Return to your Natural State Part 3: No news is good news!

We are returning to our natural state of love, happiness and bliss. Last week in Part 2, we talked about getting off the phone feed and how the phone takes us from our natural state and those we love.

The phone, tv and internet all contain a certain feed that people have been trained to crave that is becoming incredibly destructive to our society and our wellbeing and taking us even further from our natural state.

This dependance is on the endless news cycle.

We are fed a constant barrage of horror.

If as Zig Ziglar said,

“your input determines your outlook, which determines your output, and your output determines your future,”

then what future are we creating by feeding ourselves news filled with confrontation, anger, death and destruction?

I know it all seems relevant and it seems like we need to know what is going on right now, but we don’t. We just don’t need to be fed constant death, despair and anger. It’s not reality and it is not what is predominantly happening in the world. People are doing amazing things and pushing the limits of innovation and discovery, pushing the limits of academic achievement and pushing the limits of physical achievement in sports.

The purpose of news used to be to report what was actually going on and was received once or twice a day. Now the purpose of the news is to sell more ads and that’s it.

In order to sell more ads, they have to get you hooked.

Fear is the best way to get you hooked because it triggers chemical reactions in your brain that react to the fear you see. The forged fear you are perceiving is not actually in front of you.

You are not being chased by a tiger or seeing war, death, political fighting and robberies in front of you. You are being shown a cultivated story or video to induce fear or conflict, which causes your brain to release cortisol. Cortisol is the body’s main stress hormone.

When perceiving fear, the brain triggers the adrenal glands to release waves of cortisol. Dr. Traci Johnson describes cortisol as, “nature’s built-in alarm system. It works with certain parts of your brain to control your mood, motivation, and fear.”

But cortisol is not just a stress hormone that impacts fear and perception in your brain, it regulates vital functions in your body. Negative news is actually negatively impacting our physical health.

Too much cortisol can “derail your body’s most important functions. It can also lead to a number of physical and mental health problems, including:

· Anxiety and depression

· Headaches

· Heart disease

· Memory and concentration problems

· Problems with digestion

· Trouble sleeping”

Ever wonder why you feel like hell when you are so young and should feel great?

Ever wonder why you are tired, sad and can’t concentrate at work?

Ever wonder why your belly hurts or you have high blood pressure?

It could be because you are consuming too much news and producing too much cortisol. In screening you, a doctor is not going to ask you how much news you consume and how much doomscrolling you do. You don’t even know you do it, but you spend a lot of time scrolling through the horror, because you have been trained to think you need to know what is going on. We all have.

A Canadian Medical Association Journal article titled Protecting the Brain against Bad News, said

“The impulse to consume negative news can be difficult to resist. ‘We are evolutionarily wired to screen for and anticipate danger, which is why keeping our fingers on the pulse of bad news may trick us into feeling more prepared,’”

But the author says the feelings of fear, sadness and anger triggered by negative headlines can keep people stuck in a “pattern of frequent monitoring,” leading to worse mood and more anxious scrolling.

The negative news makes us think that the world is a horrible place, and everything is much worse than it is.

According to Graham Davey, professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Sussex,

“Exposure to bad news can make personal worries seem worse and even cause acute stress reactions and some symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder that can be quite long-lasting.,”

Dr. Austin Perlmutter, an MD and co-author of Brain Wash wrote in an article titled How Negative News Distorts our Thinking in Psychology Today,

So if you just watched a news report on local robberies, and then were asked about problems in your town, you might say that robberies were a major issue, even if they were, in general, very uncommon. If you’re constantly watching negative news, the availability bias means your brain may be more likely to remember horrible events and then believe that these relatively infrequent occurrences actually represent the general state of things.

The addiction to negative news and doomscrolling distorts our perception of what is real and keeps us from our goals.

It takes us on a dastardly detour down into a dark forest of despair.

Even worse than negatively impacting our health, the negative news takes us away from seeing that light within. The megaphone of horror screaming at us from the phone, computer and TV screens dampens that still small voice inside, until it becomes a faint whisper.

For the love of that beautiful shining person you must become, do not open the news and turn your notifications off. To feed the glorious soul within you, you should consume only positive content, not this horrible junk that damages your brain and your body.

There will always be pain in the world, yet life for people today is exponentially better than it has ever been in human history. But ask people today and they will say that we are in a downward spiral of misery simply because that is what they have been fed. Yet, it is not true or real.

What is true and real is that you are made of the same stuff as stars and like them, you are meant to shine. There is nothing more elemental or more real than that.

Are you going to dampen your light and let your mind and your body be controlled by a false narrative just to sell ads?

Or are you going to take control of your body and your mind, your precious thoughts that should belong to you?

Sadly, many of the ads that are being sold are for the medications that treat the disorders being caused to your body by the cortisol overdose inflicted by the news you are watching between the ads. Turn it off, close the window, stop scrolling.

For my 3 year old, Gloria, she’s not overdosing on cortisol. It’s not real to her.

It shouldn’t be real to you. You are still the same person that was once a 3 year old. You left your natural state. You can come back to your natural state.

It’s not real to me either. Why?

Because I decided it’s not.

I decided not to consume negative news years ago. After the election of 2016, I made a conscious decision to get off news. I scrolled the news app every couple of hours, probably even multiple times an hour. I had been a news junkie since I was a teenager. It continued into adulthood and most of us do the same. I had loved politics and world events since I was a kid. That’s why I went to college in DC and worked in the U.S. Senate and House.

The more I was off the news though, the more I realized that it is just the same stuff repeated daily without much change. When we are in it, it seems relevant and constantly changing, but it’s actually not once you step back and see it for what it is. So at first, I stayed informed but less often. I noticed myself getting healthier, this was the period I started getting up earlier and incorporated working out into my daily routine. I felt lighter and happier.

A couple of years later, I learned from Dr. Benjamin Hardy about the concept of “Strategic Ignorance.” In his book Personality Isn’t Permanent, Hardy defines “Strategic Ignorance” as

“Purposefully ignoring those things that distract you from your future self.”Ignoring the need to constantly absorb the negative news stream will allow you to focus on what matters most to you. It will allow you to mold and shape your life to be your highest and best self.

Setting up your environment and what you consume allows you to focus on your priorities, your goals and your productivity without being distracted.

The news is a distraction. Just like we talked about with the phone and social media, you aren’t driving your life when sucked in and distracted by the negative news, you are a passenger on a wild ride being driven by an erratic angry drunk uber driver. Someone else is driving you and they do not have your safety and best interests in mind.

Take control of the wheel, get off the news and drive your life.

In his groundbreaking book The Art of Thinking Clearly, Rolf Dobelli, a Swiss entrepreneur and author, makes a very compelling case for going cold turkey from the news.

Dobelli asks,

“Out of the approximately 10,000 news stories you have read in the last 12 months, name one that — because you consumed it — allowed you to make a better decision about a serious matter affecting your life, your career or your business. In reality, news consumption is a competitive disadvantage. The less news you consume, the bigger the advantage you have.”

Consumption of news stifles our creativity and constrains our thinking.

“News inhibits thinking. Thinking requires concentration. Concentration requires uninterrupted time. News pieces are specifically engineered to interrupt you.”

The most shocking point that Dobelli makes is how the news actually changes the physical structure of the brain.

Nerve cells routinely break old connections and form new ones. The more news we consume, the more we exercise the neural circuits devoted to skimming and multitasking while ignoring those used for reading deeply and thinking with profound focus. Most news consumers — even if they used to be avid book readers — have lost the ability to absorb lengthy articles or books. After four, five pages they get tired, their concentration vanishes, they become restless. It’s not because they got older or their schedules became more onerous. It’s because the physical structure of their brains has changed.

Being taken from our natural state by the barrage of constantly negative news, notifications and technological inputs is leading to regular states of depression, anxiety and anger for many.

Nine years after getting off the negative news, I am so much happier, less stressed, and in better shape than I have ever been physically, emotionally and spiritually. It is not to say that I do not know what is going on. I am strategically ignorant, not completely ignorant, although some may disagree with that.

Strategic ignorance does not mean that you live in a cabin in the woods and cut off contact with the outside world. You simply set boundaries on what you consume. Instead of doomscrolling and consuming news apps, TV and social media, you may decide that you want to consume material that inspires you or relates to advancing your goals to Thrive.

If you add up 15 minutes of news consumption in the morning, 15 minutes in the evening and a couple minutes of scrolling every few hours, you are losing half a day every week to this mind warping activity. That is at least 25 days a year lost on negative news. We are losing almost a month a year to unfocused anxiety ridden negative news, when we can spend that same time consuming positive life changing content to make us better and get us to our goals faster.

This is your life. You only get one shot during this lifetime.

Are we going to waste this one shot, this life, letting others train our brain what to think?

Are we going to let media moguls selling ads determine our view of the world?

Are we going to let them dampen our light and convince us that life on earth is miserable?

It is a glorious world, and we have one chance to make it even better. That is the reason you are here. Instead of letting the negative news distract your attention from your life, focus on what really matters.

Focus on developing the person you see in your mind, your future self.

Focus on being who you are meant to be.

Focus on reading, planning and doing what your future self does to make a better life and a better world.

Focus on making yourself better, stronger, happier.

Focus on the love in the mirror and cast it out into the world.

Focus on removing all these distractions keeping you from achieving great success and happiness.

As Bruce Lee said,

“‎The successful warrior is the average man, with laser-like focus.”

Visit benparvey.com to download our Habitually Inspired HabiTracker, get inspired and learn more ways to Thrive in 2025.

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