When the News Feels Like Too Much, Try This | Sharon Salzberg
Episode
38 min
Read time
2 min
Topics
Health & Wellness, Leadership, Crypto & Web3
AI-Generated Summary
Key Takeaways
- ✓Anger as compound emotion: When anger feels consuming, turn attention inward and examine what lies beneath it — typically grief, fear, or sadness. Mindfulness practice calls this "seeing by dividing," recognizing that anger has no solid core but is a shifting set of physical and psychological phenomena, which creates space to channel its energy constructively rather than destructively.
- ✓News consumption boundaries: Set specific guardrails based on personal nervous system sensitivity. Salzberg avoids television news entirely due to a trauma-linked sensitivity to deception. Dharma teacher Sebene Selassie follows a no-news-before-noon rule. Harris maintains a device-free first and last hour daily. Identify your own vulnerability and build a boundary around it.
- ✓Civil rights movement as resilience model: Movement leaders during the civil rights era did not know whether their efforts would succeed — the question was not "when" but "if." Their sustained action despite uncertainty came from connecting to something larger than themselves. Finding a comparable source of meaning, whether meditation or otherwise, enables long-term engagement without burnout.
- ✓Guilt about not doing enough: The feeling of insufficient action persists because systemic problems are complex and results are rarely immediate. Salzberg frames this through the "Hindsight Meditation Society" concept — seeds planted without visible results often produce change only visible in retrospect. Do what your current capacity allows and trust that ripple effects occur beyond what is immediately observable.
- ✓Joy as a strategic resource: Suppressing personal joy out of solidarity with suffering is a pattern that leads activists and engaged citizens to burn out. Buddhist teaching defines compassion as moving toward suffering to help, not merging with it to self-destruct. Identifying what genuinely nourishes and restores your capacity is a prerequisite for sustained, effective engagement with difficult realities.
What It Covers
Dan Harris and meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg address how to stay engaged with distressing news without becoming overwhelmed, covering anger management, guilt about privilege, the civil rights movement as a resilience model, and practical boundaries around news consumption during a politically turbulent election period.
Key Questions Answered
- •Anger as compound emotion: When anger feels consuming, turn attention inward and examine what lies beneath it — typically grief, fear, or sadness. Mindfulness practice calls this "seeing by dividing," recognizing that anger has no solid core but is a shifting set of physical and psychological phenomena, which creates space to channel its energy constructively rather than destructively.
- •News consumption boundaries: Set specific guardrails based on personal nervous system sensitivity. Salzberg avoids television news entirely due to a trauma-linked sensitivity to deception. Dharma teacher Sebene Selassie follows a no-news-before-noon rule. Harris maintains a device-free first and last hour daily. Identify your own vulnerability and build a boundary around it.
- •Civil rights movement as resilience model: Movement leaders during the civil rights era did not know whether their efforts would succeed — the question was not "when" but "if." Their sustained action despite uncertainty came from connecting to something larger than themselves. Finding a comparable source of meaning, whether meditation or otherwise, enables long-term engagement without burnout.
- •Guilt about not doing enough: The feeling of insufficient action persists because systemic problems are complex and results are rarely immediate. Salzberg frames this through the "Hindsight Meditation Society" concept — seeds planted without visible results often produce change only visible in retrospect. Do what your current capacity allows and trust that ripple effects occur beyond what is immediately observable.
- •Joy as a strategic resource: Suppressing personal joy out of solidarity with suffering is a pattern that leads activists and engaged citizens to burn out. Buddhist teaching defines compassion as moving toward suffering to help, not merging with it to self-destruct. Identifying what genuinely nourishes and restores your capacity is a prerequisite for sustained, effective engagement with difficult realities.
Notable Moment
Salzberg recounts that a young MIT student attended a nearly empty Zen session with only four or five peers present. That student was Jon Kabat-Zinn, who later founded Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction and transformed global meditation research — illustrating how invisible moments of action can produce enormous, unforeseeable consequences.
Episode Transcript
Hey. Hey. It's the 10% happier podcast. I'm your host, Dan Harris. We are, as of this episode, posting four days away from the midterm elections here in The United States. And I don't know about you, but I'm a little bit anxious. And so today, we're gonna answer a burning question that I know a lot of you have because you tell me about it. How do you stay engaged with the news without letting it wreck you? Is that even possible? My guest today, the legendary meditation teacher, Sharon Salzberg, says, yes. It is, and she has an enormous amount of practical information to share on this tip. She's gonna talk about everything from feeling your anger without being consumed by it, how to investigate what is beneath that anger, why the civil rights movement is a surprisingly useful model here, and how to handle the guilt that many of us feel to how to deal with this sense that maybe we're not doing enough. Before we get started with Sharon, I do wanna point out that coming up next week on Tuesday, election day, and then on Wednesday, the day after election day, I'll be doing free live guided meditation sessions at 4PM eastern on both Tuesday and Wednesday. We'll do a sit together, and then I'll take your questions. And on Tuesday, I'll have a a secret weapon with me, the great Buddhist teacher Vinny Ferraro. If you go to danharris.com and sign up for my newsletter, we will send the Zoom link directly to you. Again, these are free. We usually do these just for subscribers on the app, on my app, 10% with Dan Harris. But given what's happening right now, we thought we would open it up to everybody. So, again, sign up over at danharris.com. We'll send you a Zoom link Tuesday and Wednesday at four eastern, Tuesday with Vinny Ferraro, Wednesday with me solo. Okay. Let's get to Sharon Salzburg. Before we dive in, I just wanna say what you're about to hear is a conversation that Sharon and I recorded with an audience of, 10% happier subscribers watching live on Zoom and and, popping in with their own questions. So you'll get to eavesdrop on the type of conversations we're having all the time every week over on the app. Here we go. Sharon Salisbury. Hello, everybody. Welcome to the Ten Percent Happier podcast. I'm your host, Dan Harris. Let me start by asking you a question myself, which is, like, how often do you consume the news, and what does it do to your mind when you do it? It's so funny because asking that question, the obvious implication is that the news is bad, you know? So I guess that I make some effort to actually consume good news, you know, and there are these services that that provide that just to kind of have a little bit of perspective. I don't watch television news at all. Sorry, …
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