Fear Factor
How to short circuit scary messaging
Everywhere I turn these days, fear is being stoked. The messaging is often urgent and unsettling, altering perceptions and behaviors. This has worked on me, and I’m determined to stop it. I want a healthy life. I bet you do too.
An effective way to combat fear is to do a little research beyond social media reports and stories on the nightly news. Particularly when it comes to judging people or groups of people. TikTok videos don’t accurately report on what women or men have become or what they want. The loudest voice gets the views but maybe not the prize for truthfulness.
What can we do to short circuit fear?
1. Recognize what fear is doing to us
The most severe problem with fear isn’t that it is causing anxiety. It’s that it changes who we are and how we behave. We start to trust less and feel grievances more. For many of us, that leaves little energy to identify genuine problems, work to correct wrongs, and improve circumstances.
2. Listen to ourselves, ask questions
Ask, “How much of my fears are rational, and how much is earworm garbage I’ve stopped questioning?” How much of my anger and resentment is rooted in fear of the world?
Social media is often blamed for generating a lot of fear and skewed information. However, big media companies play a significant role in fear-mongering as well. These companies are in far fewer hands than ever. Three-quarters of the television stations reaching Americans are owned by only 6% of all media corporations.
“Public businesses, legally beholden to maximize profits, try to gain attention for their news and information outlets to increase readership and viewing figures. A common approach is to make risks sound as dramatic, threatening and urgent as possible.” (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1299209/
Then there are the people we live with. Their fears can be contagious.
3. Leave behind the damaging labels
Words like “Karens,” “woke,” “libtards,” and “rednecks” create a tribal atmosphere. When we align ourselves with tribes, we start fearing those in other tribes. We might tell ourselves that it is the healthy judgment of others and situations, but it is fear that: 1. We are sometimes be wrong. 2. We don’t want to lose any control, 3. We might have to stop blaming other people for our problems. It’s nothing more than schoolyard name-calling. We can live better.
4. Be an active, not passive participant in your life
Get off the 24/7 news cycle. Taking in more frightening information is addictive.
Here are just a couple of my fears. Or should I say old fears. After doing a little research, it didn’t take me long to discover how much of my thinking was faulty and built on poor information.
I became more fearful about visiting my hometown of NYC. From all press reports, the city was more dangerous than ever. But it simply isn’t. Incidents of violent crime in NYC in 2019 were about fifty percent lower than in each of the thirty years between 1970 and 2000. Why does it feel more dangerous? Because I am on the receiving end of negative news reports. And maybe I’ve also grown to feel entitled to a problem-free world. When was the last time I heard a positive news report comparing present-day crime levels to the 1970s, 1980s, or 1990s? I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a report. https://www.disastercenter.com/crime/nycrime.htm
I started to avoid flying primarily because I watched ABC News every night. Almost every night there is video of a tire falling off an airplane or a near collision (wing tap) on a runway. Accidents do happen and government agencies need to act to ensure optimum safety. But tragedies don’t occur on airplanes every day and we are all far more likely to get injured in a car accident. https://www.npr.org/2024/03/12/1237262132/why-flying-safe-united-airlines-boeing.
We are bombarded with too much information, much of it provided with the explicit intention of causing fear. But, we are not powerless to stop it. We can recognize what is happening, reflect on what we really think, and limit the amount of information we are willing to take in.
Ram Dass once said, “A guy who goes charging angrily down the street screaming for peace is sending out a set of vibrations that are, in effect, creating war.”
His words ring true for fear as well. If we are all running down the street convincing each other that the world is awful and dangerous, then we are creating, in effect, the very world we fear.
