| Morning, everyone. If you keep staring into the glowing rectangle affixed to your hand, yeah, your blood pressure will rise. The ride is feeling turbulent. Everyone's at each other's throats. Everything is terrible. The stress is warranted. It's natural to feel helpless watching everything unfold, each minute feeling more uneasy than the last. I don't claim to know how to solve any of it. The best thing you can do is take breaks from the news. You don't have to shelter yourself from everything that's happening, but try not to let it consume you. Go outside and engage with the world – the mundane parts of daily life are enough to do it. And, in this case, they might be the most powerful and transformative. Go out for the day. Leave your phone behind. Unplug. What will you see? There's a guy filling up his tank at the gas station. There's a lady walking her dog down the road. There are people buying groceries, eating out (well, depends where you are), and grabbing a midday coffee. There are kids playing in the park, teens roaming the streets on bikes and scooters. Small spurts of normalcy add up. Grab some to-go food and tip really well. Read a book to your kids. Go for a hike, a snowball fight. Have movie night. Get the kids down early to have date night with the significant other. These everyday interactions can do wonders for your emotional state. It can help you feel like you're moving forward, because you are. The possibilities to explore and engage with the world border on endless. The real, actual world is so much bigger and more beautiful than the screen in your hand. I'm not saying to ignore the state of things, or pretend it's not happening. I'm not saying you shouldn't care. It impacts us all, one way or another. What I'm saying is to look for things that are familiar, things that make your world feel like the world you know. They're out there. And those are the things that will allow us to exhale for a minute, and get us through. Let me know how you're giving yourself breaks from it all in the comments of the post, Processing Emotions Through Hard Times, written by our senior writer and Mark's Daily Apple community manager, Lindsay Taylor, PhD. It's one that's worth referring back to when times are tense. | 