Just before Christmas, I think I was starting to send MOTH slowly insane with terrible jazz in the morning. This wasn’t in any way a purposeful thing, there was no dark plot to unsettle his mind and to be honest, my own sanity was beginning to become a little twitchy-eyed.
The reason for this be-bop ambush was because I had decided that I could no longer take the onslaught of utterly depressing news that seems to dominate radio, television and social media.
I find there is a very thin line between being aware and knowledgeable about what is happening around the world (which I do believe is important) and being so overwhelmed with it, that it has a negative impact on your mental, and then following that, your physical health.
It’s been a while now since I realised I could no longer stand PMQ’s, Newsnight or Question Time, What should be an opportunity to gain insight into what the people heading up our country really think, is never anything more than a verbal bar brawl. It seems that no-one ‘in charge’ is working together, it’s all finger-pointing, blaming, shouting and lies. These programmes leave me tense, sad and angry and this is not a good way to then toddle off to bed and try and get some good sleep.
I am not a fan of ‘gritty’ TV either. Why on earth would you want to put into your life some of the most horrible things you could imagine, if you don’t need to? There’s enough real and bad stuff out there, I see no need to actively choose to invite more in. Even the blinking Archers (not that I really ever listened, honestly) went all gritty and led me to switch off: I don’t need that aggro whilst cooking tea – seriously, what was wrong with the biggest worry being the sheep getting wet in an unusual amount of rain?
When I was going through cancer treatment last year, there were days I couldn’t do a lot and this left far too much time for the mind to start churning. I decided that I needed to only give attention to positive things. For my physical, emotional and mental health, I made it my job to focus only on thoughts and feelings that would be beneficial to me. Some days, this was such hard work, it was honestly all I was capable of doing. One thing I did though, was to make a list of all the positive words I could think of. I looked on-line, in thesauruses (thesauri? thesauree?), I looked at synonyms and positive phrases and picked out everything that was good. On the bad days, I would read this list over and over, which may sound a little bonkers – but it worked.
And here’s the thing, it would seem I am not alone.
MOTH and I have wonderful evenings with a pair of good friends: there is much food, much talk, much laughter and yes, often, much booze. Two of us (some glasses of wine in, perhaps), quite regularly come back to the idea that we need a Nicer News station, feed or platform of some kind. Somewhere where you get to hear of good things that people do, where encouragement is rife (without ulterior motive) and happy thoughts are shared without the cynicism that so often follows in multi-user spaces.
The more I talk about this, the more people I find that are doing and feeling the same. Only yesterday, the lady on the checkout at our supermarket said that she no longer listens to the news in the morning as it is too depressing. I know many others who have stopped reading newspapers or putting the news on for the same reasons and as far as social media often is concerned – perhaps the less said…
It is a strange thing that us humans are very good at allowing negativity to become the norm and are terrible at making positivity our default. It takes work, I don’t know why, but it does. The way we think very much affects our health in all aspects. So, this is why I have stopped listening to the radio in the morning and started putting on music. I like jazz (I know many don’t) but I didn’t own much and so I was working my way through terrible selections that were available on-line. Perhaps it was the cheesy Christmas jazz compilations that were the final straw, but for Christmas, MOTH gave me some very good jazz CD’s.
Now, each morning after my shower and whilst getting dressed, I will bop around to an upbeat tempo (quite possibly looking completely insane) but you know what, my days are much better for starting with a smile, not a sigh, and I very much recommend this to all.
Focus on the positive…
