Do you need yet another way to tone down your stress and anxiety? I have a suggestion. Stop watching the news. One of the things about anxiety that I have learned over the years is that the anxiety you build inside yourself is not just related to how you feel. How you feel is also directly related to all the negative things that bombard you everyday and get stored in your memory and subconsciousness. Overtime all that negative junk builds up and adds stress to your already fragile and fatigued state. The negativity fuels your fears and creates new fears as well.
So why I am picking on the news? Because they bring you the most negative and unneeded information. Let’s make a short list of things commonly covered on the news. They start you off with terrible tales about the bad economy. Then they follow with news about the war, soaring energy and gas prices, food shortages, potential wars with Iran and North Korea and of course stories about local tragedies just for good measure. Now I don’t advocate that you become fully uninformed, just tone it down. Let’s face it, if something blew up in Baghdad or in the next state over what are you going to do about it? What could you do about it? Nothing. So why fill your head with bad news from all over the world?
In the extreme version of the information diet you don’t read news on the web, watch it on t.v., or read about it in the paper. You simply ask a friend or family member to fill you in on the days or weeks big important stories. The less extreme version involves a serious cut back in the amount of news you consume. Maybe instead of an hour or two a day, you watch 30 minutes per day. Once you start the diet guess what happens to you? Nothing. Except of course that your head is swimming with less potential threats to you and your health (real and imagined). No more news show teasers like, “tonight at 11 how sleeping can cause cancer” . They use hooks like these to make you watch the entire program, all the while they are pumping your brain with fear. Fear is the last thing you need being that you already get a hefty dose of that already.
Being an informed and knowledgeable person is important. But you also have to balance that with the realties of anxiety disorders. All anxiety disorders feed on one thing and that thing is stress. You should always do all you can to reduce stress in your life so that you can start making real progress toward eliminating anxiety altogether. There are no easy ways to deal with anxiety disorders, no 90 minute cures here. What you will always find however is solid advice, and I advise you to either take out or lower your news intake. This will give you more time to think about other things that you can control, like learning all you can about being the old you again.
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