I see you: clutching your phone on the morning tram, checking your notifications between episodes on Netflix, scrolling absently just before you go to bed and just after you wake up. I see you, and I know what you’re doing, because I do it too.

Right now, staying informed means staying online. I have a Twitter, Facebook and Instagram account, and I use all of them to help me find stories and promote my work online. I get newsletters from a stack of websites in my inbox every day. Then there’s the news screens I walk past in Melbourne’s Southern Cross Station, and the conversations I hear at the train station, or in the line for my morning coffee.

In this era of the 24-hour internet news cycle, breaking stories are impossible to get away from. If you work on the internet, or use it to interact with your friends and families (so, everyone), there’s no way for you to block out the onslaught of abhorrent, sad, weird, awful, disgusting news that pours out of the world wide web every goddamn day.

So how do we manage the flood without losing our minds? In an age where we live largely online, how do we protect ourselves from the trauma of the news — without switching off when we’re most needed to be active?

A Flood Of Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad News

If I sound bitter, it’s because I am.

It’s nearly three weeks into the ongoing, escalating cycle of stories relating to the sexual assault allegations made against fallen producing mogul Harvey Weinstein. There is just so much story out there, and it’s still piling up. I know this, because I trawl through news item after news item on my Twitter, Facebook and email inbox, searching for stories to cover here at Junkee. I’ve seen it all, and it is suffocating me.

But I’m not the only one. As the Weinstein scandal turns into a broader (and absolutely necessary, if long overdue) discussion about sexual misconduct in other industries besides Hollywood, our news feeds are now clogged with tens of thousands of stories, status updates, memes and videos relating to men’s sexual violence. For any person, it’s a lot. For survivors, it’s insurmountable.

And, of course, the Weinstein scandal is not the first time the internet has suffocated us with its news updates so brutal they feel purposefully vengeful. The LGBTIQ+ community is still living through a nightmare: day after day of stories about abuse, harassment, hate and ignorance directed at their community. For a group of people who have already been through so much, that’s got to smart.

And before the same-sex marriage debate really ramped up, there was the Elijah Doughty verdict, and the death in custody of Tane Chatfield, and the Lynette Daley verdict, all of which prompted an outpouring of grief from the Indigenous community, including a great deal of Australian people of colour sharing their own stories of racist abuse, targeting and harassment.

Then there’s the unholy mess of US politics — a perennial stream of awful, ridiculous and just downright terrifying nonsense pouring out of the Trump administration, as if someone forgot to turn of the tap in the Bullshit Bathtub.

And, yeah, we’re all terrified we’ll die in a nuclear holocaust.

The world is full of bad, unpleasant stories, many of which affect us directly, and all of which, when piled one atop the other, can make us feel a sense of intransigent hopelessness. Once or twice in my life I have disconnected from Facebook or Twitter, but the break never lasts long. It’s just too hard to be so separated from my friends and family and their lives. I miss updates from my sisters and cousins, and invites to drinks with friends. And I miss being up to date with the world’s goings on, despite how frequently the news gets me down.

So how do you stay on top of a ceaselessly unfurling scandal like the Weinstein allegations, without drowning in disdain? It’s something I’ve been trying to figure out for the past six weeks, with the marriage equality debate and now the Weinstein scandal, and I’ve watched as others have struggled and failed to keep their heads above the tide of nasty news.

So, if we can’t truly disconnect, how do we survive?

Self Care Is Not A Dirty Word

I will absolutely cop to the fact that the “self care” industry can be an intense and scary place. It’s often full of rich people justifying their own extravagances; writing off their skinny teas and more sheet face masks than you can poke a stick at. But there’s a legitimate and important reason why the “self care” ideology has risen so sharply in popularity in the past few years.

The world is a fucked up place! And we’re exposed to it, as outlined above, 24/7. Life is busy and difficult and complicated, and we should all be searching for alternatives to clocking in 80-hour weeks and having mini-breakdowns every six months.

According to Mindframe, approximately 14 percent of Australians will be affected by an anxiety disorder in any 12-month period. That’s one heck of a lot of Nervous Neds and Nellies, and we’re all corralled together online, scrolling through our newsfeeds and swallowing our mounting despair. It’s getting beyond essential for us to develop ways to healthily engage with the news we absorb on the internet — we can’t keep carrying it around with us or it will destroy us.

I’ve watched strong people, especially women, sagging over these seemingly unending Weinstein allegations. I’ve noticed the LGBTIQ community fatiguing at the harmful marriage equality debate. I’ve seen people of colour despairing at the unending cycle of bad, morbid news that shows them again and again that the world values their lives less than the lives of white people. Who wouldn’t swallow and internalise all that hatred and horror?

You: enraged that you got a text message about voting yes
Me: got a form to my house that allows everyone to vote on my relationship

— Bec Shaw (@Brocklesnitch) September 24, 2017

So, how do we protect ourselves? One way is to set yourself boundaries for how you engage in a particular subject. I’ve been getting more and more anxious the more I read about the Weinstein/Hollywood sexual assault scandal, so now I’ve set myself a limit: I will not read more than one article on the subject per day. When the mounting posts about #MeToo gave me panic attacks, I simply logged off my Facebook for the night.

But we can’t always log off — sometimes, we need to be on the internet (and social media) for work. When I took this question to Twitter, about how to protect yourself online when reading bad news is your job, one person suggested treating social media like a 9-5 job. “Come 5pm I log off & I never check on the weekends”.

Not sure if this helps but I've found it useful to treat social media like my 9-5 job: come 5pm I log off & I never check on the weekends

— Corpsima McGraaaagh! (@co_mcgrath) October 17, 2017

I think this is a brilliant idea. Another great idea is to take your internalised anxiety about the news out into the real world. If you’re nervous about something you’ve read, give your mate, your mum or your spouse a call and talk it through with them instead. Sometimes contextualising and externalising anxieties can help stop you overthinking, or making mountains out of molehills. (This why therapy works for so many people, duh!)

Another option is ensuring you fill your feed with just as much substantive, wholesome or silly fun as you do important news and analysis. This is why the rise of the self care bots on Twitter feels so refreshing. Sometimes, yes, you do need a reminder to “stretch your arms” or “have a sip of water”, or “reply to your friends’ messages”.

?: listen to a song you like please

— here's your reminder (@tinycarebot) October 18, 2017

Detaching yourself a little from your social media is important. It’s virtually impossible to disconnect entirely now, and I do firmly believe that sometimes we need to expose ourselves to these distasteful news items so we don’t forget just how fucked up the world can be — and how much we need to work to keep it from dissolving. But caring for yourself and your brain is absolutely valid as well.

The world is scary and burn-out is real; we can’t fight the nasties like Weinstein unless you take care of you, too.

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Matilda Dixon-Smith is Junkee’s Staff Writer. She tweets at @mdixonsmith.