I can’t stop watching. The shattered skylines, and lives, of Kyiv, Kharkiv, Odessa, and other Ukrainian cities fill my TV screen, my laptop, my smartphone. Even when I press mute, I can still hear the fear in the voice of a terrified child or the quiet determination of a resistance fighter.

If an hour goes by and I haven’t checked the news, I get antsy and click. (I’ve checked the news seven times in the course of writing this article.) I watch the news from Ukraine as if my watching is somehow helping the people of Ukraine. It is not. It is not helping me either. It is, I now realize, an indulgence, doom scrolling on an industrial scale.

I’ve written about the media’s bad-news bias. It is real, but so is this war. Sometimes the news is so bad that turning away feels like a cop-out, an abdication. This is one of those times.

Watching the grim news out of Ukraine, it’s easy to slip into “learned helplessness.” That is a behavior exhibited when a subject, animal or person, is repeatedly exposed to negative stimuli beyond their control. The phenomenon was first identified in the 1960s by University of Pennsylvania psychologist Martin Seligman. In a series of experiments, Seligman and a colleague placed dogs in three different groups then exposed them to mild electric shocks. The first two groups could escape the shocks. The third group of dogs could not. So they stopped trying.

Even when, in subsequent experiments, these dogs could avoid the shocks, they still did nothing. They had learned to be helpless. The experiment was replicated with humans (using loud noises instead of shocks) with similar results. Seligman posited that learned helplessness can lead to low self-esteem, drug abuse, depression and physical illness.

But the story doesn’t end there. Seligman noticed that not all the human participants responded the same way. Yes, many blamed themselves for “failing,” but others blamed the way the experiment was framed. They knew it set them up for failure. In other words, not everyone is equally susceptible to learned helplessness.

It is not the horrors of war that motivate people to take action but, rather, the heroic actions of others — what psychologist Jonathan Haidt calls “elevation,” the emotions we experience when witnessing acts of moral beauty.

Many of us are experiencing a kind of learned helplessness when it comes to the war in Ukraine. We can’t do anything to stop the suffering, or so it seems, yet we can’t stop following the grim news. There is a way out: we need to curtail (not stop) our news consumption and, crucially, regain a sense of agency. Do something. As jailed Russian opposition figure Alexi Navalny said: “Let’s not ‘be against war.’ Let’s fight against war.”

As a former international correspondent, I’ve covered wars in places like Afghanistan and East Timor. I was frightened. I was stressed. But I did not feel helpless. I was doing something, telling the world about the atrocities I was witnessing.

I no longer produce the news. I consume it. And that is not good enough. For starters, I realized I needed to be more selective about which kind of news I consume. I don’t in any way ignore the brutality of this war, but I look for the humanity on full display as well. What we watch affects what we do, or whether we do anything at all.

In one notable study, Dutch researchers divided a group of children, aged 9 to 13, into two groups. Both were shown news reports about UNICEF’s work helping children around the world. One group, though, was also shown two minutes of “prosocial news:” other children organizing a fundraising drive for UNICEF. It was this second group that, afterwards, demonstrated a much greater willingness to donate to UNICEF and to organize fundraising drives on its behalf.

Studies like these suggest it is not the horrors of war that motivate people to take action but, rather, the heroic actions of others — what psychologist Jonathan Haidt calls “elevation,” the emotions we experience when witnessing acts of moral beauty.

I now realize that I am not helping the Ukrainians by doom scrolling. I am only engaging in learned helplessness. So I’ve decided to change my ways. I call it “do-scrolling.” Here is what I’ve changed:

1. I’ve limited my news consumption. I still monitor events in Ukraine but not constantly, or obsessively. The war is happening whether I watch it or not, and my watching is not the same as my doing something about it.
2. I seek out positive stories about the heroic resistance of Ukrainians. Acts of moral beauty.
3. I don’t pretend to be neutral. Sometimes there aren’t two sides to a story. Sometimes there really are good guys and bad guys. In this war, it seems clear that Putin is the bad guy, and I am willing to say so — to my wife, yes, but also to my member of Congress.
4. I support the Ukrainians in the only way I can: with my credit card. I do-scroll for the worthiest causes, and I give. Here is a list of reputable organizations helping Ukraine.

None of this makes the war any less horrific, of course. But it does make me more helpful, in some small way, and more optimistic.

A landmark study used eye-tracking technology to investigate how optimists and pessimists react to negative stimuli. The pessimists spent considerably more time lingering on the disturbing images (photos of skin cancer) than the optimists did. Optimists literally see the world differently from pessimists. This does not mean that their glass is always half full, says Seligman. “Life inflicts the same setbacks and tragedies on the optimist as on the pessimist, but the optimist weathers them better.”

His work shows that optimism is not something you either have or you don’t. It can be taught. Just as you can learn helplessness you can learn it’s opposite as well.