You know how people talk about "recharging your emotional batteries," usually in reference to a vacation? I'm convinced that it's not a thing. I think the constraint is bandwidth, not storage. My therapist might even agree with me.
Humans have to endure a lot of things, and so many of them are psychological. I don't think that exposure "drains" something, per se, but I do believe that there's a limit to how much you can take at any given time. When you reach that limit, you kind of turn-off, melt-down or otherwise feel like you're imploding. I think the threshold is definitely different for everyone. It seems pretty low for my kid, but then everything feels like a crisis when you're a teenager. I used to think that mine was pretty high, but the volume of challenging things in the last month or so has been brutal. I've just wanted to retreat into a cave and not come out. The recent vacation didn't help.
So if you can identify the bandwidth problem, it follows that you should be able to come up with some kind of coping skills. Backing off of social media (except for TogetherLoop, of course) helps. Limiting your news intake, too. It's the things that you can't get away from, like parenting, or seeing your spouse hospitalized, that can get to you. They certainly have caused me to struggle.
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