Episode 25 – Stop Watching the News!

Episode Summary

In this episode we discuss the idea of not watching the news and why it’s so destructive as a habit.

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Show Transcript

All right, hello, everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Emotional Embuffination podcast. I am your host, David Enevoldsen, and here on Emotional Embuffination we are training to become emotionally buff enough to overcome any conflict in life, and at the same time, we are trying to discover and maintain new levels of success and happiness and just to optimize and feel all those positive, joyful feelings in life. This podcast is just one of a number of different resources I have available. If you want to learn more about any of that, check out the Emotional Embuffination website, which is embuff, E-M-B-U-F-F.com. Also on the website, when you’re there, sign up for the newsletter which gives quick weekly Emotional Embuffination tips that will help you in your emotional embuffination journey. Okay, On today’s show, we’re going to be talking about something that I’ve been kind of preaching about for quite a while, and that’s related to the news. You know, I have said for many years now to stop watching the news. And there seems to be this sort of counter-argument which has some validity to it about staying informed and that that’s why you need to watch the news. You need to know what’s going on so you can be an effective citizen. That’s sort of the contrast and I’ve advocated for just don’t watch the news. Like cut it out of your life. So I’m going to explore this issue a little bit, talk a bit more in depth about why I’m advocating for not watching the news and why I think you shouldn’t do that.

Okay. Let’s start with kind of what’s going on out there. I mean, the world is in a scary state. And if you are paying attention to what’s going on in the news and the world events and even local events, there’s just some horrifying stuff that’s going on out there. There you perpetually see this stuff when you are watching the news or any sort of current events. There was some Gallup data recently that indicated only 42% of us adults think it’s very or somewhat likely our youth will have a better living standard, better homes, better education and improved quality of life than than we do now. And that’s an 18 percentage point drop since June of 2019. So the perspective that we have is declining. You know, people are thinking that the future looks very bleak and there’s a lot out there to be upset about. You know, 2.1 million Americans are using opioids. According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, in 2021, 106,000 Americans died from drug involved overdoses. People are dying in droves from fentanyl. There are 4.3% of children die before they turn 15. That’s data from 2020 5.9 million children die every year. That means that 16,000 children are dying on average per day. 16,000 children are dying a day. Which means that 11 children are dying every minute.

Think about that for a second. 11 kids a minute are dying. That’s a scary number. Homelessness is up. It’s kind of out of control. We’re seeing homelessness everywhere. I live in the Phoenix area and I drive frequently to the downtown Phoenix area to go to courts that are down there. And when I go down, I frequently notice there’s this thing that a lot of people hear call, “the Zone,” where just a whole bunch of homeless people sort of congregated and taken over several streets and they just have these encampments that line up the side of the streets. And it’s almost scary to go down them because people are just sort of walking around giving you the evil eye if you even show up in that area. It’s done a lot of damage to businesses here. But, you know, these people don’t know where else to go. So it’s become a real problem. You know, homelessness there is sort of taking over the area, destroying businesses, reflecting an underlying problem about both mental health issues and joblessness issues. And homelessness is a real concern. It’s not just in Phoenix. I mean, this is all over the world, we’re having problems. If you’ve been watching any of the economic news, you’ll know that inflation is just utterly out of control. The inflation has become almost a scary thing. Like I run a business and it’s, I’ve had several moments where I keep thinking, “Gosh, are we going to be able to continue to do this business?” You know, are people still going to be able to pay us or are we going to be able to afford to keep ourselves afloat with all of this crazy inflation? You know, I remember when I was in high school, I would go to the mall and my mom would give me $5 and she would say, Here, go eat lunch.

And I could go to one of the restaurants in the food court and I could spend $5, get a full lunch, you know, a couple slices of pizza, a drink or something. And I would still have change left over. You cannot do that now. And it’s changed dramatically even within the last year. There’s been just a huge spike. I remember thinking it was about a year ago. I had to give my kid like $10 to go get something, some fast food meal and have enough to actually cover it. And I recently went to a fast food restaurant and I got just a very simple thing. It was like a drink and a some chicken, basically. And those two things cost me almost $18. So that’s a dramatic change, and it wasn’t anything extravagant. It was nothing, it was just chicken and a drink. And it was almost 18 bucks. I mean, we have seen some ridiculous levels of inflation. And obviously the in the U.S., the Fed is trying to combat that.

They’ve been raising rates and it just everything seems terrifying. You know, when you watch any of the news related to the economic conditions that are going on, that stuff is scary. Think about the school shootings. We’re, I feel like we’re constantly hearing about, you know, some kid is marched into the next school with some some crazy weapon or handgun or some assault rifle or whatever. And they start mowing kids down and then people are dying left and right. Nobody can really seem to agree on what the causals are. Everybody thinks they have the answer, but the problem persists. Whatever the solution to that is. And people are dying and it’s scary. And it gets to a point where you’re terrified of sending your kid to school. And I’ve got kids that go to school. I have concerns about that, too. There are issues that we’ve been watching since COVID. Gosh, the news has been horrifying since then. I mean, we saw riots breaking out throughout the U.S. over racism. We saw all sorts of people diving into victimhood. We had political tensions like nothing I’ve ever seen. And it doesn’t seem like it’s gotten that much better since the times of COVID. At this, I’ve never seen so much political division and over everything you know the from should we wear masks? Are they effective? Should we not wear masks? The vaccine issues, the racial tension issues. I mean, there’s so much that popped up during COVID when everybody was sitting around watching the news.

It’s just ugly out there. And when you sit around and watch the news, it it’s kind of defeating. I talked to a lot of friends and colleagues who, you know, we have some discussion about what’s going on out there in the world right now. And they become absolutely terrified and they think just just like I said, that that Gallup data, that there’s really no hope for the future. What life are our kids going to have? It’s scary. And this this is the stuff you find out when you were watching the news, right? Well, there’s some thoughts I have on this and we’ll dive into some of that in just a minute. But I think it’s also important to recognize that there have always been terrible things going on. The world has always had a lot of darkness in it. And it wasn’t that long ago that we were looking at stuff like Nazi Germany. You know that I know people that were alive. We have lots of people that were alive during World War II. And, you know, I recently was visiting someone in hospice who was kind of an older fellow who was a kid during World War II. And he was describing some of the stuff that he he experienced. And it just that wasn’t that long ago. And during World War II and that whole era, we saw a lot of ugliness.

I mean, Nazi Germany was dark as heck. We had people just getting exterminated in horrific ways, just tortured and just it was awful. And I mean, it’s almost become we’ve almost become inoculated to it at this point because it’s so popular as a device to use in fiction. And, you know, all these stories have just things about Nazis. And but it was horrifying and in many ways a million times worse than what we’re seeing now. And I’m not saying that everything now is better than it was then. And I’m not saying that there are not problems now, but there was a lot of really, really, really dark stuff going on back then. If you’ve read The Gulag Archipelago, which was a description of a lot of the horrors that were going on in communist Russia, that also paints just a horrible picture. That’s a book that I started reading. And I to this day, I haven’t even been able to finish it because I just feel so nauseated when I start going through it about all the horrible descriptions of stuff that was happening in these Russian camps. There’s another one. I’ll give you a little bit of detail on this one. If you haven’t heard of Unit 731, which was originally built in 1935. Gosh, And it just fair warning, this gets really dark here. But this I don’t think most people have heard of this, but it’s really ugly.

And it was kind of popped up also during this World War II era where the Japanese built this facility in China. It was in Harbin, China, and they housed what they called the Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department of the Kwantung Army. It was later just became known as Unit 731. Well, the project was initiated by the Japanese military, and they believed that the Western powers were out developing biological weapons, which the Geneva Convention prohibited. And so in the Japanese military’s mind, that meant that was just a testament to how effective biological weapons were. So they established Unit 731 to essentially study biological warfare and to do experiments related to biological warfare. They built the whole facility in China because they thought that they could use the Chinese population as test subjects. They thought there were so many Chinese citizens running around that they could just grab some throw them into these, this unit 731. And they just had essentially a limitless supply of people to experiment on. It was filled with just kind of everybody. It was filled with prisoners of war, homeless people, mentally ill. Some people had just ran out and grabbed really, nobody was immune. If you were if you were out there and they just happened to get their hands on you. Women, men, children, elderly. Just nobody was protected from the potential of being an inmate there. They called the inmates, “logs.” Just I guess that helped to dehumanize them or something.

And they just would take people in there and they just took extensive notes on what they were doing in their biological warfare, experimentation, which sometimes seemed to have nothing to do with anything that was remotely connected to anything useful. They just the stuff they did to people in there was horrifying. I remember first reading about this and I just felt sick. You know, they were taking people and just sometimes they would straight inject them with various pathogens just to see what would happen. And then they’d make notes on the progress of the diseases that were, you know, being were infecting these people. Sometimes they would take inmates and tie them to crosses in fields while they would just spray pathogens over the top of them using airplanes or sometimes they would drop bombs filled with various biological weapons, and then they would just come in and see what happened to these people. A lot of times when they were tying these people to crosses, they would put these kind of protective shields around their heads to make sure that if there were explosives, these people weren’t dying too quickly before they could figure out what was going on in terms of the spread of the pathogens. Some of these people were taken after they had stuff injected in them or that they were infected with in some way, and they would vivisect these people without using any anesthetic whatsoever. There were very, very cold temperatures in Harbin in the winter, and sometimes they would take people out without clothes, tie them down outside, pour water on them.

And then researchers there would just observe the effects of frostbite. Some of the prisoners there were intentionally infected with syphilis or other STDs, sexually transmitted diseases. The researchers there sometimes forced some inmates to rape female inmates just so they could study the transmission and progression of various sexually transmitted diseases. Sometimes the doctors raped female inmates, and as a result, there was a lot of children that were born in Unit 731, many of whom were infected with the very same stuff that their parents had been subjected to. Researchers viewed these children as logs, also just their subjects of experiments, and they routinely dissected children alive. You know, sometimes they would cut open pregnant women without using anesthetic, just cut them open just to see what was going on in terms of the progression of diseases. And this didn’t even stop in the camp. Unit 731 dropped some bombs with bubonic plague on a Chinese city as part of their experiments. They had plans to fill hot air balloons with biological weapons and send them to the United States, which fortunately didn’t happen. They this whole thing was brought to an end before that did. But, I mean, this was kind of the purpose of Unit 731. And unfortunately, not a single person captured and taken into Unit 731 came out of there alive.

And even the laborers that they use to build the facility were executed so that no one would be able to kind of go out and report what was going on. When the Chinese army finally started moving in on Unit 731 during the war and the Japanese realized they were losing control of it, the general there basically ordered the doctors to just exterminate every remaining prisoner and then they took off. So I went into detail here on this because a couple things. Number one, I think it’s a recognition that darkness has always been there. And when I read this, it’s utterly horrifying. And I think that we have a tendency to think everything’s just getting worse and worse and worse. And we’re getting off to this point somewhere in the future where just it’s unimaginably horrible for our children, for where we’re going, where we’re going as a country or as a planet or any of that stuff. It can be very scary when you’re watching the news, but I’m highlighting this to show that some of these horrors are things that have improved over time, and you may still be thoroughly disenchanted and rightly, you may be thoroughly disenchanted with the way things are right now. But there’s been some horrible stuff out there in our past and throughout all of human history that is is unimaginably dark. And we’re still here. And I think that there’s always going to be darkness of some some sort. And that’s always going to be out there. I’m going to elaborate on this in just a minute.

But I also don’t, I think the perception that we have is that it’s just forever worsening because that’s sort of what we’re primed to pay attention to. And indeed, the news caters to this. You know, the news is always looking for these terrible things. And if they don’t, they go out of business. There’s a great example of there was a website, the City Reporter, that was based out of Russia, and they decided they were going to change the script because they they’d heard all these complaints. And, you know, frankly, things like what I’m describing here were the news is always negative and always sounds terrible. So they decided they were going to spend a day with only good news for just a day in 2014. And all they did was report nothing but positive things. And you know what happened? They lost two thirds of their readership. Because they decided they were going to report on positive news. Now, from a certain perspective, this makes sense. If you listen to the podcast stated previously about the Big Five Personality Aspects Scale, we talked a bit about Neuroticism and some of the there’s obvious disadvantages with being neurotic. If you’re always kind of on high alert, looking for the dangers around every corner, that has an incredible toll on your body. You’re constantly pumping cortisol into your system. It just it’s very destructive and it’s miserable if you’re just constantly feeling anxious and on high alert.

But there’s an obvious evolutionary benefit to it as well. If you are running around in the woods and you’re on high alert looking for the saber tooth tiger, if you spot the tiger, awesome, you you have a good chance of surviving now. If you don’t spot the tiger, you’re dead. So there’s no real tax other than the long term tax on you for being wrong about that. On the other hand, if if you are not looking for that thing and it shows up then you’re dead. And so there’s a clear benefit to being neurotic like that. And when you are when you’re experiencing high neuroticism, that’s all about finding the bad stuff. And that’s very much what we’re doing with the news is we’re kind of looking for all those terrible things that are out there on the horizon. And frankly, the people that are watching the news, which is most of the human population, is looking for the bad stuff because we want to know what’s out there that we need to be worried about. And that goes back to the very thing that people talk about all the time, which is we need to stay informed so that we know what’s going on so that we can see the threats so that we can stop them. And there is no shortage of threats. There is no shortage of the bad stuff going on out there. There’s COVID, Russia’s invading Ukraine. North Korea is doing whatever the heck North Korea is doing now. Democrats and Republicans are at war and inflation, school shootings. Et cetera. Et cetera. It’s all terrible.

Well we know it’s bad. We know that if you watch the news, everything is very dark. We know that people just really only want to see the dark stuff. But let’s talk about the data here for a second, because there is a compelling argument that you want to stay informed. But there is such a tax on watching the news that I don’t think it’s worth it. There was an interesting study recently from the University of Pennsylvania that looked at data from 2010 to 2020, and they were coming to the conclusion based on the way that they structured the study, that things are becoming more polarized over time. The political camps are just kind of stretching out more and more. And we saw that kind of erupt during the whole pandemic situation. There was a study at Texas Tech University from 2022. So this is fairly recent when when I’m doing this podcast at least. It said that 73.6% of people identified as watching what the researchers identified as problematic news consumption, experienced mental ill being, quite a bit or very much.

Of those problematic news consumers 61% were experiencing poor physical health symptoms. There’s another study that looked at people who were watching news on related to the 9-11 attacks in the United States and were reporting high anxiety. And those people were 53% more likely to develop cardiovascular issues in the three years following the attacks. There’s another study that it was looking at again with the 9-11 attacks, it was looking at people that spent four or more hours of the early nine over 11 coverage, and it was linked to greater likelihood of health problems years later. So there is just a wealth of research out there showing that people who are just watching the news, especially large amounts of the news start manifesting all sorts of mental health problems. It ripples into your physical wellbeing. You can manifest physical problems from this stuff. I remember I saw numerous articles when COVID was going on about the surge in depression and anxiety, and I feel firmly convinced that much of that was just people sitting around at home because nobody was going to work at that time, or they were working from home, or they were just obsessing about what was going on. All they were doing was sitting around all day listening over and over to the political pundits talking about whatever COVID-related issue they wanted to go on about, that we were all going to die, or that we all needed the vaccine or didn’t need the vaccine, that we should be using masks or we shouldn’t be using masks. And it was just dark as heck and people were inundating themselves with it. And we were seeing spikes in we saw spikes in suicide, too, but we also saw spikes in depression and anxiety. And it did nothing good for our mental health. The news unequivocally shakes us up. I mean, going back to these 9-11 attacks, I remember when that happened. I was in college at that point getting my undergrad.

And I remember just talking to people that were like it almost seemed like they were in this sort of daze. You know, they were so stunned by what was going on, even though they weren’t physically there. I knew people that just knew no one there. They just were so sad about what was going on and so distressed by the whole thing. On the opposite end of the country from where this was and they were just walking around in kind of a like zombies and were miserable. One other kind of interesting point about this is that the news, in my opinion, rarely gives you a very accurate sense of what’s really going on. It’s typically modified to kind of make it sound much worse than what it really is, because the newscasters want to create those sound bites that are going to get them hits. They want to sound shocking. They want to sound scary because that’s what people are looking for. Remember, you present the good news, nobody wants to watch that. We present the scary, terrible stuff. Everybody’s all over it. So the newscasters have to sell it that way. And so they make it sound much scarier than what it actually is, oftentimes. So frequently we what we’re hearing is not nearly as bad as how it truly is.

Well, so we recognize that there’s a lot of darkness out there. We recognize that hopefully, if you’re following me up to this point, that watching the news can cause a lot of mental health problems, can cause physical problems, especially when you inundate yourself with it. So that raises us to the next issue, which is what do you do about it? So, I mean, you can completely cut out the news. I mean, you can say, I’m just never watching the news, in which case you run the risk of this this other issue we were talking about earlier, which is how do you stay informed? You know, because part of what we talk about in Emotional Embuffination is being able to recognize that there’s something that you don’t like out there. Maybe this is a political issue and taking some action. You know, in the book I cite to people that are doing some large scale things. You want to talk about Martin Luther King Jr. He’s sort of a personal hero of mine for many of the things that he did. I don’t think he was perfect by any stretch, but he was taking some large scale efforts to address political issues. Nelson Mandela is another one that I reference in the Emotional Embuffination book quite a bit. And once again, he was taking some very large scale political issues and he was really throwing himself into those. And part of Emotional Embuffination is saying, if you see a problem and you don’t like how something is going down, take action and take educated action, you know, take take action that’s going to be calculated to solve the problem. Don’t just sit around and fill your heads with craziness.

So I think this is an important kind of preliminary distinction here is that what most people do when they’re watching the news. I mean, think about COVID in that whole era, because most of us live through that and kind of saw what was going on there. In Covid everybody that I knew was sitting around spending enormous amounts of time on social media complaining, arguing, fighting with people on the Internet, people that had already decided what their positions were, just spending ridiculous amounts of time and energy working themselves into a frenzy and really not doing anything constructive. They were just arguing with strangers on the Internet that had already decided their positions. If you go back to the episode we did on fighting with facts or the chapter I have in the Emotional Embuffination book where I talk about fighting the facts, we know that there’s a fair amount of research out there talking about the fact that directly trying to argue with someone about the substance of an issue when they’ve already emotionally decided on what their position is, not only further entrenches them, it further entrenches you into your position, doesn’t change anybody’s opinions, but it also works you into a frenzy. And that’s exactly what we saw during the COVID era. You know, everybody was just kind of arguing with everyone. Nobody was really solving anything. It was just this sort of back and forth attacks all the time. I saw a lot of friendships end during the COVID period when they didn’t really need to. You know, people were just disagreeing about these issues and driving themselves absolutely insane over it. And very few people were changing their positions as a result of this, which is what happens when you’re arguing with facts.

So you know that that wasn’t useful. And I think there’s an important distinction here in terms of just I’m spending all my time rambling on the Internet and trolling or arguing with strangers that have already decided versus taking some action that is calculated to actually do something. I mean, if you’re going out and you were speaking to someone that is contemplating passing a new law that’s going to affect an issue that you’re concerned about, that’s action. If you’re going out and you’re doing speeches that are calculated to change the public understanding of an issue, that’s action. If you’re going out and doing something that is calculated to really make a change that is very different than just sitting at home driving yourself crazy or arguing with someone on the Internet, that’s not going to change their mind. So I think that’s a really important distinction that we we have to kind of think through. We shouldn’t ignore problems. You know, again, this is a foundational tenet of Emotional Embuffination we if we identify something that we think is a problem we should take action on it.

We should pick our battles. That’s another chapter in Emotional Embuffination. We shouldn’t just combat everything because we just we have finite resources. We need to pick our battles. We need to think about the important things that we’re going to fight and fight those things. But don’t drive yourself crazy. And this is what most people do with respect to being informed. Is they just kind of take a position that they’ve already decided on because it really takes very little information before you really kind of have a good sense of where you’re going to go on this. And then they keep saying that they’re going to inform themselves while they’re watching more and more and more of the same thing over and over and over again. And they start to engage in what I call, “the hardening.” And I think I’ve referenced this previously, but it’s just a name I’ve labeled to this sort of positive feedback loop that we get into where people just convince themselves more and more and more of their position. To the point that they start to not hear anything remotely rational. And it gets to where you can’t even have a reasonable conversation, even if you agree with this person because they just go off. I remember talking to somebody years ago who didn’t even necessarily disagree with all of his opinions. I disagreed with many of his opinions. But he was just hardcore extreme to one end of the political spectrum. And I remember one time I just walked up to him and I said, “Welfare.” That was all I said. And this person then proceeded for ten minutes to just rant.

No input from me. He was just so worked up into a frenzy because he spent so much of his time perseverating on these issues, that that was all he could think about. And it was not a dialogue by any stretch. It was just him working himself into madness. We want to avoid that. And watching the news, I think is an effort in or is a contributor to us going down that road where we we stop making any sense. And I saw this during COVID. I see this all the time with any political issue. People don’t really hear anything anymore. They just start spewing the stuff that they’ve been thinking all the time.

So be very careful. I mean, once you’ve decided it’s important to come up with positions on issues, especially if they have a direct impact on you or if it’s something you’re going to take some direct action on. If you’re not, it may be irrelevant, but don’t get yourself so informed unless that information is serving a function. Like if you’re preparing for a debate or something that you’re going to be doing publicly for some political office or whatever, that could make some sense to spend time memorizing data and statistics and whatever is going to be useful for your argument. But just sitting there and stewing for the sake of stewing is not useful, especially when you’ve already decided which is what most people do. You don’t need that much information and quite frankly, everybody out there is going to offer you the information. I haven’t really watched the news for quite some time. You know, occasionally I’ll look something up when I hear about some new event going on, I’ll say like, oh, that’s interesting. What are the details on this? But I do not regularly watch the news and I have not for a while. And I thought for a time I needed to be more informed and I realized that I was just driving myself crazy doing that.

And I hear stuff. You know, people will tell you when something important is going on. I can log on to Facebook and I can see 20 posts about whatever crazy current event is going on, this school shooting or, you know, the president said whatever, whatever president we’re on, you know, all of these things, I’m gonna hear about them if they’re important. I don’t need to bury myself in information about this stuff in order to have a sense of what’s going on, and especially in order to just have a decent understanding of where my position is on it. So that I can effectively vote or take action or whatever. If I need more information to kind of further the action, then go ahead and get some of that, do a little bit of research. But just don’t spend all of your time obsessing over the news because it does nothing positive. There is kind of one more important step in all of this, and it’s related to meditation. And I’ve promoted meditation in various other contexts, and I’ll come back to it again here. And I know meditation is not for everybody, but I’m a big fan of it. And again, this is not just me making this up.

There was a 2007 study published in the International Journal of Behavioral Medicine where they, the researchers, broke participants into two groups. They showed them like 15 minutes of news, and they the two groups were one, they had them doing a relaxation exercise afterwards. The other group was their control group where they just had them kind of listening to some lecture generically. Now, before and after this experiment, they were assessed they used a measure to assess kind of anxiety and other negative feelings that these participants were experiencing. And they noticed that there was a significant difference between these two groups, the one that was engaging in relaxation exercises versus versus the control group after hearing the news. So, number one, inundate yourself with less news. But number two, just some basic meditation and relaxation techniques will go a long way in reducing some of the anxiety that is being produced some of the crazy negative feelings that we start to feel when we start to experience when we’re watching the news. You know, I during Covid, I spent a fair amount of time meditating. And I, I remember talking to people who had no real reason to be upset because nothing was directly happening to them. You know they, I mean, there was stuff going on out there, but there was nothing immediate. I had a conversation with somebody who told me he asked me how I was doing and I was like, I’m doing great. And this was like right in the heart of the whole COVID period during the lockdowns and all this. And he said, “Well, I’m glad you’re feeling great because I, I don’t.”

And I was like, “Well, what’s wrong?” And he said, “Well, you know, just. Everything that’s happening in the news right now.” And I was like “Well, what’s happened to you specifically?” He’s like, Well, and he told me something I won’t repeat it here, But he told me something and I was like, “Well, wasn’t that thing happening before all of this? The COVID stuff was happening?” He said, “Well, yeah,” but and then he started ranting about several things that were in the news and what the president was doing and, you know, various other stuff. And I went, okay, well, how is that impacting you directly right now? And he said, “Well, it’s just it’s what’s going on.” And he got kind of mad, but there was nothing in his life that had immediately changed. He just spent an enormous amount of time on the news. And I’m not trying to denigrate any of the people that had problems. I’m not trying to be dismissive of the fact that people died because clearly there were problems. Businesses went under, people lost their jobs. There were people that suffered serious blows by way of the loss of family members or the people that died. My point is, there were a lot of people that worked themselves into absolute frenzies when nothing was happening to them directly. It was just they were spending all their time watching the news.

So, so, if you were to just spend some basic time doing meditation, which is what I was doing at, number one, I wasn’t watching the news, at least not not nearly as much as most people. Number two, I was doing meditation and I felt fine throughout COVID. I did not feel like I was worked up into a frenzy that whole time. One kind of final thought on this is that there’s also a law of attraction implications to this whole news issue. So if I’m spending all my time watching all the terrible things that are out there in the news, and as many of you know, I’m a proponent of applying principles of the Law of Attraction and or at least having an understanding of the principles of the Law of Attraction. And I feel like there’s this almost self-fulfilling prophecy that takes place when you are watching the news. So if you’re seeing all these dark things, then these things start to show up in your world.

There’s I think of this example where there was somebody that lives in my house who was kind of obsessing for a little bit about homelessness and there was kind of a homeless population not too far from where I live that was sort of showing up. And these homeless people were sort of congregating on the corner and showing up in different areas not too far away. And the person that I live with was a little upset about this issue popping up and kept talking about it. And I wasn’t giving it any energy at all. And this person kept seeing homeless people in the area nearby. And I kept missing them. Like I just wasn’t seeing them. I even had one time where I was in the car with this person and they said, “Oh, look, there’s homeless people over there.” And I turned and we’d already passed. I didn’t even see them. And I was having that experience a lot. It was not that I never saw them, but it was like we were just going on different journeys or something. Like I just wasn’t seeing them at all. There was one day when I came home, went inside, and this other person showed up back at home and we had put our trash cans out to get picked up for the following day. And so I was inside and this other person gets home. And then right when they get home, there’s a homeless person digging through our trash cans. This person in my house was very upset about that, came in and told me by the time I got out there, this homeless person was gone. And so it was very strange because this person who was getting very upset about the homeless population in the nearby area was seeing homeless people coming across the path.

You know showing up in our trash can, all this stuff. And I was not. Like it just wasn’t manifesting in my world at all. And then finally, I saw this person kind of drop the issue and not spend so much energy and time thinking about it. And I haven’t really seen any homeless people popping up in this person’s path. So I, I know I may get kick back on the Law of Attraction thing, but I’ve kind of bought into this paradigm. In case you haven’t figured that out by now, from listening to me, what you are dwelling on has a tendency to manifest in your world. And it tends to be what you start to see, tends to be what you think about. It tends to be the frequency that you run into. And so if you were watching the news and you’re seeing all these terrible things, from a law of attraction perspective, what do you think is going to show up in your life?

It’s going to be all the terrible things. So that’s yet another reason not to be watching the news. It’s it’s not helpful. I mean, you really does nothing constructive most of the time. Yeah, you want to be have some level of being informed. And if you’re going out and taking specific action, which I encourage you to do, if you see a problem. I do not by any stretch, encourage you to waste all your time and energy sitting around complaining to people on the Internet or just stewing in your living room or whatever. If you’re going to go out and take some action and you need to do some research for something cool, go watch, compile some data, figure some stuff out. But don’t just spend all your time and energy driving yourself crazy. Don’t start to manifest negative things in your life because you’re spending all your time thinking about it and just quite frankly, go live your life. Don’t live it in this panic about all the terrible things that might be coming. The world has always had terrible things. Again, think about what was going on in World War II.

That was real ugliness. And it didn’t, it’s not like it started there. It way preceded that. I mean as long as human beings have been on the earth, there’s been extreme darkness. And unfortunately I think there always will be some level of darkness on this world. The catch is how we are interfacing with it and to what extent we are running into the same path about it. And if we are running into the same path of it, what are we going to do about it? Don’t just sit around in your house and watch the news and get upset. Go take some action. But the end result is really, don’t watch the news. It’s not good for you. Okay. I’m going to bring it to a wrap there. That brings us to the end of today’s show.

I hope that you found this useful. I hope that you take some little nugget here. Even if you don’t stop watching the news, I hope you, like reduce some of your news content. Or if you were already sold on this, then I hope that just reinforces your position. Whatever whatever your take-away from this is, I hope that there’s something. I hope that this helps you improve your life in some way.

Don’t forget to go to the newsletter sign up for the newsletter on my website, which is the embuff.com. Remember, keep working on this stuff. Emotional Embuffination is a journey. It is all about habits and continually improving. Just like when we go to the gym, you don’t just do it once, say I’m buff forever. You keep going. You make it part of your routine. You make it part of your daily life and you exist in a much healthier way when you’ve got working out as part of your routine. Same thing with Emotional Embuffination. Your life can be so much happier if you were just perpetually working on this stuff and making it part of your routine. At the end of the day, I want you to be emotionally strong. Enough to go from saying things like, “The struggle is real,” to saying, “What struggle?” Thank you all for listening. I hope you’ve enjoyed this. Have a great week and we’ll see you on the next episode.