Emotional about the world around me

I find myself feeling more and more upset and sad over the sad things I see around me every day. Animals run over, neglected, abused... Children or elderly abused... Someone I know recently diagnosed with stage IV cancer.. I’ve always been sensitive but I think I used to block stuff out quite a bit. I was at least a bit more balanced and accepted that life can be hard and unfair... I find my heart just keeps breaking with every sad piece of news and I’m often almost in tears. This is not a practical way to live. I can’t keep getting this upset. It’s really getting to me and I just don’t feel like I’m myself lately. I keep seeing the bad things in the world and not very much of the good.

I can only speak for myself and say I too have felt that way. How I deal with it is to “pull away” find your quite place and pray for the world. Shut off tv, news, media, radio anything which produces the negative aspects of society. It won’t go away and will be there when you look again, the only difference is you will hopefully have some inner peace from your quite time. This has worked for me and I hope for you.

I can partially relate. Take a break from the news for a while. Try to dedicate some time for yourself.

As other people mentioned, there are things you can do, like not watching the news channel, not reading the newspaper, etc. (I personally myself too get sad while watching or reading news.)

But there are a few things you must consider.

1) You should not be too sensitive to other's pain.
2) You should not breakdown every time you hear something sad. Everyone has a heart and even the psychopaths cry. But once people figure out how to exploit you, it gets pretty ugly for you.

Thanks guys. Good words of advice here. I really appreciate it. I tried to pull away from sad news today and I didn’t let myself feel guilty about doing it.

That's how I was diagnosed depressed, told my PCP even tv commercials made me cry.

I have been so depressed lately especially for my son. he is 27 years old and said lately there is something wrong with his generation as the school shootings and such. i wonder how this will affect the generations after him and how it will be solved if we can just get a grip on why these people are shooting students, each other. My son has emotional problems and is on medication, and i worry about how this will affect him in the future too. What I'm thinking is that he is a good person because when i was sick with schitzophrenia, i would deny it. Luckily my son went on his own and searched for a doctor himself and he is being treated for depression and GAD. I am proud of him for this.