#2
If anyone thought, there was no hope in our kids and teens you're wrong.
The SOLE purpose of us putting this sign in our yard today was so kids wouldn't run to our door and be disappointed. (Our neighborhood usually gets 300-400 kids.)
I looked on our doorbell camera tonight and saw that kids had been stopping at the sign.
My husband and I just went outside and found this…
The picture doesn't do it justice, it's a LOT and the good stuff even.
Seriously... If the parents of anyone who did this sees this, PLEASE tell them how much it means to us and our kiddos. On the best candy night of the year kids freely and generously shared with strangers and showed so much love and kindness. So amazing!”
What kind of online content you consume and how frequently you do it matters because adult life is already stressful as it is, and human beings are hardwired for negativity bias.
There’s work to think of, as well as studying, doing housework, staying on top of your health and fitness, taking care of the dozens of family responsibilities, and somehow still finding some time for your hobbies, social life, and proper relaxation.
If you can’t regularly find some time to rest, recharge, and disconnect from everything going on in your personal life and around the world, you might find yourself chronically stressed, overwhelmed, and suffering from empathy burnout.
According to Choosing Therapy, empathy burnout is what happens when an individual deals with ongoing stress, especially when they frequently provide emotional support and guidance to other people.
People who are most at risk of this include caregivers and healthcare workers. In short, when you frequently care for the emotional well-being of other people, you yourself can end up exhausted physically, mentally, and emotionally.
If left untreated, empathy burnout can lead to cardiovascular disease, obesity, anxiety, and depression.
Some signs of empathy burnout include a lack of energy, troubled sleep, a decline in compassion, emotional exhaustion, as well as changes in beliefs, values, or views of work and the world.
Choosing Therapy explains that various factors can contribute to empathy burnout. Many of them relate to “the absorption and over-personalization of another person’s emotions.”
For instance, living during a time of distressing events (wars, pandemics, etc.) can lead to empathy burnout. In an increasingly well-connected world where traditional and social media are so easily accessible, you increase the risk of empathy burnout simply by having constant access to current news.
So, if all you ever watch and listen to are distressing news updates, toxic social media posts, and disheartening content, it will affect you. It can warp your worldview and make it feel like there’s nothing good in the world.
And, yes, life is challenging and the world often isn’t a fair place. But this doesn’t mean that there’s no hope, kindness, or positivity out there. It’s a reminder that human beings are wired to give more weight to negative events than positive ones. That’s called negativity bias.
“The negativity bias is our tendency not only to register negative stimuli more readily but also to dwell on these events. Also known as positive-negative asymmetry, this negativity bias means that we feel the sting of a rebuke more powerfully than we feel the joy of praise,” Verywell Mind explains.
Generally, human beings are wired in a way that they’re more likely to remember traumatic experiences than positive ones, react more strongly to negative stimuli, recall insults better than praise, and think about negative things more frequently than positive ones.
