Limit This!

Contributed by Stephanie Staples at Your Life Unlimited

Stephanie Staples here helping you keep emotionally well in turbulent times. While I’m trying to help anyways, listen, I can’t compete with the news. I mean it’s everywhere. It’s 24/7 overload.

What I notice is for most people, me included, the more we look at the news, the more sad and depressed we feel.  Now, it’s not that we don’t want to keep informed. Of course, we want to keep informed, but there is a limit and it’s up to us to put the limits on.

The phone has an off button, the TV has an off  button and we can even put boundaries around the amount of time that we listen to people talking about things that are not serving us well.

You may want/need to put a boundary around the amount of news that’s coming in. Maybe you decide you’re going to listen to the five o’clock news or the synopsis of the five o’clock news or just check in online, once a day or twice a day for this many minutes.

stepping in

Federal minister asks labour board to intervene in Canada Post strike

39m ago

stranger attacks

Man viciously beats Nanaimo security guard and attacked stranger in Campbell River

4h ago

no snow

Chances of a white Christmas for Nanaimo 'quite remote'

17h ago

Put an actual time limit on it because one click leads to the next click and again, you’re spiralling downward. When people are talking about things that you don’t want to hear about , (yes, I know people need to vent and they need to express) but I think it’s okay to put a boundary around that time and say something like… ‘Look when I talk about this to much, it just doesn’t serve me well. I’m really trying to limit it to a three-minute conversation about this and then can we talk about something else?’  Excusing yourself from the conversation may be an option as well.

Personally, I have to do that for myself otherwise I can get into a terrible downward spiral and it’s really no fun and it’s really not serving anybody well. It’s hard to listen to that stuff and I just don’t think I can do my best when I’m totally bombarded with news overload.

Consider a news fast for a day or two. If there is something game changing believe me you will hear about it.  I would also recommend not listening to it first thing in the morning and for sure not listening to it before you go to bed.

Put some boundaries on your news intake, it’s one more way to keep emotionally well in turbulent times.

The post Limit This! first appeared on Your Life Unlimited.

Contributed by Stephanie Staples at Your Life Unlimited