Keeping Your Sanity Amid the War in Ukraine

A close friend told me about the Russia-Ukraine war: “now I ran out of being afraid, I don’t have any resources left to be constantly terrified”. Watching the news for the last two weeks was torture. And this is for the lucky ones who don’t have their houses shelled, children wounded, family fighting. So we started doomscrolling, obsessively checking feeds, starting and ending the days with war news. And the more we scrolled, the more we felt doom and gloom, as media sells fear, with content targeted to engage. 

Regardless, it’s helpful to keep up to date, as this war is like no other in recent history. Just thinking of the existential threat of a possible nuclear conflict between the West and Russia would make us pay attention to what is happening in Ukraine. The Russian attacks on Ukrainian nuclear facilities keep us all panicked and throw doubts on nuclear energy strategies. Should a country invest in nuclear plants if conflicts arise in the following decade?

Then, as political scientist Ian Bremmer wrote:

When the world’s largest grain exporter attacks the fifth-largest grain exporter, and when the world’s largest gas exporter and second-largest oil exporter gets cut off from the global trade and financial system, the cumulative impact on everyone in the planet is so much greater than any amount of poverty, deprivation, and death Syrians, Afghans, and Yemenis are experiencing. It doesn’t take away from their suffering, but it makes it completely understandable that everyone in the world would pay more attention to Ukraine than to them. 

It is only a matter of time until unrest and civil wars start spreading across the world when two powerful breadbasket countries are at war. The world’s supply of crops such as wheat or corn is at risk, jeopardizing global food security and becoming “catastrophic for the entire world”.

 There are only nine meals between mankind and anarchy.

Alfred Henry Louisville 

On the other side, the clean energy movement might improve as rising fuel prices will prompt companies and governments to invest in more wind, solar or geothermal projects. Advancements to electric cars and e-chargers infrastructure might soon follow as fuel prices increase. World leaders met in Glasgow only a few months ago to pledge to reduce fossil fuel use. But how will that pledge be honored when, as a result of this war, there are plans of coal mines being open or expanded or shale companies told to spike supply?

Yes, we will all pay the price for this war, either in money or in blood.

And so, we should consume information about this war. Nevertheless, there are orders of magnitude between being informed and being tormented. 

So, to keep sane, we should first manage our exposure to the information ecosystem as we are at war with disinformation (information meant to deceive – e.g., trolls posting fake reports) or misinformation (defined by Nina Schick in her Deep Fakes and the Infocalypse book as “bad information with no malicious intent behind it” – e.g., our friends and family sharing disinformative content).

It is crucial to talk about the atrocities happening these days, but we should also remember we have a limit. As we learned during the pandemic, the conservation instinct will kick in, and after watching thousands of horrors, empathy fatigue and desensitization will appear.

I tried to modify the habit of reading the war news: I do my best to limit myself to a block of 10 – 20 minutes of reading in the morning and then another block late in the afternoon (but not before sleep). Cold Turkey is enabled, and when I feel the urge to check the news besides the allocated times, I open my Kindle instead.

I always write the self-improvement sections of my articles primarily for myself, so I reread them when I feel I lost my balance. I read some of my articles (especially  Building a Self-Care Plan and When Buddhism’s Nonattachment Overlaps Stoicism’s Dichotomy of Control). In the face of conflict, I needed to remember the Stoic dichotomy of control (what we can control – our time, attention, efforts, behaviors, values and what we cannot control – others’ decisions to start this war or bomb maternities).  

This Stoic attitude reverberates in an interview of a Ukrainian family caught in the warzone: 

“I am the mother of my son,” she said. “And I don’t know if I will see him again or not. I can cry or feel sorry for myself or be in shock — all of it.” 

She added: “But we’re past this phase. There are more important things in front of us now.” 

Hlib [the son] and Oleg [the husband] are part of the newly formed Territorial Defense Forces, a special unit under the Ministry of Defense that is arming civilians to help defend cities across Ukraine. 

“I don’t get to decide if Putin is going to invade or to launch a nuclear weapon,” Hlib said. “What I get to decide is how I’m going to react to the situation around me.”

In these moments bleeding between night and light, we rediscover an ambivalence: the banality of evil and the compassion of humanity, when most of the time, most people do mostly good. 

In the face of frustration and helplessness, what some of us can control is to take care of Ukrainian mothers and children and help them have a safe passage in decent conditions while evacuating. NGOs and volunteers across Romania, Moldova, Poland, and other countries, donated money, time, food, clothes or created shelters. Donation links to humanitarian efforts in Ukraine can be found here, here or here. 

For others, building a personal crisis plan is a coping mechanism that could make the difference between life and death. 

The first thing on such a plan should be looking at our finances. An emergency fund of a young single earner will be quite different from that of a single-income family with children. Do we have enough money for an emergency fund? Should we postpone some projects that might block our financial resources? In the end, money does not bring happiness. Money buys freedom.

I was ready to fight, but at the same time, I knew I had a wife and four children. Four, not two. Even if my wife and children had managed to get out of Ukraine, I don’t know how they would have survived. Maybe some good people could provide their basic needs, but what about the rest, my children’s education?

So plan A was to get out of the country with them, and plan B was for them to reach Moldova and for me to join the Ukrainian armed forces.

… It is better to have a wrong plan than to have none.

I managed to leave Ukraine, and others did not because I had everything ready in advance. It’s the same as a seat belt: I’ve never had an accident, but I wear it every time because I understand what could happen. 

The statement of a Ukrainian refugee in Iasi, Romania

 But above all, 

Maybe working on the little things as dutifully and honestly as we can is how we stay sane when the world is falling apart.

Haruki Murakami, Samsa in Love 

And here is where the power of those deceptively simple-seeming self-care habits lies. Exercise, prioritizing sleep, nourishing foods, meditation, yoga, journaling, reading, spending more time with family and friends remind us of vital knowledge: forcing the mind to focus on simple and repetitive tasks is a straightforward method to comfort it. 

 Lastly, the words of C.S. Lewis ring as true today as they were decades ago:

In one way, we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. “How are we to live in an atomic age?” I am tempted to reply: “Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.” 

In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented: and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways. We had, indeed, one very great advantage over our ancestors — anesthetics; but we have that still. It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty. 

This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things — praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts — not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that), but they need not dominate our minds. 

On Living in an Atomic Age essay from the book Present Concerns (the book can be borrowed online for free from the Internet Archive public library with a registered account) 

Previously published at https://www.roxanamurariu.com/keeping-sane-about-ukraine