were already carrying.

The Ship and Its Load

The argument with your partner that morning. Your kid having a rough day, lots of tantrums. Not enough sleep. Too much caffeine. All of it.

It's like a ship carrying a heavy load. When we haven't set down the weight from the day before, or even from earlier that morning, and then a sudden shock arrives — we read something disturbing, something lands hard — that's just the right amount of extra weight to send us over the edge.

So this isn't about one dramatic moment where you drop everything you're carrying all at once. It's more like a compassionate health check. I probably do this more than ten times a day, just quietly checking in: what am I carrying right now?

Three Questions

The first question is simply that: what am I carrying? We might notice a conversation from earlier in the day, a sick family member, all kinds of things.

The second question is: do I need to keep carrying this? Some things, yes — I want to be clear about that. There are things we genuinely do need to carry. But we can't make that choice until we've named what's actually there.

And there's a third question, for when the answer is yes, or when we just don't know how to work with something yet: is there a way I can relate to how I'm carrying this a little differently?

Being With It

This is where I find a lot of value in somatic practice — connecting with the feeling in the body, allowing it, being with the discomfort without getting sucked into it or co-opted by it. That's a practice. It's not something you simply do or don't do; it's something we get used to over time in meditation.

Often something just wants my attention. There might be fear in it, anxiety, anger, resistance, resentment. Can I give it a moment? Can I connect with it? That doesn't mean I believe it. It doesn't mean I agree with it. It doesn't mean I want to feed it and make it worse. It's just giving it a moment to be.

That's what I'd generally call compassion. Compassion can be a lot of things, but that's one strong part of it — allowing a sense of: this is what it is. This is how it is right now. Can I be with this? It's not quite about acceptance. If acceptance comes, wonderful. But it's more like: can I be with this? Can I become intimate with it? Can I stop resisting the discomfort?

So this whole question of carrying — what am I carrying, do I need to keep carrying it, and if so, how — it really can change a lot.

I'll admit I have my own private language for this, which I'm not going to share here, because I lean a little into dark humor and maybe some of you don't. But the point is, I've found language that cracks me up about my own situation, language that makes the whole thing feel lighter. Maybe you'll find some of your own.

Care Is Part of Our Nature

Either way, I think the distinction between care and carrying is huge.

In this series I've talked about a lot of things, but I want to be clear about one of them: I've never meant to say don't care. I'm not even sure that's possible. All of us care about something, even if it's just ourselves — and even that shows there's care there. Care is fundamental to our nature. To our human nature, and from a Buddhist perspective, to our Buddha nature.

But like everything else, care can become constricted. It can go narrow, rigid, solid, myopic. Much of the Buddhist path, and many spiritual paths, is about opening that back up. Personally, I find open questions, investigation, and honest inquiry really helpful here, as long as they're done with compassion, and paired with somatic awareness and a willingness to meet the feeling world with kindness.

A Last Word

Caring and carrying aren't the same thing, and learning to tell them apart — gently, and more than once a day — is most of the work. None of this asks us to care less. It asks us to carry more wisely, so the caring can last.

If you're newer to somatic compassion practices and not sure where to begin, I have some guided meditations on my website. At the bottom of each page you'll find a place to join my newsletter and receive a few of them for free, including a handshake meditation that comes from Tsoknyi Rinpoche. If it resonates, his course at fullybeing.org has many more practices for working with the body and learning to recognize the difference between healthy care and unhealthy care.