Staging a Self-Intervention Using A Low Information Diet

An aquaintance on the bookface asked what she ought to do about the fact that she has experienced a panic attack each morning since the election. How do you redirect the fear into constructive action.

I gave this advice with the idea that the fear doesn't have to be accepted at face value. Reality is mostly constructed and we are using some pretty manipulative sources in recent years:

Honestly, I would stop getting your news from social media and cable.  Cable wants your eyes glued... so they scare the shit out of you if they can.  Social media wants to cut through the noise so they need outrage  and fear as an attention grabber.

I'd suggest a low information diet for 3 weeks starting today.  Announce  it to your friends and let them know that you will not be on social media as much and to please TEXT or CALL you if it is time to fight in the revolution.  

If you use a password manager, randomly generate new passwords for all of your social media sites.  Then turn off auto-login.  Then logout... everywhere.

No news for 3 weeks.  Then after that, international news sites only for a month.  International news sites will be dialed in to a different cultural demographic which is just a bit off to plug directly into your gut.  It will allow you that crucial extra little bit of mental wiggle room to not be manipulated by the outrage and fear peddling.

Finally, yes... there is real shit going on but no one is being loaded on trains and it's not time for open revolt yet.  You will know when your friends can no longer speak their minds without being arrested or detained or threatened with **physical** harm.  For now, I simply expect that the news vortex you have subjected yourself to has created your world of constant anxiety and panic.  

Time to intervene on your own behalf.

And if you want a great audiobook that will inspire some thought about how we can open up possibility with the stories we tell ourselves, consider this book: The Art of Possibility. The audiobook version was strongly recommended by Seth Godin and I rather agree it has a lot of good ideas on how to work with your mind to achieve open-ness and orientation to what is possible.

An Affiliate link for the same book on Amazon follows (you may have to disable adblock to see it):

Following the Sun: Week 1

I am waking up at 6am these days. 0600.

For a guy who has an average wake up time of about 0800, this is a big shift. I have worked west-coast hours my entire adult life. It is a coping mechanism for the oppressive traffic patterns that come with living in the DC Metro area. To my body, it first felt like waking up at 0300. Now it's the new normal.

Lights Out at Sunset

Starting last week, Liz and I are trying something new. We are shutting down all of the lights and screens in the house shortly after sunset. No artificial lights if we can help it.

This usually happens around 2045 or so. The house is pretty dark by then. We light a couple candles, sit and talk. And then we go and brush and floss by candlelight in the bathroom and then we lie down in bed and talk for a bit before we get tired.

It used to be that I would get tired and go brush and floss and get ready for bed. I would read for a good while before falling asleep.

Now, when the sun has set we turn the lights out as well. There is no reading myself to sleep. At first I missed it. But I find that I feel tired and fall asleep after lying there for a bit. And the book is always there waiting for me in the morning.

I have to plan to get my reading done during the daylight hours now. Often this is in the morning before work and just a bit after dinner before lights out. It's a bit of a guilty pleasure reading fiction early in the morning but it makes for an unrushed feeling about each day.

Mornings At Sunrise

Waking up early hasn't made me efficient. I imagine that I will be able to squeeze in all the things most mornings: Coffee and breakfast. Exercise. Reading. Writing. Music.

In practice, the exercise, writing, and music don't always happen on a daily basis. Some mornings I spend too much time reading the streams of the BookFace. I can pretty much tell you that I always have to drop one of my morning activities because I run out of time.

I used to work 1000 to 1900... but dinner is pretty close to lights out if I get home at 1930, so I intend to start and end work earlier. This will also cut into morning time somewhat. Maybe I will get more efficient over time.

Weekends are especially challenging. It's hard to tear away from the party... hard to get home early enough from evening visits with friends and family to do our shutdown right around sunset. So we pushed into the night a little bit. We will have to find a way to adapt. Maybe by flexing our own rules, maybe by being disciplined about leaving on time.

Changing The Flow

Overall, this has the feel of an experiment to play with the flow of life. In our culture we celebrate being busy and efficient as if it's a good thing without qualification. Sometimes it is good. For instance, if you are holding depression at bay. Slow meandering action is better than no action in this case.

I tend to struggle with something other than depression: the feeling that I don't have enough time for everything I want to learn. I struggle with wondering whether all of the busy I inflict upon myself will add up to contribution and achievement which matters to me in the longest of runs.

Now that the night enforces a routine of rest and quiet upon me, I feel like I have just a bit more mental space. Nothing to read. No devices. Just my own thoughts and talking with Liz while we snuggle.

Last night, we got to talking about work and Liz could tell it was a topic that was going to make it harder for me to sleep. We decided to drop the topic and she stroked my back gently to help settle my mind until she fell asleep. That was really, really nice.

I suspect this sort of practice would break just about any couple out of a rut of feeling like they don't talk to one another enough.

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Photo Credit: "Sunset" by Sunny_mjx from Flickr

On Hebdo Cowardice and Ditching the News

While I was sitting around this morning considering the things I have to be happy about, I came up with this: “I’m happy that we live in an age where we can just search for the ##CharlieHebdo cartoons ourselves using Google.”

This is, of course, in reference to stories that the mainstream media have avoided reprinting the Charlie Hebdo cartoons and covers in full. Some people take this as the latest piece of evidence of their cowardice and I have to say I find it hard to disagree. Devils advocate against my own position: from what I have read about the Hebdo publication a lot of it is in poor taste so one might have other grounds for not reprinting certain pieces.

At any rate, this is a good time to talk about the news I think. For the last year I have not listened to the news but rather I let things bubble up via Twitter and Facebook. There are lots of things that happen in the world that I am late to know about. But I also don’t hear a lot of irrelevant BS that has nothing to do with my life, most specifically my consciously chosen values, and is only designed to be sensationalist in order to sell advertising. (Never let a tragedy go to waste)

If you haven’t stopped listening to daily news, I urge you to try it for a period of a week, and if that works out, a month. I got this idea from Tim Ferris’s Four Hour Work Week. He has a strategy he calls the “Low Information Diet” and ditching news is a big part of it. I hypothesize that you will still find out about the important things but you will not experience the anxiety induced by the regular doses of tragedy porn and outrage porn, which is all the news seem to consist of these days.