Current global news is distressing: To remain hopeful is to focus on the world you actually inhabit

As someone who has lived through prolonged periods of insomnia, I’m acutely aware how crucial a good night’s sleep is for our wellbeing. It doesn’t solve everything, but it can change the texture of the day that follows. It makes things feel more manageable, more proportionate.

So it was a little unnerving to start this year, finding myself waking at odd hours and struggling to get back to sleep.

But is it really any wonder, I have found myself asking, lying there in the dark?

For many people, 2026 has got off to a pretty horrendous start. The new and sometimes frightening global order that had been emerging over the last year has arrived more fully, and more abruptly, than many of us expected.

A difficult news cycle

Since the turn of the year alone, we’ve seen turmoil in Venezuela, threats around the status of Greenland with the implications that has for NATO, a worrying face- off between the US, UK and Russia in the north Atlantic and today the harrowing shooting in Minnesota as part of the ICE immigration raids. All that of course added to by the grinding, unresolved horrors going on in Ukraine and Gaza.

None of this is abstract or distantly “over there”. It collides into our worlds via our phones, our conversations, and for those of us slightly longer in the tooth, it eats into our sense of the kind of world we are passing on.

It would be glib, and wrong, to pretend these things do not matter, or that they are easily shrugged off. They matter profoundly, and so they should trouble us. But there is also a risk, especially for those of us who care deeply about justice, equity and human rights, that we end up carrying more of the world’s weight on our shoulders than any one person can or should.

What we can influence

One of the hardest and most necessary disciplines, I think, is learning to distinguish between what we can influence and what we cannot. I don’t mean by that we should just surrender to these terrible events and not be active citizens, voters, campaigners, and to keep ourselves informed of the events on the world’s stage. Of course, we should.

But in order not to just survive but to flourish, we also have to accept without indifference and to engage without despair. Worry has a way of telling us that the worst possible outcome is also the most likely. Experience suggests that it is mostly not true.

I grew up towards the end of the Cold War, and there were lots of times it really felt like the world was on the brink. And yet from what felt like nowhere at the time, “glasnost” emerged from the Soviet Union, and before too long, things that would have once seemed impossible suddenly were not.

To remain steady and hopeful

Part of the trick, in remaining steady and hopeful, is to focus on the world you actually inhabit: the colleagues you work alongside, the people you serve, and the small kindnesses and joys that we can all create and revel in when we take the time to concentrate on them. To take pleasure and comfort in the local, the tangible, the human.

I spent most of my day yesterday doing that and trying along the way to have a right old laugh about stuff. It was a necessary and effective antidote to just try, in my own tiny way, to keep things in proportion. Last night, I slept like a baby. And I sincerely hope you will too tonight.