Day 84. Go on a news fast

News. Fake news? Bad news?  Any news?  What’s new in the news?

Ever watched the news and been upbuilt? No? Hard to believe.

Not only are negatively valenced news broadcasts likely to make you sadder and more anxious, they are also likely to exacerbate your own personal worries and anxieties. But the effect of negatively valenced news is much broader than that – it can potentially exacerbate a range of personal concerns not specifically relevant to the content of the program itself. So, bombarding people with ‘sensationalized’ negativity does have genuine and real psychological effects. Graham C. L. Davey, Ph.D. is Professor of Psychology at the University of Sussex, UK. His research interests extend across mental health problems generally, and anxiety and worry specifically.

Sure, we all want to “keep on top of things”, we all want to “know what’s going on”. But, keeping in mind Dr. Davey’s warning we want to do so in balance. Today’s newscasts are all about sensationalism. The motto in modern-day journalism, more than ever, is: if it bleeds, it leads.  

It’s time for your own “pattern interrupt”. Break your news feeding habit, interrupt it with a pattern of healthy words. Is your job merely an avocation? Or is it your vocation? You spend 40 hrs. a week, the bulk of your time, at it. You support yourself/your family doing your ‘job”. Are you getting better at it each and every day? Are you growing? Do you find excitement performing it each and every day? Do you wake up wanting to go to work? If you answered “NO” to any of the last three questions – and would over a long period of time, it’s time to reevaluate. However, before you jump up and quit consider doing the following one-a-day plan.

Once a day, read a case study, truly digest it and apply it to your work. Sharing a case study is the best way to invigorate yourself and your prospect/customer set. The #1 SMB salesperson in Microsoft for FY2012 said when interviewed regarding her success stated: “whenever possible, whenever practical, I included a case study in every customer communication.”

Once a day, read a product/technology/services datasheet. We typically eat three times a day to maintain our physical edge, we need to feed ourselves “technically” each day to keep our tech edge.

Once a day, read/learn something NEW in your “business line”. Get better at what you do every day. If you’re in sales, read something new in a sales blog, posting, newsletter, etc. (If you need suggestions try: Jill Konrath, Art Sobczak, and The Rain Group as good starting places)

But once-a-day, you also need to feed your inner-self as well. Find time to read the Bible every day.  Find time to exercise. Find time to have a hobby. Find “real” time to spend with your family and loved ones. Feed your spirit.

The by-product of all of these “one-a-day” programs is that YOU will become a more interesting person. A more outgoing person. A person with a positive outlook and an uplifting spirit. Someone with positive thoughts, informed opinions and facts to share.

Today's short excerpt from the book 100 ways to Motivate Yourself by Steve Chandler reminds us all of the need to be in control of our own feeding program. Being in control requires effort on your part. Make it a part of your every day. I make it sound like simple stuff but, consider this: “Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.” — Charles Mingus

Steve’s book makes motivating oneself seem simple. Today I challenge you to look at how you personally feed yourself. How would you rate yourself against my one-a-day initiatives? Would you disagree with any of them? Time to get started then.

I hope you enjoy each shared chapter at the start of your day –

Matt

84. Go on a news fast

I first heard the term “news fast” from Dr. Andrew Weil, who writes about natural medicine and spontaneous healing. Weil recommends going on news fasts because he believes this has a healing effect on the human system. To him, it’s a genuine health issue.

My own recommendation for news fasts has to do with the psychology of self-motivation. If you go for periods of time without listening to or reading the news, you will notice an upswing in your optimism about life. You’ll feel a lift in energy. “But shouldn’t I stay informed?” people ask me. “Aren’t I being a bad citizen if I don’t keep up with what’s happening in my community? Shouldn’t I be watching the news?” In answering this question, I offer an observation that may startle you: The news is no longer the news.

It used to be that Walter Cronkite would end his program by saying, “And that’s the way it is.” And we trusted that he was right. But today, it’s much different. Shock value has the highest premium of all for a news story, and the lines are now blurred between the evening news and the grossest tabloids.

 Today, the goal of the person putting the evening news show together is to stimulate our emotions in as many ways as possible. Every night we will see human suffering. We will also see con artists, and even whole companies getting away with scams that victimize people cruelly. If there’s a report on politics, it features the most venomous attacks between two partisans. The goal of the news today is stimulation. It’s to take us on an emotional roller-coaster ride. It’s a “good” program if we have been enraged by one story, saddened by another, and amused by the third.

 Is it any wonder that by programming our minds with this gross and frightening information all day and into the night, we end up a little less motivated? Is it hard to understand a certain slippage in our optimism?

Going on a news fast is a refreshing cure for this problem. You can do it for one day a week, to begin with, and then get back into the tabloid shows the next day if you have to. Once you start fasting, you’ll find your entire mood picking up.

 “But what about staying informed?” you ask. There are many ways to stay fully informed. The Internet has wonderful, thoughtful sites. In fact, it is far better to be informed intel-lectually than to be informed emotionally. There are weekly and monthly magazines as well as e-zines that do a fine job of in-forming us and giving us a calm, thoughtful, overall perspective on the news. Don’t worry about missing out on important news. Really big news, such as a war, a natural disaster, or an assas-sination, will get to you just as quickly during a news fast as it would if you were watching the news.

Begin to experiment with news fasts today. Go on a short one at first, and then extend the period of time as your system allows. When you do return to the news, be totally conscious of just what the show is trying to do to you. Don’t passively take it in as if what you are seeing is really “the way it is.” It’s not. They’re not going to tell you how many thousands of planes landed safely today.