How to Calm Your Mind by Chris Bailey

Author:Chris Bailey [Bailey, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2022-12-27T00:00:00+00:00

Reconnecting

My first dopamine fast occurred later on in my journey to calm, and as chance would have it, the fast ended mid-March of 2020—the start of the historic COVID-19 pandemic. This obviously made reconnecting to my sources of distraction after the experiment all the more distracting and anxiety inducing. While I kept on top of what was happening through the daily newspaper, reading updates online felt . . . different. It was the same news, only presented in a more extreme and concerning way. With a daily newspaper, I was able to find perspective. Online, I found only panic.

The loudest voices broke through to the top of my feeds, and I almost instantly felt like I had more to worry about—often while nothing materially changed in my life or in the lives of my loved ones following our first lockdown. The worries and concerns of everyone I encountered online became my own worries and concerns. Instead of only reading news updates from the calm, analytical perspective of a daily newspaper once a day, I read about the virus, stock market shocks, and political unrest from websites and feeds that refreshed every few minutes. I got caught up in the cyclone, the fray of worry, anxiety, and distraction that characterizes online social news activity.

At this point, I had an impulse that I had never had before: to step back. To disconnect. To no longer put my mind and heart in the hands of social networks to manipulate, distract, and take advantage of me for monetization purposes. Reflexively, on this particular day, I wrote a few fragmented words in the notepad on my desk that I use throughout the day:

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