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from the would-you-like-to-talk-about-it? dept.
How to keep your sanity when you feel like the world is going crazy:
Hi there. How are you feeling today?
It's a loaded question right now. Many of us are having extraordinary feelings in response to extraordinary times. Hundreds of millions of people here in the United States and around the world are doing their best to help contain the spread of novel coronavirus disease COVID-19 by following World Health Organization and Centers for Disease Control guidelines and, bluntly, staying the heck away from other people.
Even for a born introvert like yours truly, the era of prolonged, enforced social distancing is hard. Folks are either stuck at home alone, stuck at home with their families, or still having to go out into the world every day to work—either because their work is vital or their employers are being stubborn—and all the while, we're being buffeted by government warnings and endless waves of frightening news.
In short: right now, we're all exchanging some measure of our mental health in order to preserve our own and others' physical health, and that has limits. We're all in this together, for several weeks and months, if not longer, and basically, we need to avoid driving ourselves and each other crazy if we're going to get through it.
That, of course, is easier said than done. To that end, we called up mental health experts to ask what, realistically, we should all be doing to help ourselves and others.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Monday March 23 2020, @11:57AM (1 child)
I stopped reading the news years ago. My faith was broken when the New York Times through Judith Miller lied to sell the Iraq War; that, in turn, led me to immediately disbelieve the Russian Hoax and every other hit story and hoax about Trump. My suspicion was also heavily augmented by time at the Clinton Foundation, watching how incestuous they all were, how corrupted and biased they all were.
I did two things instead to compensate. Generally I use online commentators for headlines; they traffic in fear/rage porn also, but as they've already masticated and processed the media sources to some extent it's less toxic and noteworthy patterns can still form around issues that merit further investigation. For example, the Wuhan coronavirus began circulating there a couple weeks after it began, and as the numbers grew a couple weeks after that I stocked up and avoided all the panic buying.
The second thing I did to compensate was to read the abstracts of primary sources. Government reports, industry association prospectuses, and that sort of thing. For example, I've been reading the Congressional white papers on China for 20 years, which is why I have been sounding the alarm bells about them for 20 years. Nobody can read all of those sources, but it's not too hard to track a handful of topics or areas of interest. Even source documents are not 100% free of bias because no human-authored document can be, but at least the galling sensationalism is absent.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Beryllium Sphere (r) on Monday March 23 2020, @04:54PM
Digging to primary sources is the other thing I do. Much recommended.