Rodger Ruge, Nederland.   I first heard the report in 1998. It was called “blood initiation weekend”. The information was obtained by police officers who reported that gang members were driving around at night without using their headlights. The first car to flash their lights at them would be chosen as their victim, chased down and an uninitiated gang member would then murder them to become a full gang member. I believed this story as it made the rounds throughout our community. Everyone took precautions that weekend, told their friends and neighbors, kept their children at home and called the local police department to voice concerns and get advice. The fear was palpable, understandably so, and the story was false, an urban legend that would emerge every few years, ultimately going viral with the advent of social media.

The reason we seldom check to see if a story is true is a simple matter of conditioning. The news media portrays itself as a fact-checking business and most of the time this is true for the ethical organizations. However, much of what is presented is often intentionally misleading via fear-based, attention grabbing headlines. Case in point; A recent headline from The Guardian, an on-line and print publication, stated; “Coconut Oil is Pure Poison says Harvard Professor”. If you took the information purely on the headline you would likely never buy coconut oil products, you would make sure to tell all your friends and post it on social media, which is exactly what has happened with this story.

If one reads the entire article you will learn that the Harvard professor’s concern is that coconut oil contains a high amount of saturated fats and eating too many of those can lead to cardiovascular disease according to the American Heart Association. The article goes on to say, “There has been speculation that some of the saturated fat present in coconut oil may be better for us than other saturated fats, but so far there is not enough good-quality research to provide us with a definitive answer.” That’s a far cry from the headline grabbing phrase “pure poison,” eh? And yet, most people take the headline and run with it as the complete picture, and that is exactly the intention.

Fear causes an emotional response. Emotional responses are triggered by stress related chemicals produced in the brain that trickle or flood into the body depending on how strongly we are aroused by the event or information. Once we are in a fear-based emotional state, that specific brainwave frequency makes us more vulnerable to suggestion. The media knows this and takes advantage to push you to become sufficiently motivated to stay glued to their channel and to buy what their advertisers are selling. This is especially prevalent in the graphically visual mainstream TV news coverage as well as commercials from the pharmaceutical industry. They present this or that doom and gloom story and then hit you with a commercial that informs you about this or that disease and the drug to cure it. You’re primed for an emotional, fear-based reaction, and fear sells.

When we are living in a continuous exposure to fear-based emotions, there is a price to pay at the end of the road with regard to the detrimental effects on your physical and mental health. According to the CDC (Center for Disease Control), 85% of all visits to a primary care physician are directly caused by stress. The good news is that there is an easy fix; turn off whatever device you use to watch your media. Do it for a week. Do it for a month and let me know what shifts in your world.

One family I worked with took me up on this challenge and turned the TV off for a week, including putting away the violent video games their eight and ten-year-old boys liked to play. They told me their initial resistance to this suggestion was completely dispelled by the wonderfully amazing results. They became a family again. They had conversations at the dinner table, they played more, talked more, read books together and it was so transformative they all agreed to extended one week into a month, and a month into forever.

(Originally published in the September 20, 2018, print edition of The Mountain-Ear.)