It is now time for an emergency Public Service Announcement. I wish I could say this is only a test, but if 2020 was any indication, this is not a test.
In today’s episode, I’m will be addressing my American listeners. My British, Kiwi, Canadian and Australian folks – I cannot sense to what degree that which I have seen in the United States also plagues you, but I sense if it isn’t happening in the political arena, it may be happening in another arena, a grand social cause such as the rights of the underprivileged or climate change or animal ethics — if you have a big heart and you care deeply about the world, then today’s topic will more than likely apply to you, even if the details differ.
I was working in a large medical clinic during the last American presidential election, helping individuals who were working to manage obesity, metabolic syndrome, diabetes, and heart disease in a very progressive area of the United States. This was a population that, by and large, still felt traumatized by the 2016 election that brought Donald Trump into more power than he’d ever had before, because everyone around them, and all the media they immersed themselves in had told them such an outcome was an impossibility. Many believed fully that a re-election of this man would be the end of democracy in the USA. I’m not interested in weighing in on the truth of that, but what I witnessed as we came closer and closer to election day was many of my patients deeply struggling to keep to their outlined plan to get their health in order.
Anxiety and worry was terribly high. They were tapped into the news cycle constantly and it dominated discussions in social circles both in person and online. I witnessed a lot of unquestioned acceptance of the media narrative, parroting of hyperbolic statements gone viral on social media, and a level of exhaustion and worry that I would expect from a parent with a child in the NICU, not from an election year. Because the source of this anxiety was based upon polling averages, media reports, and the gossip of everyone around them, there was no effective action to take to empower themselves or put themselves at ease. Multitudes of my patients during the last couple months of that election cycle backslid and gained fifteen to twenty pounds or more due to emotional eating and increased alcohol use to cope with the intensity of the situation.
They were compelled to stay tuned. They could not turn away. When I gently confronted them with the fact that they were very literally sacrificing their health for an outcome they could not directly control and for information that they could do nothing about, upon speculation one told me she felt it was her civic duty to stay connected to the news cycle. Another said she felt it gave her a sense of control – if she could anticipate the doom, than it wouldn’t catch her off guard this time.
Interesting – I just realized that those who had the most struggles with this were women. Men did not seem as caught up in it, or perhaps they didn’t talk about it openly. I did have very candid, vulnerable conversations with my male patients, so it isn’t that they fit into the stereotype of men who couldn’t connect with their feelings. But I do not recall the same degree of backsliding in my male patients, and unfortunately I don’t have access to anyone’s medical charts now to test that memory.
Anyway, these were some of the reasons given to justify alcohol and food abuse – civic duty and a sense of control.
Today’s episode is a plea to not follow that path.
You cannot save democracy by staying so connected to a media industry with perverted incentives to create clickbait for an increasingly diminishing attention span that necessitates the loss of nuance altogether that you need to numb out at the end of the day to cope with being alive. Life is challenging enough for many of you already. This does you no favors. The majority of people who struggle with weight do have complex emotional relationships with food that need to be addressed as part of a sustainable plan. That doesn’t always mean you need a therapist, but if somewhere along the way you’ve learned food or alcohol is an excellent sedative, staying tuned in to an intentionally inflammatory news cycle is very much throwing yourself under the bus. If you then blame yourself for your lack of willpower following such self-traumatization, then you are neglecting to acknowledge the skillset of marketers’ ability to manipulate human emotions in a way that is simply unfair, unkind, and further traumatizing.
So for the love of God and all that is good in the world, please stop.
Whether the cause you are close to is political, environmental, or social, you do that cause no good by staying in a space of panic and fear. Humans cannot think clearly or rationally under duress. And what all these situations need right now is clear-headed, rational, strategic thinkers to right the path and work together to bring us to a better place.
That cannot happen if you are forever tapped into the news cycle.
The problems that we face are bigger than any one person can cause, and bigger than any one person can fix. But if none of us are capable of coping, then we certainly have no chance of fixing anything bigger than us, and have a really real risk of damaging ourselves and others close to us whom we love. I’m hard pressed to think of a circumstance here where that is justified.
If any of this resonates, there are actions you can take now to preserve your strength, your spirit, and your sanity. They must be employed aggressively, immediately, because it’s all at a fever pitch and will not abate for some time.
For reference – I want to tell you I pulled out of the news cycle shortly after the USA invaded Iraq a second time, and I saw how all the protests I attended and the work I did to voice my opposition amounted to nothing. All it did was make me feel a part of something larger and justified, but those feelings did not equate to change. I became aware that I could only really have impact in my immediate environment, and that this can create a ripple effect of positive change within family, and community, which would then ripple outward. Change has always come from the bottom up and I am convinced at this stage in my life it will continue to be that way. It is only until we stop feeding our attention to those who profit off of it that they will find something different, and hopefully better, to sustain themselves. That’s how it is with schoolyard bullies, and that’s how it will be with the media. We won’t get better until we demand better.
So I stopped watching the news in the late 90s. Believe it or not, I still found out when the towers fell in 2001. Every major event that happened, nationally or locally or internationally, came to me regardless. Minor events that impacted me personally reached me. Most other news did not, and my life was made better for it.
I had a lapse during the pandemic, as this was a very novel situation that definitely would have a personal impact. Viruses can’t be stopped. I knew that. And so I tapped in and within a couple months’ time observed how the media skillfully hijacked me again, and how easy it was to feel that rise of outrage or urgency and begin spreading information that was not telling the full story, not nuanced, but designed to get eyes on news pages. I pulled out of it soon afterwards, went back to the basics of what I knew about supporting the immune system and what little I knew about virology from my education, and trusted that what news was relevant to me would be made known to me without me looking for it. And it was. Plenty of others were tuning in for me, being emotionally yanked around by fear and poorly-conducted, questionably scientific sounding journalists who had less education in biology than I do spouting off their expertise in something no human was actually an expert in, and since my central nervous system was not kept in a perpetual state of panic I had better ability to critically think of the information as it was shared with me and keep a clearer, big picture perspective as everything unfolded. That doesn’t mean I’m not without my own pandemic scars, folks. I’m not immune to being human, either. But my scars are more due to witnessing what large groups of people in a panic do to one another than from being relentlessly goaded into panic from being way too connected to corporations making glorious profits off my attention and emotions.
One of the most immediate things you can do in this moment is take out your phone and delete news apps.
If you want to go a step further, delete social media apps. Make it less easy to get that information. Give yourself the blessing of making the conscious choice to seek out the information rather than letting notifications and algorithm-altered feeds subject you to what they decide you want in your life.
Remember, you can always redownload these after the election if you find you actually miss them.
Replace that time with devoted attention to that which calms and delights you. Go for walks, play with your kid or dog, have a conversation with someone. Watch a sunset. Make a healthy meal. Catch up on laundry because that is an action you can take that will directly improve your quality of life immediately. Pick up a physical book and read it. Explore what it feels like to be bored. Observe how many times you have the impulse to check out what is going on. Ask yourself if you are okay with that impulse going off that often.
This is a simple request, but it is not easy. I do not want to mislead you into thinking it is. When our brain is accustomed to that much stimulation, coming off it can be painful. In time, it gets easier. Give it 4-5 weeks and you’ll see what I mean.
As much as I detest social media, I cannot pull away from it completely. So I have installed a browser app called Newsfeed Eradicator which eliminates my social media feed and replaces it with an inspirational quote. I no longer get on social and unwillingly, unintentionally step into someone else’s shit. This is the only way I can remain online in any capacity. I have to go looking for a person to see what they say, choose a group to tap into. Yes, I am missing out of several friend’s random posts, but my best of friends are those who make equal efforts to maintain a relationship offline as well. And the quality of those relationships are higher than were we to take the easy way out and just stay connected on Facebook. They feed me more. They enrich my life more. Quality over quantity, in food and friendship!
So check out Newsfeed Eradicator if you don’t want to be further subjected to your family’s crazy-ass political rants.
Some of you may work in journalism or in some arena that very literally necessitates being connected to the news. Before you decide that is you, really question if it is true. A cultural workplace norm is not necessarily a commandment required to keep your job, but obviously if you are working for politicians you probably can’t just stop watching the news. In these cases, setting boundaries can reduce exposure and give you a moment to collect yourself and remember who you are outside of all that distracts you from this. Happy Hour can be a designated ‘no workplace talk’ hour. Learn about your coworkers as humans, rather than continuing to work off hours. Turn off your phone for specific times of the day, even if it is only one hour. Silence notifications after 7pm or earlier. Begin to take your life back 30 minutes at a time. It all counts. It all matters. More than the amount of time you take, it is the very act of taking action to preserve your mental and physical health that is the important act!
When you discover that not everything falls apart when you are not tuned in 24/7, you begin to explore taking a little more and seeing how much of your life you can reclaim for yourself. This is the only way. You cannot give everything to your job or a social cause and expect to also have something left for you. And if there is nothing left for you, eventually there will be nothing left for them, either.
To recap:
Social media and the news cycle is a business model now designed to take as much of your attention as it can. If these businesses are impacting your mental health to the degree that you find yourself using food or alcohol to cope, you need to revisit the role they play in your life, because at the current level they are leading to active destruction of your health and quality of life.
Begin by deleting news and social media apps to make it harder to react to the impulse to check in and eliminate unasked for notifications about things going on you have no control over and cannot do anything about.
Install newsfeed eradicator on your web browser to disrupt the inevitable unconscious impulse to check social media on a laptop that will come when you uninstall apps on your phone. This is also a great way to find out who stays top of mind that you want to stay in contact with, and who does not.
Reinvest your attention to that which nourishes you. Beauty in the world, friendships and relationships, a hobby or craft which delights you. If you want to escape, pick up a physical book or put on an audiobook, go for a walk or a hike, find healthier forms of escapism that replenish rather than further deplete you.
Don’t expect this to be easy. Marketing psychology is an advanced industry that is very skilled at keeping us addicted. Use this time as a time to increase awareness to the degree to which you feel an internal impulse to seek that emotional rush of an inflammatory headline or unexpected tweet. Notice how it feels to come down from the rush of righteous indignation that we are all subjected to from the political landscape.
If you find yourself anxious about not knowing, remind yourself you can always go back to it later. Right now, you are choosing not to. You are doing an experiment. You are traveling back in time to twenty years ago, or forty years ago, before CNN brought us 24 hour news and the inevitable hot-aired pundits speculating ad nauseum just to fill airtime. Trust important news will still reach you. See what happens when you make an active choice not to engage versus being a passive recipient of what has been effectively determined to command as much of your attention as you’ll allow. On election day, you don’t even need to be tuned in. You can’t change what the outcome will be at that point anyway, so you might as well get a good night’s sleep and allow your body to rest and prepare for whatever the future brings.
My dear listener, please take care of yourself! The world needs your health, your joy, and your sanity if we are to make a better life for those here now and those who are to come. If you are so bold to undergo this experiment, please reach out and let me know! I’ll be cheering you on and honestly, will enjoy a bit of company in this place!
