Nearly every morning, before I get too busy, my habit is to scan the headlines of various news sources to get a feel for what’s happening in the world. I trace this urge back to around 8:30 am Monday morning, September 11, 2001, when a phone call from a colleague told me to go look at the TV, and my impression of our world made a dramatic distressing shift.
My brain – like yours – wants to know if we’re going to be OK today. Introductory psychology courses include a description of the way our attention is strongly attracted to news of novel things, especially with frightening or angering content, because we are biologically-wired to be concerned with safety before happiness. After all, as the story goes, we are the descendants of the pessimists who assumed there were lions behind the shaking bushes instead of something benign, and responded accordingly.
The first part of having an NVC-guided consciousness is being aware of how the world is affecting us through our feelings and needs. The second part is then considering what we can do to better meet our needs in this world. Making a request of myself to change a behavior is one of those options.
While I am not ready to sacrifice a daily peek at the news, I have considered the nature of the media in light of psychology, as well as the statistically-grounded arguments of rational optimism, and realized that we have to put out effort to rise above our biological tendencies for noticing only bad news in order to acquire a more representative picture of the world we live in. This means I have to go looking for those professionals are making it their job to find the vastly underrepresented positive news all around us that can help improve the accuracy of these impressions.
The request I make of myself is to find and add to my habit a real and objective sources of positive news.
And, I found one! One of the many long-format interview podcasts I track had an interview with Stephen Pinker (who makes strong arguments for rational optimism) and at the end he recommended a news site called HumanProgress.org. I invite you to check out what they say about themselves.
To be honest, as I’ve started to follow through with this request, I experience it a little bit like swallowing cough medicine. I may not be immediately excited about the subject of a particular article, but I pick a couple and trust that it will be interesting and useful to know what it has to say and be good for my health. Sure enough, while reading some of these articles from the weekly HumanProgress.org newsletter, I am pleasantly surprised and notice feelings in my body and thoughts in my mind shift to a more moderated state where there is a stronger sense of hope and empowerment. I can still feel concerned or even distressed over some negative situation elsewhere in the news, but now those unpleasant feelings are specific to that situation and, in a zoomed out picture of the world, sit along side the awareness of other specific situations in the world where things are going well, which trigger tranquil and optimistic feelings.
While I haven’t chosen to stop the behavior that leads to some of the existential stress I feel, I am taking my self-prescribed medicine to make it more tolerable to handle. An intentional dose of positive news helps balance out my impressions of this world and their effect on my body.
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