2020 — Stop the negativity!

I wake up in the morning to an alarm, followed by checking my phone for messages and news : mistake 1.

With each day bringing in a new problem(not kidding media is doing its best to highlight the negativity), I already have started my day with anxiety. This translates into very short long distance calls to my family back home in India because I want to discuss only the positive things.

After a hectic day which at best would be average even if there are bits of good news, I log on to twitter. I wanted to call this mistake 2 but I really love twitter(it is quite fun at times), but I see tweets saying ‘ it’s still 4 months to the year end?’ or ‘this year can’t get worse’ followed by some or the other incident that disturbed the individual, or stories collating all the news items that depressed us from January till now, how can it get better? I relate to many of these pieces and would like these posts and move ahead, but it has definitely messed up my mood, and with a stressed mind I wake up the next morning all grumpy.

I am quite sure there are people who follow a similar routine, may be making similar mistakes, or are just tired of feeling anxious, sad, grumpy or any of these emotions that can put them down.

There are different things that work for different people, but for myself I have found a way to keep my spirits up. I still look at my phone in the morning, but I skip the news and look at just the messages. After my breakfast and some work, I read the news and gulp it down with water, because I have done some work for the day — these pieces do not affect my work as much as it should. However stressful the day goes, I make sure I go for a walk, and on does when I can’t, I video call my family to lift up my spirits. At the end of the day when I check my twitter, I stop as soon as I feel my mind is getting above a certain dose of negativity I handle. I have been trying to discipline myself to make sure I can handle this negativity put out on the internet. I can’t blame the media people completely as well because it is difficult to find positive news many of these days, but we all can definitely do better.

We don’t need an overdose of optimism or toxic positivity, we don’t need ‘you should look for the good’ or ‘there are worse things out in this World’ but we need ‘this is hard, but we believe in ourselves to get through it’, we need ‘it’s probably hard to see any good right now, how can we make sense of it?’ because we all feel that it’s hard to be positive in a situation like this. We need to make sure we don’t get into the negative spiral, just keep our head above the water so that we are able to breathe. Let’s not choke on these waves and hold hands to make sure we can help each other breathe.