What helps short term for me are workouts, mostly strength training, and playing board and role-playing games with friends (often online), a nice combination of socializing and concentrating on something. On bad days I’m ignoring the news even though I like to keep informed. For long term improvement I’m looking at getting more into Buddhism, which has shown some promising early results. It’s all about alleviating personal suffering, basically a system of therapy so effective, people made a religion out of it. (The religious trappings can easily be ignored and usually are outside of Asia.)
I’m German and switched from Mama/Papa (mom/dad) to their first names sometime in my early teens as did my sister. I couldn’t say how exactly it happened—just felt too old to use the former. But that’s not universal here; I know people who still use the nicknames in their forties.