Fear Less: How to Defeat
The
Terrorist In Your Home
Anxiety from
worsening economic news will be compounded this
week by reminders of terrorism as we observe the seventh
anniversary of 9/11. Gavin de Becker, adviser to such
clients as the CIA and the U.S. Supreme Court, helps
readers manage fear in this excerpt from his powerful
book Fear Less:
Anxiety kills
more Americans each year than all the foreign
viruses, electromagnetic fields, airplane crashes, and
blown-up buildings put together — through high blood
pressure, addiction, heart disease, hypertension,
depression, and all the other stress-related ailments.
Think of the times your mind just
wouldn’t stop chewing on something, just
couldn’t stop tossing and turning in its own bed of
nails, just couldn’t find peace. Recall your worst
times in the mind and understand that the TV news is that
exact same energy given a billion dollars in resources,
wired to propel itself far and near, inspired to dwell on
every fear, and nurtured as it spins around the world
until it reaches terminal velocity.
The news media is a giant mind, a giant
unquiet, overstimulated mind that won’t let itself
rest — and won’t let the rest of us rest.
It’s a vast game of telephone, an unleashed gossip
virus.
With all the risk and danger they bark
at us, the news should simply open each evening’s
show by saying, ‘Welcome to the Channel Two News;
we’re surprised you made it through another day.
Here’s what happened to those who
didn’t...’
The news business is a business. It
seeks to balance its stated mission of informing the
public against its sometimes more compelling mission of
competing with others in the same business. The rush to
be first appears to have eclipsed the rush to be
accurate. You can always speculate now and clean it up
later.
Languages, images, and graphics are
carefully chosen toward the goal of getting around our
natural editing by making each story seem urgent or
significant of new. One result is that many viewers are
left swimming in pictures of fear rather than with a
balanced perspective on the situation as it stands.
If you had a friend who treated you the way TV
news has treated you — calling every 20
minutes barking about a new emergency drama —
you’d change your number. But when a national news
anchor does it with weighty intonations, we actually
volunteer.
In millions of homes, the newscaster is
a guest who arrives in the afternoon full of frightening
tales and gory pictures. He stays through dinner,
enthusiastically adding grisly details that make the kids
wince, and he’s still around at bedtime to recite a
scary story or two.
While he’s showing slides of his
awful vacation, you slump to sleep, only to find in the
morning that he is still there, eager and fast-talking,
following you around in the kitchen, warning you about
the dangers of coffee. If it weren’t for the fact
that occasionally he says something that’s actually
important, you’d throw this guest out of your house.
Now, for a moment, imagine that, unlike
the unquiet mind, this nightmare could be easily switched
off. That peaceful thought brings me to five guidelines
for a happier and safer life in the age of terrorism.
1. Turn off the sensational, uninspirational,
uneducational, privacy-meddling, death-peddling,
celebrity-snooping, helicopter-swooping, flesh-eating,
rumor-repeating, minicam-toting, fear-promoting TV news.
If we turn it off, then we can face the
important question, which is not how we might die, but
rather, How shall we live? And that is up to us.
2. Keep the TV news off at least long enough to
see — as you will — that you’re not
missing anything, and that you are feeling happier, more
courageous, more connected to the people you’ve
chosen to have in your life, and, perhaps surprisingly,
better informed.
3. Get your information in print. Read.
Stay informed by reading. Read Time magazine or U.S. News
& World Report or Newsweek or the newspaper. If you
feel there’s an emergency (and you make that
decision yourself as opposed to being told by some
newsreader) put on TV news for one telling of the story.
You won’t miss a thing — unless you miss
feeling anxious.
Why is reading so much healthier than
watching the news? When you read something, you decide
how scary or alarming or calming it will be. You get the
information, but you decide what it will look like to
your soul. Your intuition can consider it without the
distraction of an elevated heart rate.
When you read what someone has written,
you get the benefit of that person’s having had a
second to take a breath, a moment to think. You
don’t have to see the thoughts they thought better
of and rejected. You don’t have to absorb what will
be outdated just a minute from now. TV news personalities
are chattering all the time. They have to keep talking.
4. Get information — don’t let
information get you. If you’re interested
in something, do research. Check the Internet, read about
it, go to a library, look at a Web site, ask a smart
friend — but don’t let some TV news reader tell
you what’s important. Be willing to miss the gossip
of “developing stories” and wait for the
perspective and caution of the newsmagazines.
5. Talk to people in your life about
world and local events. TV news imitates human
interaction, right down to the chummy banter, when in
fact it is preventing human interaction. Television
connects you to nothing except the illusion that you are
connected to something. By contrast, you can be connected
to your friends, family, neighbors, co-workers; talk with
them about events, and thus get your emotions out, get
your feelings felt, get clarity and perspective; in
short, bring real life into your life, as opposed to
being a cog in a for-profit business that nurtures and
feeds upon your anxiety.
Gavin de Becker's books Fear
Less and The Gift of Fear are available at
bookstores, at amazon.com, and at his website
www.gavindebcker.com.
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