Transcript:
Welcome everyone to the first installment of the Esoteric Wellness blog. Thank you for tuning in and joining me today. Today, I want to talk about a controversial topic that is increasingly prevalent in my client sessions, impacting mental health and consequently physical health. It has been fascinating to observe this issue from a different perspective. The topic I want to address today is politics. I am not going to try to persuade anyone about a specific political view, as we all have our own perspectives, including myself. I will leave that out of this discussion. I want to focus on how politics has become saturated with fear and anxiety, causing many individuals to feel genuinely scared about the political landscape and its potential consequences based on different outcomes. This anxiety and fear significantly affect people's mental health. It is astonishing to witness that for some of my clients, the primary source of fear and anxiety in their lives is politics, which is concerning. When I was growing up, politics did not hold such a prominent place in the average person's attention. So, what has changed? Firstly, I believe the most crucial aspect of addressing this issue is recognizing how the media, social media, and political campaigns capture our attention through fear and anxiety. Smart individuals have learned that nothing grabs our attention like a potential threat because our brains are wired to notice danger quickly as a survival instinct. By utilizing fear, anxiety, and alarming news headlines, they effectively seize and retain our attention. Consequently, political campaigns and advertising have become fear-based. The current political dialogue often portrays democracy's fate as hanging in the balance with each election, instilling a sense of impending doom regardless of the outcome. This fear-mongering tactic has become a common strategy, leading to the election of individuals who evoke fear and anxiety rather than hope and reassurance. Recognizing that both sides employ scare tactics to manipulate voters is essential. If you find yourself feeling fearful about a political issue, take a moment to reflect on the source of that fear and question whether it is based on reality or external influences. The constant exposure to alarming information contributes to heightened anxiety levels, which can have detrimental effects on both mental and physical health. Chronic anxiety, fueled by a continuous stream of perceived threats, can disrupt the body's natural processes, leading to various health issues. To address this problem, individuals can educate themselves, become aware of media manipulation, and establish healthy boundaries with information sources. By understanding the tactics used to induce fear and anxiety, individuals can make informed decisions based on logic rather than reactive emotions. At a societal level, unity is crucial in combating the divisive tactics employed by those seeking power and control. By coming together and focusing on common goals, we can diminish the influence of fear-based manipulation and work towards a more harmonious society where differences are respected, and unity prevails. Yeah. It's as simple as that. OK. It's as simple as that. It really is. We all want the same thing. So why not come together and make that happen rather than bickering over details that, in the big picture, don't really matter? I mean, look at the issues that the current candidates are arguing over. I mean, like, I think abortion is a great example. Whatever your views on abortion are, abortion is a problem that affects a very small portion of the population. OK, looking past the fear-mongering, the scare tactics around it. Before all the bans got put into place, there were not that many abortions happening. OK, this is compared to other problems, other issues in our society like homelessness, hunger, education, things that affect all of us or most of us. This is such a minuscule issue, but it's at the forefront of politics because it's divisive. Because people have very different opinions on the matter and these are the topics we're going to choose to shovel our face because it keeps us divided. And it's an issue without an easy answer, right? There's no one clearly best answer to abortion. No matter which way you go with it, there are problems, there are problems, and ideally it would be a case-by-case, right? Because in some situations, yeah, abortion makes sense; in other situations, it doesn't. So it's a divisive issue. And there's no clear right answer. Perfect to make us fearful and angry at each other. Perfect. That's why abortion is constantly at the forefront of politics. Yet, for most of us, it's not an issue that even affects us. But if the main issue was something like making sure all children were fed or weren't going hungry, I mean, there's a clear right answer there. We can argue about details about how that gets done and who pays for it and all that but there's a clearly right answer. So of course that's not at the forefront, because that's not going to keep us divided. So I went on a little bit of a rant there, but again, at a societal level, we need to be coming together. We need to be having conversations, not yelling matches. Because we all have, I don't care what side of the aisle you stand on, we all have much more common ground than our differences. We're all human beings. We all want and need the same things. And we're losing sight of that because we're being manipulated by fear. And we're becoming reactive. And all that does is divide us. So that's my political rant for the day. But yeah, I think it's becoming quite an issue and as the election draws nearer and nearer, I think it's becoming more of an issue and then it'll fall to the wayside for a while probably. But no matter how the election goes, no matter who wins, life will go on. We'll all go to work the next day. I mean, it's not the end of the world as it's being made out to be. So take a deep breath. Look past the fear and anxiety tactics being used to manipulate you. And just trust that we're all humans and we all care for each other, and we all have common ground. So I'll leave it at that. Thanks everybody for listening for tuning in and I look forward to the next one. And I'll leave you with the words of Ram Dass, who frequently said, his guru taught him. I don't know who came up with it first, but he said love everybody and tell the truth. And I think if we all lived by those simple words, a lot of this problem would go away. So love everybody and tell the truth till next time. Bye bye.
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