Watching the News
I don’t really watch the news.
I wonder how many other people feel the heaviness of being attached to traumatic events of the world. Maybe we think we don’t have permission to look away. Maybe we think we’re being irresponsible if we don’t know what’s happening around the globe.
Here’s the thing: our nervous systems are frayed and misfiring. Our nervous system is in charge of a lot of functions and feelings, so a constant state of high alert is really problematic. When we feed our minds tragedy after tragedy, our nervous system can’t get a break from fight-or-flight. Each time we review an incident, our brains think it’s an entirely new situation. When the Boston marathon attack happened in 2013, a group of researchers from the University of CA, Irvine, made an interesting discovery.
“It’s intuitively obvious that being physically present for – or personally affected by – a terrorist incident is likely to be bad for your mental health. By chance, there were some people in the study who had first-hand experience of the bombings, and it was indeed true that their mental health suffered. But there was also a twist.
Another group had been even more badly shaken: those who had not seen the explosion in person, but had consumed six or more hours of news coverage per day in the week afterwards. Bizarrely, knowing someone who had been injured or died, or having been in the vicinity as the bombs went off, were not as predictive of high acute stress.” (emphasis mine)
Our most basic instinct is survival and our evolution has built in a very important awareness mechanism for things that could harm us. Guess who understands this reality on a deep level ($$$)? Social media companies, news outlets, pretty much any business that only makes money when we’re paying attention. I heard it said that there are only two businesses that refer to their customers as “users”—social media companies and drug dealers. Perhaps the problem isn’t awareness of trauma and danger, but our focused attention on it.
We have collectively gotten to a place where we absolutely gorge ourselves on fear, violence, and destruction. The constant bombardment of tragedy also negatively impacts our perception of the hard things in our own lives. We compare our challenges to the hardships of others and get after ourselves. We think, “I don’t have it so bad!” and we stuff our emotions down and ignore them. I have seen this over and over again with people who talk to me about our situation with Anni. One woman I used to go to church with would talk to me about her husband who was dying of cancer. She would say, “I would start to lose faith, be upset about what was happening with him, and then I would think of you. I would think, ‘I don’t have it as bad as them, so what do I have to complain about? This is my husband, not my child.’”
That makes my stomach churn. Is it possible that we gorge ourselves on the suffering of others to avoid our own pain? 100 years ago we would still get our news but not only was there a delay, it was more difficult to get our hands on. Now we have it on our phone home screen. It’s on the first page when we open our web browser. We have immediate access not only to words, but to images, sounds and video.
If the MOST we’re willing to do about it is talk about it, fret about it, think about it, worry about it, post about it, get enraged about it, become fearful about it, why do we let it take up valuable real estate in our minds? If I’m not going to DO something, I purposely avoid reading, thinking about it, and watching footage.
Have we become emotional addicts, less able to regulate and deal with our own emotions and employ empathy toward others? When we repeatedly disturb a spot on our hands or feet, we develop calluses. When we do this emotionally, we callus our hearts.
I don’t avoid the news because I’m afraid of Feeling. I avoid the news because I’m embracing Feeling in a connected, real-to-my-life way. My intentional turning away from worldwide news is a turning toward the events happening just beyond my screen in my own home and community.