I remember being on a business trip in New York City a number of years ago and I had the “enlightening” experience of sharing a room with a fellow employee. Our first business meeting of the day wasn’t until 10:30, but my roommate was up at six-thirty sharp and the first thing he did was turn on CNN. For the next two hours he flipped from one news channel to another and then back again. I did my best to sleep through it but as I woke and drifted off to sleep and woke again I began to become acutely conscious of the dangers of subjecting oneself to this onslaught of negativity.
“The mind is everything. What you think you become.”
“We are shaped by our thoughts; we become what we think.”
~ Buddha ~
If you agree with the Buddha’s statements then it only stands to reason that ingesting negativity will take its toll on your attitude and what you think about.
It’s not uncommon for people to listen to the morning news while getting dressed, then picking it up again while driving to work, then tuning in while driving home, and of course one last helping of news before going to bed. When I’ve asked people why they find all this news-information necessary they generally respond by saying, “they want to be informed and in-the-know.”
Really!
If you’re one of these “news junkies,” suppose I suggest to you that watching the news is merely keeping you abreast of a lot of misinformation and infinite negativity?
In 1996, Richard Brodie wrote a wonderful book on memes titled, Virus of the Mind. In that book he gave a brilliant example of the misinformation trap that we are all subjected to, and to which many of us succumb, when we buy into ingesting helping after helping of daily news.
Brodie writes;
It’s an old saw of journalism that when a dog bites a man, that’s not news, but when a man bites a dog – now there’s news! The point, of course, is that everybody already knows dogs bite people: one more occurrence of this everyday event is not interesting to people. When something unusual or ironic occurs, though, people want to know about it.
This leads to another bias in the media: a bias toward the unusual and offbeat. It’s only natural: people want to hear about the unusual and offbeat. However, amplifying power of the media gives people a distorted impression of the world because the media rarely report the mundane and ordinary. We watch television; see crime, disasters, and superhuman athletic feats; and form a picture of the world having little to do with our day-to-day experience.
The problem is, going through life with a distorted picture of the world handicaps us.
In 1992, 37,776 people were killed by guns in the United States. Another 40,982 were killed by automobiles. Yet a casual look at reporting would verify that guns get much more coverage than cars, even though almost half the gun deaths (18,169) were suicides. I’m not saying guns shouldn’t get more coverage – after all, this gun problem is new and growing, while the car problem has been with us for decades. But people get a distorted picture of the dangers involved.
Just doing a simple calculation, the chance of any one person dying in an automobile accident in a given year in the U.S. are 1 in 6,224; the chance of dying in a gun accident, other than suicide is less than half as likely: 1 in 13,005. If you put yourself in a low-risk group by not being a criminal or a police officer, your odds get considerably better. But what are people more afraid of: guns or cars?
If you’re like most people, the answer is guns, and it’s likely because of the distorted media coverage. This kind of distorted coverage leads to an outcry from the populace, which often leads to politicians going off – forgive the pun – half-cocked with “solutions” to the problem.
Now let’s get a handle on what it really means to have a 1-in-6,500 or a 1-in-13,000 chance of dying. It’s as if you lived on an island in the South Pacific with a population of 650. You make your living by swimming around in the azure waters around your idyllic paradise and spearing fish for dinner. Yum, yum. About once every ten years, a stray shark happens by and eats a swimmer. That’s a 1-in-6,500 chance of any one person being eaten by a shark, just the same as the odds of dying in an automobile accident in the U.S. in 1992.
Also, about once every 20 years, two men get into an over-heated argument over a fish or a woman and one of them kills the other with his spear. That’s a 1-in-13,000 chance of being killed in an argument, just the same as the odds of being killed by someone else with a gun in the U.S. in 1992.
These are very sad events, and probably dinner-table conversation for quite a few days, but not the be-all and end-all of life. Fortunately, since you live on an isolated island, these events come and go, and life goes on.
But now image there are 392,000 of these islands all linked by television and INN (Island News Network). This bring the total population to about 254 million, less than the U.S. today. Every night, INN reports on the goriest of the 107 shark attacks and 54 spear deaths that day. Suddenly people’s picture of the world is quite different. From a peaceful existence disrupted only by a tragedy every few years, you go to a fear-ridden hell filled with crime and terror.
Isn’t this interesting? Nothing has changed except the addition of television. Yet now it feels like you’re living in a dangerous world, not an idyllic paradise. Same number of shark attacks same number of spear deaths. What happened?
Television news. It’s provided a new and powerful means of spreading memes that push our danger button.
But sitting in front of the television getting scared about danger halfway across the world isn’t very useful and doesn’t add much to our quality of life. It’s like an addiction, a drug. We have very real buttons that get pressed when we see danger, buttons that drive us to pay attention to it. It takes substantial mental effort to pry ourselves away from it.
Back in our former paradise, people start demanding that the government do something about this new perceived danger. Politicians start talking about a five-day waiting period for spear purchases. Entrepreneurs start running half-hour infomercials for shark repellent. But underneath it all, the tragedy is that people don’t enjoy life as much anymore. They live in fear, fear brought about by nothing more than television news.
Does all this sound eerily familiar?
If you were to analyze most news stories you will see that they’re about catastrophes, economic crisis, wars and various conflicts of which we have little control. This is not to suggest apathy or burying one’s head in the sand as the solution, but to simply absorb this “information,” day after day, does nothing but load your mind with negative, and often erroneous data.
As I detailed in 29 DAYS … to a habit you want!, brain scientists have discovered an automated system in the brain called the “reticular activating system” (RAS). The RAS is a group of interconnected neurons not located in any specific part of your brain, although it is part of your limbic (subconscious) system.
Every single impulse, whether derived from thought, touch, taste, smell, seeing or hearing, first passes through your RAS. One of the most important functions of your RAS is to recognize impulses coming into your brain and determine if it is related to fear, stress, danger, or anxiety. It instantaneously decides if it is something that requires immediate attention or not.
If you subject yourself to negativity on a continuous basis, you RAS will have you focus on negativity, it will confirm your suspicions and suggest pessimism as the best means of survival. “Seek and ye shall find.”
Try Going on a News Fast!
If you want to really know something about a subject just look it up on the internet and voila, now you know.
If you’ve gotten into the habit of reading and watching endless bits of news, ask yourself what it has gotten you over the past several years? What major crisis, infidelity, economic downturn or mass murder would have been different had you not listened to the latest breaking news? Or, put another way, by your listening to the endless streams of catastrophes, how did it improve your life and the lives of those around you? What good has it done for you, your friends, your family, your career?
If you feel in the dark when it comes to water cooler conversation, simply ask questions and listen to the various views and opinions. That in itself will endear you to most people while giving you the added bonus of freeing your time for more constructive pursuits.
Try going several weeks without subjecting yourself to the negativism of the evening news. Forgo reading a newspaper from cover to cover. If there is something you need to know look it up, but try passing on all the rest of it. See how it might affect your attitude and overall wellbeing.
It’s an experiment that will produce immediate results (free-time), and make you a more positive, productive and optimistic person.
