Obsessed watching news - wanna stop - but can't

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Ever since this Ucraine-Russia war begun I have been overly obsessed watching and reading the news. I would say maybe every 20 minute if Im awake or so. Just in a few days I know more about war and weapons, Nato etc then I ever would imagine. This war scares me a lot for so many reasons, all the what if's... I hate when people say "we can't do anything about it anyway, live your life" I want to, but I can't. What if something happen to my own country and Im not prepared, the fear, the anxiety, I wish I was indifferent but Im not. I cant even find a safe place on this planet, its just scary all over.

How do you cope with all this?

When there is strong anxiety at the root of the thing it can be exceedingly difficult to turn off the flood of 'what if'; finding a method to do so will go a long way toward reducing the probable anxiety which is at least part of what is driving that obsession.

EDIT, here, this might be useful, https://www.taylorwellness.com/working- ... who-worry/

That's what the off-button is for.

A friend of mine posted a meme on Facebook to the effect of 'When you're laughing at WW3 memes and then the sun comes out at 9 PM'.

It's not light stuff and it has a lot of people nervous for a lot of quite valid reasons.

One of the more obnoxious things it points out - we're sharing our fate with idiots. The interview misses this one but Eric Weinstein was in an interview with Peter McCormack recently talking about his desire to launch a mathematical physics theory of everything in hopes that it could get humanity off the planet, and in his terms no longer stuck with the same shared fate. He was pretty explicit with his examples that he didn't want to share the same fate as Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Mitch McConnell, etc., etc.. and that we have no way not to suffer, possibly even go extinct or hard reset, thanks to idiots and psychopaths.

It's not pleasant content to think about but it's there.

I think what's been helpful for me is that I've thought about it for a long time, spent a lot of time listening to a lot of the Game B thinkers and a lot of the people who talk about x-risk (extinction risk) for a long time, so I intuitively get the whole E. O. Wilson 'paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, god-like technology' and the increasing number of ways that we could do ourselves in during the next century. Eventually I think that gets you to a place where you understand that you have less to fear from death itself than the things that can go wrong in life, much like if every major city in the US was nuked by warheads coming across the north pole it's an open debate whether I'd rather be downtown and not have a clue what hit me or have to live the rest of my life in the dystopia that came of it.

Ultimately that much isn't in our control for the time being and what we can / can't do pretty much is what it is.

Join the club. I can't pull myself away from the news, either.