Worry/Hope

[YinYang]

Coordinate_Apotheosis, do you think there may be a possibility that you're experiencing some compassion fatigue?

Compassion fatigue, also known as secondary traumatic stress (STS), is a condition characterized by a gradual lessening of compassion over time. It is common among individuals that work directly with trauma victims such as, therapists (paid and unpaid), nurses, teachers, psychologists, police officers, paramedics, animal welfare workers, health unit coordinators and anyone who helps out others, especially family members, relatives, and other informal caregivers of patients suffering from a chronic illness. It was first diagnosed in nurses in the 1950s.

Sufferers can exhibit several symptoms including hopelessness, a decrease in experiences of pleasure, constant stress and anxiety, sleeplessness or nightmares, and a pervasive negative attitude. This can have detrimental effects on individuals, both professionally and personally, including a decrease in productivity, the inability to focus, and the development of new feelings of incompetency and self-doubt.

Journalism analysts argue that the media has caused widespread compassion fatigue in society by saturating newspapers and news shows with often decontextualized images and stories of tragedy and suffering. This has caused the public to become cynical, or become resistant to helping people who are suffering.

I have mentioned it before here, a heavy "news media diet" is very detrimental to well being. There was a time when I was a news junky, and I could just feel the hopelessness creep in, by the sheer magnitude of it all. Everywhere you look is chaos, or rather they make it look that way, but it isn't so. Wanderers are very compassionate, and more affected by others' suffering, so you gotta shield yourself a little. Pick up an inspirational book, or do something you love like spending time with good friends or something, and try and avoid the news media for a while, and you will see how the healing happens.

What you expose yourself to, has a very real effect on your well-being.

Ra: You are dancing thoughts.

The news media sells fear, it's predominantly an STS apparatus.

This is from Thoughts are Things:

Let us endeavour, then, with the help of the Supreme Power, to get into the thought current of things that are healthy, natural, strong and beautiful. Let us try to avoid thoughts of disease, of suffering, of deformity, of faultiness. A field of waving grain or the rolling surf is better to contemplate than to pore over the horrors of a railway accident. We do not realize how much we are depressed physically and mentally by the incessant feast of horrors prepared for us by the daily press. We invoke in their perusal a thought current, filled with things and images of horror and suffering. We bring ourselves in this way in connection and one-ness with all other morbid and diseased mind, which lives and revels in this current. It leads not to life, but to disease and death. Neither others nor yourself are one particle aided by your knowing of every fire, explosion, murder, theft or crime which the newspapers chronicle every twenty-fours hours.

Written in 1889... and nothing has changed, except for an apparent contest to see who can publish the most gruesome, shocking and goriest content... the news media motto is afterall "if it bleeds, it leads"...

Here's something that'll make you smile! Very rarely something funny and lighthearted makes the news, like this recent clip of an ostrich chasing a cyclist here in Cape Town.

Along with Prentice Mulford, who wrote Thoughts are Things, you can also check out all the other New Thought writers, some real inspirational gems in there.

Change your thought, change your life!