Rachel Feltman: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, this is Rachel Feltman.

No matter what you believe, I’m willing to bet you’ve been feeling a lot of outrage lately. To me personally, it feels unavoidable: I can’t look down at my phone or glance up at a TV without seeing something that makes me upset. And that’s really exhausting. But when outrage is everywhere, what can we do to keep it from getting to us?

Here to talk to us about fighting so-called outrage fatigue is Tanya Lewis, a senior editor covering health and medicine at Scientific American.

Tanya, thanks for joining us today.

Tanya Lewis: Thanks so much for having me.

Feltman: So you recently wrote about this phenomenon called “outrage fatigue.” Could you tell us what that is?

Lewis: Sure, so outrage fatigue is kind of an informal concept, which basically refers to repeatedly experiencing perceived moral transgressions and feeling fatigued by them. So what that basically means is just, you know, you see something, you’re outraged by it, and over time you just become kind of numb to it.

Feltman: Sounds relevant to [laughs], to many of our […]