A fantastic insight by Lisa Feldman Barrett: When someone expresses anxiety, the first thing you should do is ask: do you want empathy or do you want a solution?
Will 100% use this phrase going forward.
What you allow your milieu to feed into your mind is what you will be processing. It is what will carve the pathways of your brain. This is perhaps well-understood, in theory if not in practice.
But it is equally important to consider who and what you are sending output to.