When News Stresses You
You believe you can’t make through the day without knowing the latest things. You feel a missing link if you can’t connect to any newest event. You even know the headlines like the back of your hand. The broadcasters are as familiar as your family. Despite all this you may feel overwhelmed by all the facts and information you have.
The desire to be informed is certainly an attribute. In a democracy, we want citizens who are knowledgeable about major issues. Knowing about current events can help you to protect your property, to improve your health, even to protect the lives of yourself and your family. People who ignore current events altogether do so at their peril.
Obsession with the current news can cause a whole lot of pressure to oneself. Already burdened by one’s own problem, major world issues could add more to one’s anxiety’s factor. Many a time one can feel weak at the knees when faced by grave world situation where one can only observed and yet do nothing. What a heartache this may cause!
Take a quiz to see if you fit the into the news junkie category. Let’s see if you have gone beyond the limit in your quest for the latest news. Are you watching more of two hours worth of news on your TV sets? Are your reading more than two major papers in your city? Are you picking the news over music every time you switched on the radio? Are you surfing for news more than an hour a day?
If you answered “yes” to the preceding questions, you are in serious jeopardy of threatening your emotional and physical health through excessive stress. While watching television or listening to talk radio is a passive experience, it can nonetheless take a toll on our nerves. We might become edgy and feel high-strung. We might find it increasingly difficult to concentrate because we are distracted by the news stories we see and hear about. Our stress might even manifest itself in terms of increasing irritability.
Being over informed is bad to your stress system. If you have gone off the limits in gathering news consider yourself a news junkie. You need to learn ways to work this out of your system as it can be deteriorating towards your well being. There is a time when knowing too much can hurt. It is advised to work ways that may counteract this extra stress.
To begin with, try to limit the amount of time you spend viewing cable news. You might have noticed that the news is updated every half-hour. Therefore, you can just watch the headlines at the top or bottom of the hour and get all the information you need about the top news stories of the day. On occasion, you might want to tune in longer in order to hear in-depth reporting of a particular issue. But try to limit your viewing time to an hour at the most.
Other then that you should try to reduce the amount you spending surfing for news online. Knowing just the headlines and a few sentences after that is good enough. You don’t have to know every gory detail that the reporter has to put forward to judge if your neighborhood crime buster works. By reading just a few major papers should be enough to give you a concrete knowledge of major news surrounding you.
There is nothing wrong with wanting to be informed. But taking it to the extreme can cause you unnecessary stress. So, if the news becomes overwhelming, turn off the TV, disconnect the Internet, sit back and relax. You can learn to be a reasonable news consumer without becoming over-anxious. It may take some time at first to adjust to your new viewing schedule. But once you become used to it, you may be amazed at how relaxed you feel.
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