How to Keep Living Normally When the News Won’t Let You

Let’s be honest: your phone has not been your friend this week.

Every time you pick it up, there’s something new — another headline, another voice note in a group chat, another screenshot that someone’s cousin apparently verified. You put it down, you feel slightly worse, and twenty minutes later you pick it up again. We’ve all been doing it.

Here’s the thing though. Oman’s coffee is still excellent. The roads are still full of people going places. The sunset over Muscat is still, annoyingly, one of the most beautiful things you’ll ever see. And the most quietly radical choice you can make right now is to let your life keep being your life — not despite everything, but alongside it.

That’s not burying your head. That’s a decision. And it’s one worth making out loud, because anxiety doesn’t announce itself — it just slowly colonises your day until you’re not quite sure where the news ends and your actual mood begins.

Keep Your Anchors

Routine sounds boring until you lose it — and then you realise it was holding everything together.

The morning walk. The family dinner where nobody’s allowed to check their phone. The Friday ritual, whatever yours looks like. These aren’t small things — they’re the architecture of a normal day, and right now a normal day is genuinely valuable.

When the world outside feels noisy and unpredictable, the things you do every day become a kind of anchor. They’re proof that your life is still yours to direct. The morning coffee, the evening prayer, that walk around the same block you’ve walked a hundred times — none of these fix anything. But they remind you who you are when you’re not reading the news.

If your routine has already slipped — and it probably has, at least a little — don’t try to rebuild everything at once. Pick one thing. Restart it tomorrow. Just one.

Check the News Twice a Day. That’s It.

There’s a meaningful difference between being informed and being consumed — and right now, a lot of people have drifted well past that line without quite noticing.

Here’s what continuous news exposure actually does: it keeps your nervous system in a low-grade state of alert, like an alarm going off very quietly in a room you can’t leave. You don’t feel dramatic panic — just a persistent low-level tension that makes it hard to focus, enjoy anything, or sleep properly. And the frustrating part is that refreshing the feed for the fifth time this hour doesn’t give you better information. It just gives you more anxiety about the same information.

Two windows a day. Morning and evening, 15 minutes each, from a source you actually trust. Then close the tab — genuinely, not just minimise it. Your nervous system will start to settle within a few days. It’s almost embarrassingly effective.

Talk to People. Actual People.

Group chats in a crisis are chaos dressed up as community.

Everyone’s forwarding the most alarming thing they’ve seen, speculation gets repeated until it sounds like fact, and there’s a subtle social pressure to stay in the thread — to react, respond, keep up — that makes it nearly impossible to step away even when every instinct is telling you to.

Try this instead: call one person. Not a message, not a voice note dropped into a group — a real phone call, just the two of you. And then talk about literally anything other than what’s happening. How their week has been. What they made for dinner. Whether their kid said something that made them laugh. That kind of connection — specific, unhurried, about ordinary things — does something that a hundred notifications genuinely cannot. It reminds you that your relationships exist independently of the news cycle, and so do you.

Remember Where You Actually Are

This one is easy to lose track of when the news is pulling you in every direction. You are in Oman. And Oman, by very deliberate design, is not a combatant in this conflict.

That’s not an accident — it’s a decades-long policy built on the conviction that dialogue outlasts confrontation. Oman has been the quiet room that difficult conversations happen in. Its foreign minister was in Washington the day before the latest strikes began, pushing for diplomacy. This is what Oman does, consistently and stubbornly, regardless of how loud the region gets.

That institutional steadiness is real, and it’s worth holding onto. The gap between what’s on your screen and what’s outside your window right now is significant. The streets of Muscat are not the streets in your notifications. Both things are true at the same time, and noticing that gap matters.

Do Something With Your Hands

Cook something. Fix the thing that’s been broken since October. Repot the plant you’ve been meaning to move. Get into the garden.

There’s a reason every culture on earth has always turned to physical work in difficult times — it actually works. Not as a distraction, but as a genuine interruption of the mental loop that anxiety runs on. When your attention is on the heat of the pan, the texture of the dough, or the precise placement of a screw, your brain genuinely cannot spiral at the same time. The noise quiets. Not forever, but enough.

It is, as a side effect, almost impossible to catastrophise while focusing on not burning the karak.

Give Yourself Permission to Actually Enjoy Things

This is the one people resist most, and it’s worth addressing directly: enjoying your life right now is not disrespectful. It is not proof that you don’t care. It is not naive.

There’s a particular kind of guilt that shows up in moments like this — the feeling that enjoying dinner, or looking forward to the weekend, or laughing at something silly is somehow inappropriate given what’s happening elsewhere. It isn’t. The people affected by this situation are not helped by you being miserable in Muscat. They are helped by people staying clear-headed, functional, and kind — which is much easier to do when you haven’t hollowed yourself out with guilt for having a good evening.

Enjoyment right now isn’t indifference. It’s sanity. It’s also, quietly, a form of stubbornness — proof that the weight of events hasn’t taken the whole thing over.

You don’t have to suffer to prove you care.