Wellbeing and Wellness are never more important to all of us these days. We make ourselves aware of the toxic dangers that lurk in obvious places, like lead in paint or asbestos in cladding or the quality of the air or the water. But a recent experiment we have conducted with our circle has revealed that we are all being exposed to daily doses of toxicity from hidden sources, that are affecting our moods, our ability to cope and even our immune system.
But don’t take it from me. The best way to discover this is to take a controlled experiment to see whether our hypothesis stands up to the test. Take this short exercise and let me know what you find.
____________________________________________________________________________
EXPERIMENT ONE
I want you to sit in a quiet place where you can hear yourself breathing.
Take a deep breath in….and a deep breath out.
Repeat this for a minute or so to slow down and then check in with your core.
On a scale of 1-10, rank yourself as to how you feel in your overall well-being right now.
Note that number so we can revisit it during this exercise.
Now I am going to get you to read out a series of random words,
out loud or quietly if that is easier. Perhaps if you have someone nearby who can read them out loud to you, that would be ideal. They have no order and pace can be brisk.
Are you ready? Here we go.
Barrage
Nightmarish
Fades
Crisis
Hammers
Rioters
Soak
Flee
Missile
Starved to Death
Few have been paid
Constitutional Crises
Attack
Reparations
short-lived
refuge
Panic Buttons
Displaced
Pursuit
attacks
rains down
difficult
storms
Deadlier
drought
savage
plummet
Crackdown
Now check in with yourself to see what score you feel on the 1-10 scale. Note if there has been any change. Now we will complete the set of words
rally
shooting
far-right
protest
Military action
riot
executes
spying
death toll
disaster
pain
lie
Disaster
Standoff”
regret
covid deaths
Thank You- Please report out now how your feeling of well-being was impacted by this random list of words. Compare it to where you were at the beginning.
When I have tried it, I found that people end feeling less whole and positive than before they started. But you might be different. If you are not exhausted and getting curious, I invite you to take a breather, have a coffee and check the mail and we will do Experiment Two, in a similar vein, with a new set of random words. OK.
___________________________________________________________________
EXPERIMENT TWO
I want you to sit in a quiet place where you can hear yourself breathing.
Take a deep breath in….and a deep breath out.
Repeat this for a minute or so to slow down and then check in with your core.
On a scale of 1-10, rank yourself as to how you feel in your overall well-being right now.
Note that number so we can revisit it during this exercise.
Now I am going to get you to read a series of random words,
out loud or quietly if that is easier. Perhaps if you have someone nearby who can read them out loud to you, that would be ideal.They have no order and pace can be brisk.
Are you ready? Here we go.
Opposites
Shelved
Cache
Tumble
Fiery
Shootings
Limits
Plot
Challenge
Conspiracies
Test
Remains
Winters
Repeat
Covid
Emergency
Struggles
Dump
fractious
Divorce
Rams
Criminal
Dark
Undo
Spiral
charged
Murder
Killing
Halt
Plot
Criticized
Falling
Stall
Perverse
muddy
Guarding
Resisting
lashing
militant
Dismembered
War Zone
rape
Convicted
Now check in with yourself to see what score you feel on the 1-10 scale. Note if there has been any change. Now we will complete the set of words
scandal
Corruption
deal
climate
dread
Fatal Flooding
Tightens
Limits
Fleeing
war
Duty
Victims
Crash
Asylum
Fraud
Minority
tax bills
deficits
tanks
incrementalism
frightening
unpublished
riot
classification
immunocompromised
Thank You- Please report out now how your feeling of well-being was impacted by this random list of words. You can email us here at paul@storywise.com. It would be interesting to get some data and relay it back to the sources of this poison, and have them declared a public health hazard.
______________________________________________________________________________________________
WHERE DID THE LISTS COME FROM?
As you conclude, I want you to guess where the random list was from?
Do you think they were just thrown together or is there a shared source for both lists?
The shared list comes from the page to page headlines of the daily Washington Post newspaper- paper copy that I get every day.
The first list comes from the Washington Post SUNDAY JANUARY 15TH 2023 PAGES A1- 26
The second list comes from three days later, the Washington Post WEDNESDAY JANUARY 18TH 2023 PAGES A-1 – A20
If this is the fire hose of news coming at us on a daily basis, and the folks in charge of headlines are capturing the Attention Grabbing verb or phrase accurately, it is like being thrown into a washing machine with every edition. And what the papers are presenting is writ large on the broadcast media. Breaking News lives off the constant sense of drama.
Yet, after reading even two or three of these articles, it is surely going to impact our mood. How could we feel happy with the way things are going? But someone wants us to feel that way. It is no accident.
They are going to tell us that this reflects the way the world is headed, that “this is the world, and the world is thus.” But these final words of the movie “The Mission” provide the rejoinder,”No, Thus have we made the world.”
In the same SUNDAY JANUARY 15TH WASHINGTON POST was this Pearls Before Swine cartoon (link below) that was a kind of corrective in and of itself.
The news of the day is what we decide to pay attention to. The Washington Post, typical of the media nowadays, seems to delight more in the genre of scare, terror, fear, and catastrophe. They have cut out the Sunday Opinion pages and the Magazine that offer a more detached analysis. They want us to ride the roller coaster of the moment.
That being the case, perhaps they need to attach with every paper a sachel of tranquilizer pills, so we can read and not do any more damage to our immune system. Is it any wonder we are feeling depressed. The Washington Post has become the local Agony Aunty who prizes herself on all the gossip.
The world is not so predictably bad for us to complain like the Dickens that this is the worst of times. We had a civil war and the Cuba crisis and the 2008 meltdown and 9-11. Can someone get a grip please?