Name: How to deal with stress - What in the World podcast, BBC World Service
Uploaded: 2026-01-30T15:04:47.000Z
Duration: 13 min 41 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Present continuous

There is more evidence that more younger people are feeling burnt out.

The comparative

There is evidence that more younger people have increasing levels of difficulties like anxiety or depression.

Gerund

I'm probably not even graduating till I'm 24.

The feeling of being left behind is so, so overwhelming to me.

We're starting the episode in a bit of a different loc vacation today because I thought I would bring you guys on my journey into work.

I don't know how I've managed to do it again.

I have about a 20 minute walk to the tube station.

That was pretty painless compared to normal.

I'm just gonna have to frantically search for my past so I can actually get into the BBC.

This is what in the world from the BBC World Service.

It might be similar to some of you guys as well.

One thing's for sure, that overwhelmed feeling hits most of us at some point in our day and that's what we're getting into today.

I know there's a bunch of TikTok videos out there about this, so we wanted to talk about why we're all feeling so stressed and overwhelmed in our lives and how we get round it too.

We've got some of your questions and we're putting them to the BBC presenter and psychologist Claudia Hammond.

And she's also written a book about being overwhelmed.

I know we've got a bunch of questions to get through.

Before we get to the questions though, I wanted to actually get into the definition of overwhelm.

So overwhelm is an emotional state where you are struggling with your current situation.

So you might feel overloaded, you might feel you can't cope and that might be a temporary thing, hopefully, but

if it's not in the longer term, if that becomes more of a kind of chronic kind of stress, then that might lead to burnout in the end.

And have you noticed this has become more common for Gen Z?

I see all the TikTok videos about burnout stress.

There is Evidence that more younger people have increasing levels of difficulties like anxiety or depression.

When you're young, there's so much uncertainty.

There's uncertainty about what's happening in the world as well.

There's uncertainty about what will happen with the world in the future.

If you think about things like climate change, there's a lot going on.

So I guess let's focus on different aspects of life.

It's so easy to pick up your phone and you've got that instant access to whatever is going on in the world.

There can be a lot of bad stuff going on in the world.

How does that affect how overwhelmed we feel?

If people find themselves, you know, doom scrolling and looking, looking for the bad news in a way, and

then carrying on and on looking at that bad news and getting alerts all the time that are telling them what's happening in the world, then when it's bad, there is evidence that that can be damaging for people.

There was a really interesting study that was done after a Boston Marathon bombing that took place in 2013.

And there were some people even back then who all watched more than six hours a day of coverage of it, either on tv, on rolling news.

And they found that those people who did that actually had more acute stress than people who were actually at the bombing, which seems really extraordinary.

But it's because if you keep watching the worst bits of it, there's no beginning, middle and end if you are actually there.

Thankfully, the experience does end in the end.

And so if people find themselves drawn to watching negative things all the time, we know that if they're already in a low mood, they're more likely to then carry on looking for negative things.

And then that puts them in a lower mood again.

So I think we do have to be careful how we, how we consume news of what's going on.

Do you have to have alerts that tell you immediately when a news story has happened, or would it be okay to find out at the end of the day?

Something that me and my sister talk about a lot when it comes to overwhelm and social media is, I sometimes say to her, why do you not reply to my messages?

Like, I know you've seen them instantly when they come up on your phone.

And she says, sometimes I just get overwhelmed when I see the messages or there's a few coming through or maybe there's not even a few coming through, but

there's like they're building up, you know, a backlog that she needs to reply to.

And I've heard a few of my friends say that, too.

Yeah, I think there can be a real pressure because we've got messages coming in by loads of different methods now, and

it is really hard to stay across those and answer them all immediately.

And especially when people know whether you've seen the message, then it feels rude if you don't answer.

But then that can add to the pressure of all the other things you've got to do as well.

And maybe at that moment you didn't want to engage with that person, not because you don't like them at all, just because you're thinking about something else.

You know, maybe you're watching something, so you're watching a film or something, maybe you're chatting to friends.

Maybe you're out, you know, enjoying nature.

Maybe you don't want to be interrupted at that moment and that that's okay.

So I think in a way, we need to give ourselves a bit less of a hard time about that and not expect to be able to be perfect and answer everything straight away, but

To let our friends off a bit, you know, if.

If they don't answer straight away, it's not because they hate you.

It's because they're doing something else.

And we know sometimes big news headlines can make us feel overwhelmed.

Sometimes these headlines hit closer to home as well.

We have heard from someone who's experiencing just that.

I felt overwhelmed lately because of all the news about my country and the world in general.

It just feels like the future is so unpredictable and hectic, and