| 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.
|
