It's All About the Input

Some may wonder, "What got you to the point of doing this 'Hope Stream' thing?". It was a combination of things. A while back my wife and I decided to remove from our media viewing line-up anything that was gory, or had dark and twisted story lines. This meant nixing many shows. I also changed my media listening habits preferring music with uplifting and positive messages to help balance out the weekly Tech/Security podcast I listen to. I also changed my news intake. Switching to Newsbeuter so I only saw plain text headlines and reading the news in a text only format removing the images, deemphasizing the links to other articles etc.

I think it was the combined positive influence of these things that led me to realize how negative much of the postings in social media were. A couple weeks prior to posting my first "Hope Stream" article I decided that I would work very hard to only post positive and supportive things to my social media feeds.

The title of this post "It's all about the Input" is, to be sure, an over simplification. But the input is an important factor. How is anyone supposed to be up and hopeful when they are constantly bombarded by things that raise their stress levels and tell them the world is going to hell in a hand basket.

One needs to balance out the negative noise. To do affirming and positive things and to take a break from the doom and gloomers. When I did I found it much easier to see that things aren't so bad. That I'd been putting far too much energy and head space into things that don't really impact me or even those around me. I started skipping a lot of news stories because they would just be a bunch of negative crap designed to drive hits on a website.

Most of all I started to feel better about myself, about others and about the world in general. By no means am I advocating a "head in the sand" approach. I'm merely suggesting that mass media has gotten very good at driving hits on their content by pushing negative content, stress, and anxiety "World to end at 6pm!!! Tune in at 6:30 for the full story". All this negativity and anxiety has a real effect on people's outlook. I suspect it is a large part of the reason that social media feeds have become so negative. Partly people seeking support for their anxiety and partly people using the same negative = hits/followers technique, probably without realizing they are doing so.

So I will suggest an experiment. Change your media habits for 30 days. Cut out broadcast/video news, Avoid gory and twisted TV shows, only read news articles that effect your life/area and read them in as vanilla a form as possible. Find positive and affirming things that are meaningful to you and use them to fill the gaps created by the above deletions. Do this for 30 days and see if it makes a change in your life, how you view the world and those around you.

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