Ashok Gupta explains how 24-hour news overstimulates the brain and blurs on-screen threats with real danger, especially for people with past trauma. Your brain's threat detector gets stuck in overdrive, interpreting every discrepancy as danger. He recommends limiting news exposure and deliberately distracting yourself to break the cycle.
Now what is the news? The news is, let's look at all the worst things that have happened on the planet in the last, whatever, 24 hours, and let's feed it to you in an emotionally overstimulating way. Alright? And it's impossible to feel safe in the world when you're constantly feeding your brain that it's dangerous. Because your brain can't tell the difference between a threat that's on your screen and a threat that's actually real in your environment. Yep. And what does the news do? It makes those images really bright and powerful. It makes them over the top, and in doing so, it makes you think that things are much worse than they actually are. Yeah. And so that's really important that we don't watch 24-hour news. So instead, what we want to do is keep ourselves updated, read the news, but also look at distracting our mind away from the news. Yeah. Now, of course, some of us might say, well, hang on, don't we want to know what's going on? Don't we want to feel empathy for the people who are going through these experiences? Yes, and at the same time, we can have a maladaptive empath response where we over-empathize in the sense that we then take on that negativity, and that isn't helping anybody. And if some of you may remember, recently I did a model called the Trauma Protection Matrix. And it was all about how trauma from our past can create these protection matrices and these layers of protection in our psychology. And one of those that we mentioned was safety. And if we grew up in an environment where we didn't feel safe as a child, the world will create— or our brains will create a world where we will see the world through that lens of a lack of safety. To fit its narrative. So the brain is always looking at, how is the world compared to what I believe it is like? And if it's different, that's a threat. But if the world is the way that I predict it will be, then I am comfortable with that analysis. And that's why we can get stuck in our patterns from our past. In brain neurology, this is called predictive coding. The brain will want to see the world the way it's always seen the world, which is why change can be very different. A way to think about this is the lens. So our brains have got used to seeing the world through a certain filter, a certain lens, alright? I'm sure these look quite comedic right now. And the brain is saying, "This is the way the world is, right? I can see the world this way because that's how I learnt to see the world." And when we see it in this particular way, if we've had trauma in our past, if we felt unsafe in the world in our past, we will then see these situations as much worse than they actually are in our current situation, and then it will be magnified and over-trigger and over-stimulate our nervous system.
