Hey there, you. Hope you're well and handling things with great confidence and calmness.

Easier said than done, people tell me, though. Not that I need people to tell me,

therapists are human too, for now, at least before the robots take over. I'm a positive kind of guy,

and even I get sucked into the negativity of what's

going on in the world and often need to practice what I preach and certainly keep my news watching

to a minimum. If watching the news encourages you to donate something to an emergency relief charity or

something, that that's great. Something positive can come out of it. But if all being glued to negative news does is make you feel more

and more helpless, more and more anxious, then that could have quite a negative effect on us,

because it primes us to experience it elsewhere as well. Priming is like hearing a funny

joke, laughing, and then hearing a less funny joke, but laughing again, more than you would

have done if that had been the first joke. That's just how brains work. Because you've been

primed to find things funny. But if you prime yourself for

stress, pain and helplessness, then it doesn't take long for exposure to bad news to influence

your sleep. Make you shout at your kids. And shouting at your kids isn't going to prevent

anti-Semitism or provide medical aid for

anybody. All it does is make things worse. And it's no secret that bad news gets more views than good

news. So if someone wants your attention, whether it's for ad revenue or it's for attention around

a pub table or something, they are going to bring up the bad news.

But you can care about other people and the pain and suffering their experience and still care about yourself.

It doesn't make you selfish or cruel to be happy even though there are others that aren't.

And you certainly don't have to

make yourself ill. Like you might have heard me say before, the brain doesn't know the difference

...