Combatting Existential Dread: How to Create a More Nuanced Global Perception

The global population is predicted to eclipse 8 billion by 2023. This is a big world of ours and let’s face it, we are constantly bombarded by news from all sides, with the lion's share of it negative, anxiety-inducing, and generally destabilizing. It is not hard to understand why if we allowed our emotions to respond to it all and began to internalize a general perception, we might conclude that the world is going to ruin, and society is in peril. While the climate change crisis deepens and the threat of nuclear armageddon, war, and global terrorism represent real and ever-present dangers, we must remind ourselves to look beyond news headlines to the actions of individuals, entities, and charitable groups both big and small that serve to make the world a safer, healthier, happier, and more harmonious place. The world is an enormous place, with so many things happening simultaneously, our specie’s old evolutionary need to sniff our threats to our safety and livelihood, often cloud us to the good that is occurring. Charitable deeds, heroism, compassion, while not completely overlooked by the media, tend not to sell subscriptions or attract eyeballs. What this means is that we must work that much harder to understand that existential concerns must be tempered by a broader understanding of what is happening in the world. Our lens of understanding is deeply informed by our emotional perception, our biases, and our experience.

So how do we combat the tendency towards dire worry and dread?

We need to take the extra time to do a more evidentiary dive into uncovering all the good that is happening in the world. We need to get a wider perspective on this complicated world of ours. The world is a huge and complicated place and our minds have trouble absorbing it all. If we are willing to take a more in-depth look at what is happening, we can work to avoid living in our emotional perception, which can feed anxiety, dread and negativity, and see the world in less categorical terms.

Here are some ways to do this:

We can

1.) Research people we admire who are making a difference in areas of local, national, and global concern—on the issues that matter to us.

2.) Get involved ourselves at the grassroots level and set out measurable goals for ways we can make a difference in our corner of the world.

3.) Research charitable organizations that are involved in issues we care about and follow their actions via newsletters, emails, and webinars and then decide if we want to support them financially or materially.

4.) Make a concerted effort to seek out and highlight acts of charity, altruism, heroism, patriotism, and compassion whether they make the mainstream news or not, and celebrate these with activism, artwork, journaling, blogging, or in your own unique way.

If you are experiencing anxiety from media exposure and societal challenges, have a look at my Anxiety Therapy page and let’s chat.