Connect with the victims, not with the numbers.
To overcome psychic numbing, the first step is to recognize that it’s happening. (When people are made aware of psychological tendencies or biases, they become less susceptible to them.) If you’re reading an article or post about what happened in Uvalde, Texas, and it doesn’t engage you emotionally, remind yourself that you’re probably feeling numb. Then “pause and think about the people — the lives that are affected beneath the surface of the statistics,” Dr. Slovic said.
It may help to spend time reading about one of Uvalde’s victims — who the person was, what she or he looked like. Remember the iconic photo of the Syrian child lying facedown on the Turkish beach that ran in newspapers during the Syrian refugee crisis in 2015? Dr. Slovic’s research has shown that this one photo increased worldwide donations to the Red Cross by more than a factor of 100 — it did far more to incite people to take action than the many data-heavy articles that had run before it.
Another thing you can do is to try to deliberately pull at your own heartstrings. In a 2022 study, researchers asked about 1,800 people in Sweden to make decisions according to either their gut feelings or their rational brain. They found that those who were told to rely on their feelings were more likely to make choices that helped others. You can do this to yourself, too — before, say, reading an article about gun violence, take a moment to encourage yourself to connect with your feelings.
An additional strategy for staying engaged is to find ways to deliberately remind yourself of how similar the victims are to you or your own loved ones, Dr. Slovic said. As a mother of two kids in elementary school, I immediately thought of my own children when I learned about what happened in Uvalde, which amplified my horror — again, tapping more into my feelings, helping me to connect with the issue.
That said, you don’t have to — and probably shouldn’t — stay engaged with difficult issues all of the time. “If you’re grinding your teeth, feeling sad, feeling angry, feeling like you need to disconnect, that doesn’t make you a bad advocate,” said Dr. Jessi Gold, a psychiatrist at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. “It just makes you human.” You may need to give yourself some space to process your feelings, she said, before re-engaging with the problem.
Make a commitment to help, and join forces with others.
If you want to keep your momentum going, make a formal commitment, Dr. Slovic said. That could mean making a specific to-do list that you hold yourself to — like, this week, I’ll call my representatives, and next week, I’ll give money to organizations working in this space. Or it could mean signing up to volunteer in support of the cause, as the act of signing up will hold you more accountable.
Dr. Slovic said that joining forces with groups could also help you overcome those pesky feelings of inefficacy. When working with others, you “amplify your effort,” he said, which makes it feel more productive. Plus, engaging with others will keep you focused on the issue and will make it less likely that you’ll slide into psychic numbness. When you surround yourself with people who also deeply care, you’ll be constantly reminded of how insane and heartbreaking our country’s gun violence is, and you’ll be more likely to keep fighting — and end up saving lives.
