Breaking News

              Are you addicted to watching or listening to the news? Do you watch it several times a day, morning, noon, and night. Local, national, and world? On your phone, social media, or computer? Do your conversations often turn towards national and world politics? If you answered yes to these questions, then you're probably addicted to the news. Welcome to the club!

               In my mid-twenties, I was someone who would watch the news in the early morning while getting dressed for work, watch it throughout the day on my off days, and more still in the evenings. Then, I took a break from watching it so much, because I began to see the addiction in myself. Mind you, this was around the time of the first campaigning cycle and election of President Barack Obama.

              Now, here we are in this new cycle of campaigning and election of President Trump. All the campaigning, emails, tweets, and "breaking news" banners flashing across my phone and crawling across the bottom of the television screen sucked me right back into the "24/7 news cycle addiction" AGAIN. I have often been late to work because I do my makeup and hair while watching CBS Morning News (very addicting). When I say, I was addicted to the news I am serious. I watched the local and national news in the morning before work and would come home and watch more local and national news. This does not include the constant barrage of “Breaking News” updates coming to my phone from both the pre-installed app as well the CBS News app that I willingly installed.

  I began to feel weird the past two or three weeks. You know how sometimes you have this weird feeling or emotions rolling around inside of you but you don’t know what it is? Well, this was not one of those times for me. I knew exactly what it was.

Self: “You are overwhelmed, fearful, anxious, panicked, and it’s slowly turning into depression”.

I was starting to feel magenta. Magenta? Yes, magenta. According to Blanche on Golden Girls, magenta is basically when you're feeling a jumble of emotions but can't pinpoint the feeling exactly. For example, when you're feeling sad people say you're feeling blue. When you are scared, you are feeling yellow and so on. Now that I knew what the source of my problem was I could now begin to work on it.

 The first step to my "news boycott" was deleting the CBS News app. I have nothing against CBS NEWS, it just happens to be the only national news station I listen to and watch along with CBS Evening News. It was extremely important for this step to be first as it is the format of news that literally follows me throughout the day on my phone. Secondly, I had to stop myself from waking up and immediately turning to the local news at 5 am during the week. Honestly, I am still struggling with this one a bit, but I do turn the station to something else more uplifting after about 30 minutes of local news. Third is in progress. I have to now strike a balance. Too much news is too much news. I am currently working on taking in just enough of the local, national, and world news as to not to be uninformed or out-of-the-loop, but not so much that I begin to feel magenta again. How do you find balance?

Stay tuned, for part two!

Ttyl,

J