How to Deal with Media Related Stress

Our capacity to continue to breath and go about our daily life is astonishing, given the excess of disempowering, frightening images and events that surround us each day.

From the moment we turn on the outside world via the radio alarm clock by the bed, the TV near the kitchen, the radio in the car - the hypnosis has begun - a gentle but persistent seeping into the subconscious the several hundred "negative" affirmations we receive on any given day.

What a way to start the day!

The Buddhists believe that one should experience "each moment afresh". Easy to say, challenging to achieve, given the relentless media focus on publicising everything that isn't working in the world, rather than what is.

But, as media have a choice, so do we. As we can powerfully express our opinions by choosing to turn off the news, notice the good in our kids instead of what they are not, change our homepage to positive.press.com, for example - so we have a choice in how we choose to perceive the planet.

The conscious mind is like the control room or the bridge of an aircraft carrier. The sub-conscious is the rest of the ship. The bridge tells the rest of the ship what to do based on what it thinks best and the ship carries out those orders.

This can work very well sometimes. Often it doesn't - as the bridge can make a decision based solely on its experience up to that particular moment. Think back to who you were ten years ago and now see where you are now on your path of life. Notice whether you might have made wiser choices now, compared to then.

The ship can also alter the orders given, based on the personal experiences of all those people who work on the vessel. The ship may know something, based on all that hard work and training, that the bridge may not know.

The third possibility is that the information is relayed from the bridge to the ship inaccurately. Miscommunication is a common everyday problem for all of us and our most empowering lesson could be to learn how to communicate clearly and effectively. For many people, miscommunication becomes the chosen first language, so if the bridge is suffering from this condition, the entire ship malfunctions.

Hypnosis, in a nutshell then, is a way of communicating with the ship to see if it has the right information and if not, correcting the information.

So, imagine the bridge is the newsreader. What kind of messages about your new day are you receiving - that life is frightening, unsafe, unpredictable and violent, and there's no good news to balance it out, save for a puppy dog story at the end of the bulletin.

Imagine yourself as the bridge with the rest of the ship your family, loved ones, friends and work colleagues. What kind of messages are you sending and are they accurate?

Choice is a word we may need to use more. We can choose to create a new day based on positive expectations, rather than what someone outside of ourselves is telling us about. Sure, there are - and will always be - tragedies, elections and hurricanes that will threaten to knock us off our perches of confident expectation.

What if you choose to believe that there is plenty of good news happening that isn't getting reported, that there are many more loving people that there are harmful, and that, actually, when you look back on your life, even the harshest of lessons have made you wiser and stronger. It's said that it's almost irrelevant what happens to us, it's about what we decide about ourselves and life.

What we focus on, grows.

What thoughts would you like to grow this week?

Choose carefully.