Has your worry maxed out?

Somewhere between the disastrous floods that killed 22 people in eastern Australia earlier this year and Putin’s threats of World War III, I started avoiding my phone. It had become the bearer of constant bad news, and my capacity to summon an empathetic response had all but dried up. I was suffering from what the internet has dubbed “worry burnout”, what clinicians call “compassion fatigue”, or what I like to bark at my long-suffering husband: “How much more of this can we take?!”

It wasn’t that I didn’t care about those who had lost their homes to record-breaking floods or the Ukrainian women fleeing war-torn cities, leaving their husbands behind. I did. But in the aftermath of one disaster after another, I had become exhausted, angry and cynical;