September 2025. Hardly can one relax when their home is undergoing protests, wars, or grappling with the aftermath of such.

Much as the Abu Dhabi summer heat had almost finished its course, for many students on the New York University Abu Dhabi campus, some hot-headed tension persisted with every Instagram update, news notification, and text message from home. For others, traumatic memories from summer still remained so visceral.

I had the fortune to talk to some of the students on how they emotionally cope with these situations. Some pointed to online entertainment. Some pointed to religion and faith. Some pointed to dissociation. While each approach varied widely, all shared the same strength, and hoped for the better.

It was never easy for many to observe tragedies from afar, let alone cope with the fact that they have limited capacity to protect those at home.

“If I could go back [to when protests still happened in Nepal], I would not really care about the news that much, because at the end of the day, it doesn't matter if I know the news or not,” said Hems, when he reflected upon his experience observing the protest in Nepal – which often intermingled with news of prison breakouts, and destruction of public spaces.

“I will be aware after the protest. I will get a summary of everything in two or three hours. It used to be exciting to get new follow-ups, new updates, but I don't think it was worth wasting that much time being updated with everything.” It was particularly mentally-draining and distracting for him to constantly update every news story, while he himself had little influence over the offline events happening back home.

For Hafsa, receiving unfavorable news from Morocco triggered her anxiety, and imagination. “Every time I see something bad, I put a picture of it: What if my friend was there? What if my family was there?” Hafsa explained her fear.

Imagination ran wild during these days of uncertainty. Many tended to seek out respite within the limbo they found themselves in.

Hafsa had attempted to divert her attention from the news by doing other work in her room, allowing her moments to recompose herself. Her own living space has been a comfortable zone to her to process her anxiety, and fully engage with personal negative emotions. “There's no one who can be affected by my mood, no one that I'm going to be, for example, hurt by saying something or neglect because I'm thinking about something else. Then I start thinking about these thoughts,” said Hafsa.

On days like these, the Disney classic “Tinker Bell” brought her comfort. “I have been going back [to Tinker Bell] because every time there's chaos, I try to remember, or go back to any small detail about when my life was calm,” said Hafsa.

“So now I started watching the Tinker Bell movies, the 2008-2009 ones. I kind of remember how, ‘Oh, how we got the DVD with that, how we watched it, the night, all of that’. And then it's like, I dissociate from this time zone and go back to that time zone for it. So for those two hours, [I] kind of feel okay, everything is calm now, beautiful.”

Seeking comfort from external sources, music, and the pervasiveness of sounds, has helped Ahmad ease his mind from stressful emotions regarding the then-escalating protests in Indonesia in September. “I think specifically, I didn't really turn to novels or things like that, [because] I do think that sometimes it can be a bit difficult to focus on what you're reading, but when you listen, it's easy to just listen because and take in things when, when there is sort of more unrest.” He had also picked up wall-climbing as a new habit.

Sometimes, for how much one seeks escapism, they still ought to confront realities of themselves. It is during these mental battles that one learns to control thoughts, and comfort themselves.

“I would always just tell myself, ‘Okay, it's fine. My family's responding to me, my friends are responding to me. Everything's everything's fine,’” said Rayan as he recalled the times reaching out to family in Pakistan amid fears of offense. Even when his family was beyond the proximity of conflict, his overthinking habits still tended to kick in.

Sometimes, surrendering to the uncontrollable brings him comfort. “Because the city that I live in, Lahore, is connected to the border. So there were moments where I thought, ‘Okay, maybe I should be more worried about this’, but again, I would tell myself, ‘Okay, you don't need to overthink it, and just focus on what you can do, and focus on your studies, and just make sure to stay in contact with them.’” he said. “And that's all I could do. That's what I would tell myself, that you can't really do anything more than that.”

“I always tell myself, you know, things pass, whether it's good or bad. So even if it's really bad, like what I'm feeling at the moment, it would just pass,” said Mandip, from Nepal, as he grappled with the violence happening during his country’s protest in September. By the second day of observing the protest, news of civilians being harmed had entirely distracted Mandip from his research work at university. Sleepless nights filled with moments of waking up from anxiety, only for him to calm himself down had been a staple during those days for him.

Sometimes, people need to express emotional turmoil to others, both physical and spiritual.

For Mandip, his friend group had been his largest confidante during times of uncertainty. It was particularly difficult, and emotionally draining for him to explain the situation back home to others on campus. “You limit yourself, you filter yourself and you have to think in a way to tell them only certain things that's necessary and not express a lot of emotions,” said Mandip.

Hence, the chance to express his emotions freely to people who resonate with him, especially fellow Nepalese, had been helpful for him with processing emotions. Furthermore, journaling had been effective for the anxious Nepali in confronting his turbulent mental state.

For others, it is during turbulent times that religious faith became a source of comfort, consolation, and hope for these far-away students.

“We pray to hope for the best. Because, at the end of the day, everything is in God's hands. You can only hope for the best. You can pray for the best. And the connection you gain, or the constant connection that you maintain with your God, is what makes you calm,” said Ahmad as he reflected upon how Islam helped me overcome the stress of observing the protest in Indonesia.

“Having a religion to trust in gives you at least one option to do something for those you love back home, which would be praying for them when you can’t do anything else,” said Rayan as reflected upon the role of Islam in his emotional coping journey.

“I think one thing that stands out [from my experience with Christianity] would be being able to bring specific concerns into requests [to God], actually. So it's not just thinking only about the problem, but bringing a sort of request,” said Alisa as she also shared the same situation with Ahmad back home. “As a Christian, I also not just pray for the request, but I also give thanks, along with that [...] for the help that I believe will come, and also [...] for other things that I've received. And I think that helps me to see the good that I've already received.”

Following the stories of these international students, I came across stories of dark humor as a source of comfort, and to lighten up grim situations. For many, humor, and satire have become a means of stress relief, dissociation, and mental coping for many disturbed minds.

In particular, in the Pakistan-India conflict, local news from both Pakistan and India reported the internet’s use of memes about the then-occurring event as a means of dissociation or emotional coping.

For Abdul, from Pakistan, a layer of humor on difficult subject matter can serve to make it easier for people to retell it to others. “There comes a point I feel like, you just laugh it off. Like, ‘Oh, this happened to me.’ Obviously it's not funny to you [on the] inside, but you just use that as a sort of tool to distract yourself from it, and distract people around you from it as well,” he said. “Because not everyone might want others to know about the losses that they're facing, and it could be such a tough thing to talk about.”

Positionality, particularly who narrates the internet humor, was also discussed. Rayan noted how many Pakistanis outside the country when the event happened would consider matters more seriously than their peers and family back home. “And I feel like that's fine if they're the ones who were involved, and they're not taking it as seriously. They said that they're fine, and they're taking humor in it, then, I think a lot of people hated that as well. So like, I would say that yeah, it was, in a way, a kind of a realization of everything, how the situation was, how critical the situation was, and the severity of it, in some sense,” he said.

Humor also ran through many groups of people grappling with harsh realities beneath their eyes, as comfort, dissociation, or mere trauma-bonding. One student recalled a running joke between them and their friend as protests happen in their country, often with violent police intervention.

“We had a joke. When I called my friends, I'm like, “Did the police take you already or not?” ‘Not yet’ [replied the friend].”

Amid turbulence, destruction, anxiety, and fear, trying to maintain comfort amid a plethora of insanity-causing factors can be important in maintaining hope for a better future. Some might need moments of dissociation to fully cope with the constant bombardment of news, others might want to go deep upon themselves to know what to do amid uncertainties, but the reality remained there, brute and egregious. And as an understatement, one cannot look to a new dawn when their mind is still submerged in darkness.