"The Sin of Empathy" Part I + How to Consume News Productively
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In this episode, Brad breaks down the troubling rhetoric from Christian nationalist pastors—and even figures like Elon Musk—who claim that empathy is a sin and a societal weakness. He critically examines Pastor Joe Rigney’s book, The Sin of Empathy, which argues that empathy is particularly dangerous for women and should be rejected in Christian teachings.
Also joining the discussion is Dr. Jill Richardson, who offers practical strategies for consuming news without feeling overwhelmed. She shares small, actionable steps to stay informed while maintaining hope, joy, and humor in the fight against authoritarianism.
Tune in for an insightful conversation on why empathy matters—and why some want to erase it.
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According to Christian nationalist pastors and Elon Musk, empathy is not only a sin, but it is a bug.
It's a weakness.
Something plaguing our society.
This idea is not only dangerous, but it portends something quite terrifying.
In order to get started, let's listen to a clip from Elon Musk that has been making the rounds.
Mental weakness.
That was Musk on the Joe Rogan podcast, an interview that no doubt has already made its way to millions and millions and millions of young men and other young people who turn to Rogan for knowledge and insight and just how to be in the world.
Let's listen to another clip, though, one that is a little longer.
This is from Pastor Joe Rigney, who talks about empathy as a sin.
Empathy almost needs to be struck from the Christian vocabulary.
Empathy is dangerous.
Empathy is toxic.
Empathy will align you with hell.
Absolutely.
Sympathy, compassion, yes.
Empathy, deadly and dangerous.
And this will be controversial.
Women are especially vulnerable to this.
Absolutely.
In our churches, women will have empathy for the sinner.
They'll have empathy for the rebel.
They'll have empathy for the toxic sixth person who's gossiping and slandering and being bullied by the spiritual authority of the church.
And in their empathy, they'll align with those who are misaligned with God.
One of the patterns that we've seen in 25 years of church ministry, the most divisive households are those households where there is a loud, aggressive, Jezebel spirit wife.
Paired with a weak, passive Ahab beta male.
Not ungodly for a man to speak into who his wife is friends with.
Absolutely.
Who she can hang out with.
Who she's following.
Who she listens to.
Because a husband and wife have to be united.
Now, I'm not chasing Sharon around policing her friends because my wife is godly and she wants nothing to do with the ungodly.
But I'm telling you, women can be vulnerable.
Rigney is the author of a new book called The Sin of Empathy.
And a couple of years ago, he talked about this publicly and wrote about it.
And I tweeted it out.
I tweeted out the idea of the sin of empathy.
And back when Twitter was a thing, back when Twitter was actually functioning and people actually used it to share knowledge and all that, not just disinformation and conspiracy theories and other stuff, it might have been my most liked and sent tweet in the history of my account.
Like, people reacted so strongly to this.
And so Rigney didn't give up.
He wrote a whole book about how empathy is a sin.
And you heard him in that clip talking about how empathy will tear up the church.
And then he went directly, like right into how empathy is a woman problem and how women need to be kept in check when it comes to their empathy because it could ruin the church.
It could ruin their marriage.
And weak beta males allow these loud women to...
Get out here and gossip and empathize and just destroy everything.
Here's what I want to do today.
I want to do a deep dive into Rigney's book.
I read the book so you don't have to.
I paid for the book, unfortunately, so you don't have to and no one else will.
And there's a lot here to talk about.
And eventually I'm going to come back and link this to Elon Musk and what he said about empathy on Joe Rogan.
But the first thing I want to do is simply go through Rigney's book.
And see how he concludes that something like empathy is a sin and why this is a gendered problem.
And as we'll see, it's also a racial problem.
So let's dive in.
All right.
So let's start at the beginning of the book and just start to try to understand how you can think of empathy as a bad thing.
Rigney says in the beginning of the book that he takes a lot of insight from a book by Edwin Freeman.
And what he says he learned from Friedman is that empathy has become a sacred cow that allows the least mature and most reactive members of a community to hijack the community's agenda.
And as you'll see, if you read this book, and I hope you don't, but I did.
If you read this book, what you'll see is that he is talking about specific people, that there's whole chapters on women who are the most reactive members to a community and hijack the agenda.
There's also, like, long reflections on the idea of woke.
And he even equates wokeness with empathy.
And, of course, he extends that, woke and empathy, to those who reacted to the murder of George Floyd, the murder of others by police at the hands of police brutality.
And so you can see that when he talks about the most reactive members to a community who hijack its agenda, he's thinking about specific groups.
He's thinking about women, and he's thinking about racial minorities.
He's thinking about those who decry racial injustice and so on, and we'll get there.
He then sort of lays his cards on the table when he talks about the ways that the Bible outlines empathy.
And he mentions passages from the New Testament, 1 Peter 3.8, that we should have sympathy and a tender heart.
Colossians 3.12, that we should clothe ourselves in compassion.
Philippians 1.8, that Paul tells the Philippians he yearns for them with the affection of Christ.
So, there is an admission that the Bible wants Christian people to be compassionate.
And compassion is a word he likes.
He thinks compassion is good.
He thinks empathy is bad, and we'll see why.
But he then goes on to say, well, these passages are one thing.
But there's others.
The Bible contains passages like this.
He quotes Deuteronomy.
He quotes Deuteronomy about the ways that those who serve other gods are to be punished.
Deuteronomy 13, 6-9 ends like this.
But you shall kill him.
Your hand shall be first against him to put him to death and afterward the hand of all people.
So that escalated quickly.
We went from compassion in the New Testament and Colossians and 1 Peter.
Clothing ourselves with affection to you shall kill him.
And he justifies it by saying it this way.
I know what I'm asking.
Sometimes you must overcome natural emotions in order to be faithful to me.
You might need to kill people.
So, you know, there's that.
Okay.
He then goes to Ezekiel.
There's like a really interesting thing here with Ezekiel.
Therefore, as I live, declares the Lord God, surely because you have defiled my sanctuary with all your detestable things and with all your abominations, therefore I will withdraw.
My eye will not spare, and I will have no pity.
Ezekiel talks about this again in chapter 7. It's also in the book of Jeremiah.
Okay.
Rigney concludes from this that there are times when pity and compassion are strictly and absolutely forbidden.
It's the second principle that is difficult for many moderns to accept.
But there's like a super interesting thing here.
The book of Ezekiel is a place where Yahweh is upset with the Israelites because they have worshipped other gods.
And he commissions Ezekiel as a prophet who represents him and tells Ezekiel to go to the Israelites and explain that because they've worshipped other gods, because they have not been faithful to Yahweh, that he will turn against them and he will also punish them.
He not only will turn away, but then he will turn towards and he will violently punish them.
Ezekiel is one of the most violent books in the Bible as it comes to images of interpersonal violence.
Not war, but interpersonal violence.
And here's the thing, y'all.
Ezekiel's that book.
It's like one of those books in the Hebrew Bible where Yahweh specifically addresses Israel as his wife.
Something I've maintained for a long time, and this is borne out in the scholarship, is that in many ways, the Israelite relationship to their monotheistic God, Yahweh, Is a monogamous relationship.
Israel is the bride, is the woman in a heterosexual marriage, and Yahweh is the male dominant spouse.
What happens in Ezekiel, if you keep reading Ezekiel chapter 16, other parts of Ezekiel, is Ezekiel explains that because Israel is an unfaithful wife, she can be abused physically in order to get her back in line.
There's similar imagery in the book of Hosea.
There's some in Jeremiah.
And this has been documented.
My former colleague Rhiannon Graybill, who's now at the University of Richmond, has written on this wonderfully, and I've highlighted it on this show in the past.
So the way that Rigney concludes this sort of biblical lit review is this.
So then we are to be characterized by tenderhearted compassion and pity, and yet there are times when pity and compassion are strictly and absolutely forbidden.
It's the second principle that is difficult for many moderns to accept.
So I just like have comments here, as you might imagine.
Like, one, the passages you just highlighted, one of them is like, go kill people.
So that's just like not practicing empathy.
That's not like, hey, empathy bad or empathy dangerous or empathy warning sign.
That's like a time when it's like, go kill that person.
The next passage is Ezekiel, which is literally a book in which Yahweh, the husband, abuses Israel, the wife.
And you just got done saying in the clip we played, Joe Rigney, that this is a woman problem.
So the context there is just...
I don't think I need to kind of flesh out for everybody how that is playing in my mind in terms of what he said about women and their empathy problem.
And the verse he uses to tell us why empathy is bad is one in the book of the Bible where there is violence against a wife who is struck at the hand of her husband, who happens to be her god.
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Third, and this is one that happens over and over again, is why when you are justifying something, it could be like you thinking empathy is dangerous.
It could be anything.
You couldn't find one New Testament passage for that.
Like you quoted the New Testament as like, well, seems like we should be compassionate or full of pity.
Definitely not empathy, but compassion or pity, sure.
But there's times we got to look out for that.
As in when you should, God says, go kill people, or when God is Punishing Israel, his wife.
Couldn't find a New Testament passage telling us not to be full of empathy.
Couldn't find a New Testament passage that was like, yeah, here's a time when Jesus just wasn't into this.
No quotes from Jesus on this one.
No quotes from St. Paul.
No book of 1 John, 1 Peter, Colossians, Philippians, Romans.
I don't know.
We could go through them all, but couldn't find one there.
Had to go to these.
Interesting.
Now, that all just comes from the introduction, and in chapter one, Rigney sets out to define empathy, and he says, look, sympathy is suffering with.
It's suffering with someone.
It's recognizing their suffering.
And empathy, the difference is, is that is suffering in.
He makes this analogy where the sympathetic person sees a drowning person in a river that is raging, and they're going by as they stand on the shore, and that person...
He sees that the other person is suffering, but they're able to act.
They're able to do something.
And he says, if you have empathy, there's a good chance because that person's suffering, you want to suffer with them, so you jump in.
That's the danger of empathy.
Empathy is suffering in.
And the big bad other he has here, the person that really, I think, gets under his skin, and it makes sense, is Brene Brown.
And I'm sure you all have your opinions on Brene Brown, but Brene Brown is just not somebody that Joe Rigney can really stand.
He says that for Brown, and he's quoting this video that Brown has published that's been seen many, many times, 25 million times or so, called The Power of Vulnerability.
And says that, you know, in that video for Brown, empathy is recognizing someone's perspective as their truth.
It stays out of judgment, recognizing emotion in other people, and then communicating that recognition.
Empathy is a sacred space in which we join people in their darkness and refuse to find silver linings in their affliction.
So, one of the things that Rigney just can't stand about this is that it seems that for him that empathy is a stopping place.
Like, he quotes Brown here, and it really seems that for him that when you sit with somebody and you listen to their perspective, you understand their suffering and try to put yourself In their shoes, to see it through their eyes.
That when you do that, Brene Brown is saying, there's no judgment, there's no refuting, and there's no kind of trying to find a silver lining.
Hey, let me fix this.
Now, I've not read a ton of Brene Brown.
I know Brene Brown is, I've been around long enough to have seen the snippets and read some of the quotes and passages.
I'm not an expert on Brene Brown.
I'm not going to tell you that I have that.
I have Brene Brown's corpus recognized and here's how she addresses this and that.
I don't.
But what strikes me immediately about Rigney's reading here is that he takes empathy to be the end point.
That when you sit with someone and listen to their perspective, when you feel the truth of their experience, when you understand as best as possible what it might look like from their eyes or feel like in their shoes, you just stop.
That's it.
Now we're done.
Okay, I did it.
That's the thing we're supposed to do.
And now I'm supposed to go into the world and act and see and protest and politic in the ways that person would.
So my job is to completely identify with them and then go be an extension of them in the world.
That's empathy and that's why it's dangerous.
The thing that totally gets under Rigney's skin is that empathy is a suspension of judgment.
Here's what he says.
Since empathy entails a suspension of judgment and a more comprehensive sharing of emotion, the danger of empathy is drowning in the pain and suffering of another.
So he basically thinks empathy is this situation where you try to drown yourself in the suffering of someone else and you suspend judgment.
And you can only imagine for me why I would be kind of alerted here to this idea that, well, it's a problem because you suspended judgment.
There's this desire here for control.
There's a desire for authority.
There's a desire to be able to put someone in line.
We already heard him say at the top that men need to speak into their wives' lives and tell them who to be friends with.
We've already heard him at the top saying men need to be strong and get their women in line.
So we know that if you suspend judgment, that that's going to be, like, threatening.
That's going to be a moment of, like, whoa, we can't have that.
What do you mean suspend judgment?
So I don't get to say what's right and wrong.
I don't get to tell you if you're sinful.
Now, don't mishear me.
There are times when we do need to pass judgment.
We do need to figure out a way of political action.
So I'm getting there.
Don't get me wrong.
I don't think that empathy is a stopping point.
I don't think that empathy is simply drowning in another person's sorrows and nothing more.
I think empathy is the beginning place of a process where, by listening...
By understanding, to trying to see and feel the perspective of another person.
That you get in an enlarged perspective yourself and you are able to understand the context and the landscape of your family, your relationship, your public square more broadly, in a way that's much more nuanced.
You see how certain institutions or dynamics or other things affect people who might not have the same experience as you.
Empathy is a beginning point to a lot of things.
But the reason you suspend judgment and empathy is because the process of empathy is not about fixing or judging.
It's just about understanding.
For Rigney, there's this sense that if I suspend judgment, that's the end point and that's it.
We're done now.
We can't do anything else.
And I think he's particularly triggered by this idea of suspending judgment.
If I, the man, if I, the pastor, if I, the authority of God...
And his representative on earth don't get to pass judgment.
Well, what do I get to do?
How am I going to keep people online?
How am I going to, like, you know, enforce social order, church order, etc.?
This is the underlying reason, I think, that people decry empathy.
It could be Elon Musk.
It could be Joe Rigney.
It could be a Christian nationalist.
It could be a guy who does Nazi salute.
It could be any number of folks who think empathy is weak or bad or wrong, a bug, a virus.
What about social order?
What about authority?
What about power to punish?
Right?
Power to do other things.
I want to be very clear.
I don't think empathy is a stopping point.
And I don't think it's the entire story of our relationships, of our political life.
But I also think that when you decry empathy and you call it a sin, when you say this is something that's reactive and it's bad and it's a suspension of judgment and therefore it deteriorates church life and destroys Western civilization.
You're telling people that the problem is when they try to feel the hurt of others, when they try to see how others experience the world, when they try to understand why someone might be experiencing pain or exclusion or something else.
When you skip the step of empathy, you rule out something that is so important to being human, so important to living in a democracy, so important to having healthy relationships.
You skip the part.
Where you try to see and feel in a different way.
It doesn't mean you become that person.
It doesn't mean you lose your identity to adopt theirs.
It doesn't mean that there's not a time for political action and making judgments and decisions, trying to move forward in a way that takes into perspective everybody in the community, everybody who's affected, everyone who's in a family, whatever it may be.
They want you to skip that part.
It's not about empathy as the end.
It's about empathy as a key ingredient to a recipe of human life together that is actually full of compassion, full of understanding.
It's what makes diversity and pluralism, it makes living with those who are different from us possible in any kind of healthy, non-authoritarian manner.
All right.
Next chapter, The Sin of Empathy.
Later on, we get further elaboration as to why Rigney thinks that empathy is so dangerous.
And he again quotes Friedman on this and talks about how empathy encourages people to lose their own boundaries, which we've talked about.
So it works against self-regulation.
And it leads to viral members of a community invading the space of others.
So those who are...
Viral, I guess, because of their willingness to speak up, to speak out, to not allow things to go unsaid.
And he calls them easily hurt injustice collectors.
Easily hurt injustice collectors.
One of the things that Rigney seems to not appreciate about folks like this is that when injustice happens, they speak up.
Easily hurt injustice collectors.
And he says they often get stuck in linear black and white formulations, unconditional with us or against us attitudes, and they cannot tolerate difference or dissent.
Now, one of the things that I want to say here is that I understand in communities where if you have black and white formulations and unconditional with us or against us attitudes all the time, all the time, It's hard to have a community that functions.
That could be a college campus.
That could be a church.
That could be your family.
Whatever it may be.
Now I do think there are times for unconditional with us or against us attitudes.
We need those at times.
Not always.
And you can't really do that in every decision.
And if you do, it's hard to have any kind of community.
You're going to have splintering.
You're going to have infighting.
And you're not going to be able to mobilize for your cause.
Linear black and white formulations.
And what's interesting here is Rigney really does not enjoy, it seems, when people he believes have no authority in his church, people like women, are willing to say things that have black and white formulations, such as if someone, and this is just me, it's not in the book, this is not Rigney, this is me, but I'm just, you know, bringing in some things that have been on my mind lately.
Who knows why?
They just get it in my head.
Who knows?
Like...
I don't know.
There was a man in ministry who committed sexual assault in the past.
He should not be in ministry.
That's a black and white formulation.
And you can see how Rigney's like, this isn't okay.
Now, don't get me wrong.
There's nuance in every community.
Black and white formulations and unconditional with us or against us attitudes can be good.
They can also be harmful.
It's all a matter of the life of the community, the decision-making of the community, and so on.
However...
Just to close today, and don't worry, I'm going to do more on this.
I got more to say.
I got, like, way more to say.
But just to close today, give you a little foretaste of what's happening in the latter chapters of the book.
Rigney is willing to say, in what I would call a black and white manner, women and men are different.
Empathy is more endemic to women.
Women are not the same as men, and in fact, they are...
A compliment to men in a role that means they are not an authority.
He's pretty black and white when it comes to gender and it comes to sex and it comes to the roles of the people who have those assignments.
The black and whiteness, the with us or against us stuff, it happens a lot with Christian nationalists.
They just don't like it when someone turns it around on them and says, We have authority too.
We have a voice too.
We are in church.
We are the women who were abused in a church.
We are the people who have been assaulted or marginalized in a church.
We are the folks who are saying, yes, there might be division in this church because we're going to speak up about the toxic things happening in the church.
We're not going to prioritize unity over health or safety.
Those things can hurt a community because it's a community that's already been infected with.
Assault, violence, all kinds of discrimination, whatever it may be.
In my experience, the pastors like Rigney are the ones who are like, well, you're upsetting the social order.
You're upsetting the authority.
What about the judgment that I'm able to hold?
What about the ways I'm able to hold everyone in line?
If there are people like that in the community, my authority is weakened.
It's lessened.
So I'm going to make black and white statements about gender and women, but when you make black and white statements about stuff like, I don't know, people in ministry who, like, accused of sexual assault, like, whoa, empathy queen, oh my god, injustice collector, just hold your horses.
You can see how this works.
I got way more to say about this, but I'm going to stop for now.
We're not done for today.
I want to introduce you to somebody who is a first-time guest and is going to help us talk through how to consume the news without letting it consume you and ways we can be healthy about our consumption habits.
Let me introduce you to Dr. Jill Richardson, who earned her PhD at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in sociology.
She is currently faculty in anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis.
She researches political polarization, science communication, and consensus-basist decision-making using conflicts over large carnivore conservation as a case study.
We had a great conversation about ways that we can be proactive in the ways we listen to news, the ways we consume it, and how we can self-care so that we cannot become paralyzed by the just onslaught of things happening around us.
Hope you enjoy the conversation.
We talked for about 40 minutes.
If you are a subscriber, you're going to hear all of that.
And if not, please consider subscribing so you can get the entirety of our conversation and the rest of this episode and all our other bonus content.
Thanks for being here, y'all.
Here is my discussion with Joe.
Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
As I just said, here today to talk to Dr. Joe Richardson and the ways that we can employ strategies.
To not allow the news to consume us, to become full of despair, to give up, and so on.
So let me just say first, Jill, thanks for joining me.
Thank you.
Thanks for your excellent show.
I found it last year, and I love it.
Well, and we've traded emails.
You have been so kind in sending information.
You've kind of sent things where you're like, hey, I think you should probably think about it this way.
And doing this kind of stuff, you get a lot of emails.
A lot of those emails start with, why are you an idiot?
And, you know, your emails have always been like, hey, thanks so much for, like, doing this show.
I'm sure it takes a lot of work.
I think maybe you could have thought about it this way.
And I think those emails, I'm always like, oh, yeah, I'll read this.
This will make me be, like, better at my job.
The other ones, unfortunately, usually start with expletives and calling names and things like that.
So I've really appreciated getting an email with you over the last year and getting your perspective on things.
Today to talk about your brand new stuff stack, which is...
Called Not Crying Wolf, which is a great name.
And the ways that you really are hoping to help people not allow the news and the endless cycle of bad news to take over and consume them.
And so I want to just talk to you about, you know, kind of some of the strategies you've learned and employ, the ways that your research informs them.
But let's start here.
2017, I think a year that a lot of us will remember for the rest of our lives.
I remember being at the Women's March and just getting used to the fact that Donald Trump was president.
In 2017, you kind of had a moment where you knew you needed to change your relationship with the news and with information.
What happened then and what did that teach you?
Yeah, sure.
So I've gone through this long journey with chronic illness and I'm very fortunate after like literally 20 years of having no diagnosis and like just nothing to do about it.
I got a diagnosis.
I got into the right kind of therapy.
So I was kind of newly in therapy at that time.
And it was a shock that Donald Trump won.
And my undergraduate is in East Asian Studies focused on China.
So I've studied an authoritarian regime.
And then in 2016, I was taking a class on Latin American dictatorships right through the primary.
So I was really recognizing what was happening.
And I remember saying at the time, it really doesn't matter what his policies are.
He could be proposing policies where I just was like, this guy, he's giving me everything I wanted, and I could not vote for him because he frightened me.
I just saw the rating on the wall.
I'm a data nerd, so I figured out that he was going to win before they called the race, both times that he won.
Because I was in the weeds with the data and I couldn't even talk for a couple days.
I remember two days later I had to go to a class and I'd been in silence and it was so hard.
I was so grateful.
I was teaching a class at the time called Marriage and the Family and I didn't have to talk about the news.
I could just go in and be like, let's talk about different styles of child rearing or whatever.
And finally my therapist said, I think you need to go on a news diet.
You can't just immerse yourself in it.
24-7 the way you always have.
So that was really the start of just going through what are the strategies where I can be engaged?
I want to be an active citizen.
I especially want to know about anything that's important for me if there's an action I can take.
But then how do I not immobilize myself because I'm so inundated?
And I went through that again with COVID. COVID was also very hard.
One of the things you point out in a great post at your Substack is that news and news headlines are really designed to affect our nervous systems and affect our kind of evolutionary responses in a certain way.
And so I'm wondering if you can maybe talk about the ways that headlines and the ways that stories are presented are meant to really...
Evoke a response from us that puts our nervous system in a certain state.
Oh, absolutely.
So actually, before graduate school, I was a journalist.
And if you're writing on an outlet that's really trying to get clickbait, you can write the most measured, well-researched, level-headed article, and then it's going to get a title, like, you won't believe this, you know, whatever, whatever, that's designed to drive people's eyeballs.
And fear and anger are just very reliable.
It's like evolutionarily, you know, if you were out there on the savannah and there was a lion and you were paying attention, you were the one who's probably not going to get eaten compared to the person who didn't care and was just going about their business, you know, never mind the lions.
So we tend to gravitate toward fear and anger, and they know that, and it's profitable.
Comparatively, something like a New York Times or Washington Post, they're often using language that's very measured and tended to tone down the headlines.
And I see people getting mad at them for this.
I think they called what Elon Musk did aggressive incursions into the government and people are yelling, why don't you call it a coup?
Fair.
But if you're getting your news somewhere like a New York Times where they're using that more measured language, or even if you're getting it from Stephen Colbert where he's making jokes but still being accurate, You're not going to have that jolt to your nervous system.
And if that's what it takes for you to be informed, I mean, I got my State of the Union through late night TV. Jimmy Kimmel did a great job informing me.
Yeah, there is an interesting thing here where I think I would include myself in that camp of people who get frustrated with the times about the way they phrase certain things and are unwilling to perhaps use language that they will deem as...
Not doing the both sides-ism, etc.
However, I take your point and I think your point is that if we're going to consume this information, we have to find sources that allow us to do so without becoming so activated that we are overwhelmed.
I think that's something you talk about in your piece, which is like, you know, somehow to get the news without becoming overwhelmed is a really important coping mechanism and strategy in this day and age.
You know, do you think that there's a sense also not just in the ways that we receive the news, but how much we consume that's important to keep in mind?
Yeah.
So, I mean, the thing that I always end up doing with my therapist and then I take these ideas.
I mean, I'm certainly not doing therapy to my students because that would be highly unethical, but it would be.
But I teach about like a lot of really disturbing subjects.
We just had a unit on famine where we were learning about massive.
You know, 19th century famines where, like, millions of people died.
And I don't want to leave my students just completely traumatized.
So I'm always thinking about this in terms of how do I design a class as well.
So part of it is the dose and the pace.
So if I am on social media and all of my feed is...
Right now I'm on Blue Sky, actually.
I follow a lot of people who follow each other, and then we're all, like, retweeting the same things.
And so I will see the same story like 50 times in a day.
I really need to see it once to know what's going on.
I don't need to see it 50 times.
And a lot of this is, you know, figuring out what works for you.
Now I'm in a space where 50 times, like whatever I'm seeing in blue sky, it's not overdoing it for me.
But I have been in the past in a space where I'm like, I'm not there.
I can't see COVID news.
You know, it's like March of 2020. You know, wall to wall, 50 times a day.
I'm going to, you know, make my Facebook account that I'm on all day follow, like, cute baby animals.
I'm going to unfollow people who are constantly posting news I find upsetting, and then maybe once a day I'm going to head out to a publication that I like, get my news, and then I did it.
Or, you know, I'm going to look at the news, and if I notice I'm getting really upset, take a break.
Take a long break until you feel all the way better.
For me, one of my tactics is taking a shower.
It's, you know, you have to, it takes a bit of time to like finish the whole shower to do everything you got to do in there.
There's a lot of sensory stuff going on with the smells and the water and the temperature.
It's, you know, relaxing.
So I can really get my nervous system kind of pieced back together in a shower, have a meal, do a chore, go play a game, like dance, music, whatever it is that makes you happy.
And then come back to the thing later because sometimes just the quantity, It can put you over the edge, but if you do it a little bit at a time and you take breaks, then you're able to take in that information.
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