Balance: Rewiring the News Brain
Last week we began talking about strategies for using Mindfulness to engage with news. The aim is to stay informed in a way that meets our needs and doesn’t deplete us. Our first strategy in the A, B, C’s of Staying Informed is to understand and be aware of our agency: the choices we get to make around staying informed.
The next strategy involves balance. Mindfulness can help us see the filter through which we see the world. An oft-used expression about mindfulness is that it helps us see the filter itself, rather than seeing through the filter.
When we look at the news that is presented to us, we notice that it actually presents a very small picture of what there is to know about the world. We might notice the repetition across stories and news outlets of a few themes rehashed in many different ways. If we rely on that filter to present the world, we’ll have a very narrow, incomplete and inaccurate view of what is actually going on.
We also know that stress hormones - released when we feel fear or perceive threat - take a toll on the body and even further limit our ability to perceive opportunity. They narrow the information we take in. Conversely, dopamine and serotonin - which are released when we’re feeling happy, resourced and connected - support our well-being and also help us to be more creative.
With a little intentionality in our news-seeking, we can curate a more balanced view of the world, one that doesn’t block out reality, but lets more reality into our field of perception. One quick tool for doing this is to make sure that we read news that lies “below the fold” in a newspaper, or those stories that require scrolling down the page when we're online, looking for stories that capture the goodness and the wonder that exists every day around the world. We can go directly to the Science section and find a story that captures our imagination and feeds a sense of wonder: cocoons made of fluorescent silk, spotted skunks that do handstands, the community behavior of trees….. The Arts section also offers opportunities for hope and inspiration: the intricate beauty of an Indian miniature painting, public art lifting the spirits of passersby…. Stories of good Samaritans, and community are tucked into corners of our news sources, there for the finding and every bit as real and informative as tales of woe.
When we encounter a piece of news that lifts our heart, we can pause, letting ourselves rest in the sense of connection, wonder, joy, or relief that we’re feeling in the moment, knowing that this is as real any anything else happening in the world.
Every time we find ways to nurture this joy and connection, to foster a sense of our needs being met, we are rewiring our brain toward a more sustained state of happiness. It’s also fun to think that by clicking on the news stories that share the good in the world we may also be rewiring the “news brain” that determines which stories make it into the front page. The more clicks the happy stories get, the more likely they are to run “above the fold.” Wouldn’t it be great if stories of joy got equal air time!?!
Hoping that you will join us this week in person, by conference call or by Zoom, or virtually via the many recorded meditations on the website. Click here to see our full schedule.
May all beings feel the joy from all the goodness that exists in the world,
Your CMP family
