Consuming News Creates an Emotional Feedback Loop
A minimal and very conscious approach to news consumption has a profound effect on changing the collective consciousness
After ten days of a thirty-day news fast it has occurred to me that consuming more than a small amount of news on a daily basis creates an emotional feedback loop that perpetuates the current state of human consciousness.
This has been profound for me, and I couldn’t have perceived this awareness while consuming news on a daily basis. I had to step away and disengage in order to notice how different I feel without the presence of news.
If I'm consuming news that is filled with things that bring up emotions of fear, worry, lack, and drama, then I'm feeding that emotional frequency back into the field of human consciousness, thus perpetuating the current state of fear, worry, lack, and drama.
It becomes self-fulfilling because what we think we manifest. This is happening on a mass scale through mainstream media each and every day.
Therefore, I'm beginning to think that when I've completed this thirty-day news fast, rather than returning to my prior level of consumption I’ll scale it way back. And I’ll endeavor to be more conscious of what emotions are welling within me when I'm consuming news. If it's fear, worry, lack, and drama then I'm either consuming too much news or I'm consuming the wrong sources.
Many things are addictive, not just substances. Emotions are addictive. Behaviors are addictive. And for many, the emotions delivered to us every day through various news outlets are addictive. It’s not the news itself that’s addicting, but the emotions that well up within us. It reinforces a frequency of emotion that we’ve become accustomed to. And if we don’t receive our daily fix of those emotions, then we seek them through outside sources such as mainstream news.
This is so ironic for me as I spent many years working in media and developed a deep love and respect for quality journalism. This news-fast has not caused me to lose one iota of that love and respect for the type of journalism that digs deep and presents the facts in a way that makes us think. But so much of news does not dig very deep and is designed first and foremost to attract and retain an audience of viewers and readers for the very specific purpose of being able to consistently sell advertising space. We, as the consumers of news are the product — the advertisers are the customers. Meaning that media companies work for advertisers, not readers and viewers. It’s important to remember that.
Even in the blogging world, which I love and am (of course) a blogger myself, there is and has been a well-known approach to writing which is called “listicles,” which are articles that present things as lists: 3 Reasons to Eat More (fill in the blank), 7 Tips to Better Health, 4 Little Known Secrets to Success, and on and on. Despite their boring redundancy writers keep writing listicles ad infinitum, because study after study shows that articles with these titles captures attention. I’ve even written a few myself.
What listicles do is present advice in a context that everything can be known or accomplished through a linear approach — that every complex problem can be boiled down to simple steps — which I find over-simplistic. Life is more like a box of chocolates. Did I just write that? No seriously, life is full of nuance and subtly and complexity and interdependence. Life is deep and rich. Listicles paint our beautiful gift of life as a superficial journey of point A to point B. It’s much more than that.
News can be deep. Stories can be presented in a context of deeper meanings and implications. One writer I can’t say enough good about is Heather Cox Richardson. She’s a historian who writes about politics in a historical context. I don’t feel fear, worry, lack, or drama reading her daily emails, but rather some measure of comfort, even when she’s tackling topics with potentially disturbing ramifications.
There are others like Heather Cox Richardson. They are there if we practice feeling into the energy of the news and bloggers we follow and gravitate toward those sources that bring more depth and feelings of comfort. The age-old saying, “if it bleeds it reads” is still true in many respects. But we can change that reality by being more conscious of our news consumption and more willing to let go of those sources (that may even be substantive) that play on our base emotions for attention.
Meditation has been the key for me. Years of daily meditation changes us in subtle and profound ways. I believe daily prayer works in a similar way. In fact, I often blend the two. It brings us into a higher state of conscious awareness where we begin to think and feel differently. It dislodges calcified emotions and long-held beliefs that no longer serve us.
We know that merely telling a fanatic, a cultist, a racist the facts about their beliefs has zero affect. Change is an inside job. We can’t change them, we can only change ourselves. But the way for us to truly affect human consciousness is to become increasingly more conscious of our daily emotional state, because it is our daily emotional state that we are feeding back into the field of human consciousness.
So . . . what emotion do we wish to feed back into the field? What emotional state do we wish to exist in? What do we wish to project to those around us?
Meditation, yes. Prayer, yes. And a minimal and very conscious approach to news consumption (I have found) has a profound effect on changing the collective consciousness.
Try fasting from news, if even for a few days, and see how you feel.
HI Glenn,
Thank you for this. I also really, really appreciate Heather Cox Richardson.
One other thing that has helped me is receiving my "news" in a matter-of-fact, non-biased way. I sue the 1440 daily e-mail that take news from a straight-forward AP source (without extra drama, or clickbait shenanigans). It is just "the facts" of the daily top news, summarized without bias. I can choice to read deeper, and wider (whatever sources I want), or not. I can know what's basically happening, but not be triggered by how so many modern "(cable-esgue) news" agencies (from different directions of bias/opinion) will "bait" me into an emotional "response."
I also totally avoid getting any "alerts" of news on my phone, and avoid Apple News and the like. 1440 allows me to take news at my pace, or not at all. (I find the only links I dig really further with these days are really important issues where I can help or make a little difference, maybe, by being informed), or stories that mostly have to do with a cool discovery in science or space, or art, or an amazing human interest thing at the very end of what they call the "clickbait" link section...
In all, it has the FB/Twitter drama removed. My heart rate stays lower. And, if I want something deeper on big issues I look up Heather's daily recap. later in the day).
Thanks again for this very thoughtful, well-written post. All my best to you and Maria,
Jeff