We know the dangers of alcohol, cigarettes, and drugs, but we are just beginning to learn how toxic media consumption can be to our mental health.

If you ever feel like you are being eaten alive by the world around it, it’s likely because the media becomes consuming. We’ve learned how to be worried, not just about our problems that we can’t change, but every problem in the world the media targets.

There is value in being informed, but there’s also value in not overloading your system with things you can’t change.

This isn’t a new problem. Since the world has become global and information widespread, it’s hard to maintain perspective. But now we are inundated with information in our pockets.

The media loves the negative

One of the survival tools we’ve been gifted is the innate ability to look for and be aware of danger. We’re no longer looking for the predator stalking us in the wilderness. Instead, we’ve become hyper-focus on what we hear and see on the news and on social media. As a result, the world feels like a pretty scary place. It’d be like taking an ariel view for our ancestors and showing them all the beasts lurking close by.

It doesn’t leave you feeling good. When we aren’t careful, this strategy meant to protect us can lead to our demise. Seriously, the stress levels today are out of control!

We could be constantly reading feel-good, save the world, what a beautiful place this is, articles. No way! Bad news sells. It’s where the money is.

There’s no innate instinct to focus on the waterfalls in the world. We need to know where the danger is and we pay for that knowledge with our time and money. Media outlets are only too happy to comply.

Needing to know about danger is the very reason bad news overload hurts our mental health.

Humans have selective attention. We can’t pay attention to everything all at once.

Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons put this to the test in an experiment that which participants were asked to count the number of times a basketball was passed among individuals in a video they were watching. At the conclusion of the video, participants were asked if they noticed anything unusual.

Fifty percent of participants failed to see a person in a gorilla suit move across the screen. Their focus was elsewhere. The abnormality didn’t even register.

We pay attention to the things on our minds. Do you have a new vehicle in mind for your next purchase? You’ll begin seeing them everywhere.

Selective attention is functional, to keep some space open in our mind, and it’s essential for survival. It allows us to screen out all the meaningless information. What information is more important than that which could ultimately lead to our demise. Well, not much. So we get this intense focus on threats to our life and we are living in a state of terror as a result.

This intense focus on danger means our neurological responses are constantly on high alert.

All this information we are zoned into is telling our bodies, you better worry. This is bad! And our bodies are obedient little servants. They respond like the dedicated soldiers they are, filled with anxiety and stress. So, we can survive, but we are having a hard time living because the responses for healthy peaceful living are running away to hide.

It doesn’t matter how close, how realistic or unrealistic the threat is, we internalize it and our nervous system responds.

You’ll likely recognize some of our body’s fantastic responses to danger:

• Anxiety–fear for your well-being
• Depression–a state of hopelessness over the inevitability of bad, terrible, horrible no-good things happening
• Insomnia–an inability to sleep as a result of an over-active mind you can’t quiet, stealing away your restorative rest.
• Stress–an elevated sympathetic nervous system response, elevating your heartbeat and blood pressure (that’s not good over the long-term)
• Anger–a defense mechanism protecting yourself from danger and heightening your responses

BUT! Focusing on positive aspects of life can change your thinking patterns and responses to your environment.

It’s up for debate if the media uses our innate reactions for profit and gain. They probably do, but still, we’ll say it’s up to debate. It doesn’t matter though because it’s your responsibility, not the front-line reporter working for his next paycheck, to protect your mental state. Your brain does a good bit for you, so you really should protect it.

There’s this awesome superpower humans have. It’s called personal control. And we live in such a free day and age that we get a lot of control over what we do, say and maybe most important, see.

So instead of sitting in a virtual hornet’s nest, waiting for the painful stings to come, get out of there!

Go sit by a waterfall and enjoy the actual peace and calm your life currently consists of, instead of running from a pretend tiger, or the lion chasing someone an ocean away.

You respond to what you see and you if create a more peaceful world to live in, you will feel, this is pretty amazing, more at peace.

We can’t change much of what the media is showing us.

Researchers Martin Seligman and Steven Maier learned just how damaging the inability to change things is and coined the term learned helplessness. When dogs were exposed to an unpleasant situation they couldn’t escape from, they stopped trying. We also know this as depression.

Later on, they were given the chance to escape, but they wouldn’t even try anymore. They had become hopeless.

You aren’t hopeless, take the escape!

We see these situations around us and it feels impossible. We become a victim of circumstances, or in this case information, and come to believe we are powerless.

But this simply isn’t true! You have incredible power in your life and an endless ability to create change, but you have to put that focus on the things you can control.

You Got this!

First step: change the information that is being input into your mind. Guess how well a computer functions, if you only feed it viruses. Well, I’ve never done it, but I bet it’s not good.

Get rid of the things you can’t change and focus on where you have power. Find that place and take action. Cool thing, not only will you feel better, but the world will be better.

The media has no place in the present moment.

Present moment thinking is a mental health elixir. The past and future–they aren’t there! They are a virtual reality in our mind, but they are not actually in our reality.

The media focuses on the bad things of the past and fears for the future–but those aren’t things we can change right now. We can never change them. They will always be at a different moment in time.

Yes, you need to learn from them, but the focus we place on past difficulties and future concerns kills the present moment. We can become hyper-focused on something that is done and over with, or has not yet and may never occur and completely derail the present moment of our life.

The media projects the future, but they aren’t some all-knowing god. They are just a bunch of guys behind a desk making guesses. Scarily enough, or awesome enough, sometimes when we believe we know the future we create a self-fulfilling prophecy. Awesome if we see good things in the future, but do we want to create the future world we are fearing?

We’re not really choosing our future though, we are creating it by our thoughts and the actions that follow.

The media has a powerful platform. The message one journalist shares can become the world’s reality. We can conjure up the projected reality as we selectively focus on the five Audis on the highway, ignoring the thousands of other cars. That doesn’t mean the world is full of Audis, it’s just all we can focus on so it feels that way.

Don’t put your reality in someone else’s hands.

Here’s what you need to do.

Be aware of the past and the future, but focus on the present. Seriously. Do it. Right now. Where are you? What are you surrounded by? Where is your focus? Look and appreciate what you have right in front of you at this very moment. Turn the news off, look up from your phone, television, and computer screen.

Be present where you are right now. Focus on feelings and sensations of the very moment you are in.

Bad news is addictive

It feeds our dopamine response and we can tune into the news and media anytime, anywhere. Pick up your phone, type in the website, turn on the television, click the link and you will have a constant and unending uproar about the negative state of the world. It’s hard to go a moment not checking to see if the world is ending. We think we need to know what happened, we have to hear what is being said.

We are losing patients, we don’t even need to analyze information because computer screens, reporters, and big money companies are doing it for us. Our internal processing atrophies, becoming old and scared. We are not robots, fed information and then told how to behave, but sometimes we begin to act like one.

Ironically, our mental processing gets an upgrade in the quiet mind, not with incessant information pouring in.

Just be quiet.

Find quiet. Use your internal sense of danger and safety, you have some pretty good built-in detectors.

Practice moving away from the incessant presence of the media until it becomes a habit.

Set time limits. Limits are good. A nice big fence will help the media be a good neighbor. Put up some barriers of access so it’s not always creeping into your house and sitting on your couch with you.

Fifteen minutes on a news site is enough time to read any news you might need to know, why would you spend more time there overloading your senses and spiraling into a state of obsessiveness and worry.

Our brains might have atrophied a bit, but they are still incredibly capable. Use them instead of letting the media use them to stay present, create quiet and put up those walls. Yeah, walls might be more appropriate than fences.