When I’m in the kitchen cooking, I like to watch the news as I chop and stir. But lately, the routine has turned corrosive. The reports don’t stay in the background; they invade the foreground of my mind.

A bulletin on the war in Ukraine, with footage of shattered lives. An update on the grinding conflict in Gaza. Shootings of citizens in Minnesota. Before I can process one tragedy, an ASPCA commercial shows the pleading eyes of a starving dog, triggering another wave of helpless sorrow.

I stand at the counter, feeling my breath shorten. It’s not just sadness. It’s a physiological siege, a constant assault on my nervous system. If I turn the TV off, I feel guilty for looking away. If I leave it on, I feel myself crumbling under the weight of a world in pain.

This is the modern dilemma of compassion: We are connected to a global tapestry of suffering, yet neurologically unequipped to hold it all. Systems theorists describe this convergence of overlapping global stressors as a polycrisis, a term popularized by Edgar Morin to describe crises that compound rather than resolve independently.

Human brains evolved to respond to acute, local threats. A predator appears, the amygdala sounds the alarm, stress hormones are released, we fight or flee, and then the threat passes. Recovery begins.

The kitchen TV delivers a fundamentally different kind of threat: chronic, global, and unresolvable. It activates the same ancient alarm system—the amygdala, the cortisol rush—but offers no tangible predator to confront and no safe place to flee. Neuroendocrinologist Bruce McEwen described the result as allostatic load: the cumulative wear and tear on the body when the stress response is repeatedly activated without resolution.

This kind of exposure........

© Psychology Today