Hey, welcome to week 2 of the course. Thank you for sticking with it, and I hope the first part was useful to you. Let me just begin by saying that guided relaxation thing that we ended with last week, please keep doing that. Whenever you get a chance, just relax for a moment, bring your body down. Again, every time you do that, you'll start to just know what that relaxation feels like and it'll be easier and easier for you to push yourself into that state. So I'm going to mention that every now and then just to keep you doing your homework. Where we're going to go from now it's like that what I told you about in the first week there was that, what I sometimes would think of as a direct intervention. Your anxiety is too high and you really want to bring it down, you can use your ability to relax yourself to do that in a very direct way. What we're going to talk about now is some of the, I don't know the best way to do it, but things that aren't quite so dramatic perhaps as laying down and putting yourself into a relaxed sleep. But ways you can manage your emotional state by managing your environment to a large extent. We're going to start by talking about the news, and how the news is affecting you in a time like this, and why it's important to manage that too. So yeah, let's jump right into that. I want to begin by just talking about addiction, which will seem weird but I'm going to suggest that we have the danger of becoming addicted to the news. So I want you to understand why. So let's begin with just a gambling machine, like a slot machine. If you've ever been in a casino, you know that these are all over the place and a lot of people play them. The way they work is relatively simple. You basically put in money, you pull that arm down and every now and then it pays off. It gives a jackpot and the light up there, it does its thing and it makes a bunch of noise and money falls down, and so everybody in the casino knows that you just won. So that's a very powerful reward when that happens. The thing that makes these one-armed bandits so addictive, and there's no other word for it, is that these rewards come in a random way. So you may be on a machine, you may get a payoff and it could be just like two pulls later you get another jackpot, or it could be 300 pulls later you get a jackpot and you just don't know. So they intentionally make those rewards random. When a reward is random, we start to feel like it's always just around the corner. There might be a reward if I leave this machine now, maybe imagine you've just put in money and pulled it 20 times and have not been rewarded, you feel like, why should I give up? What if I give up and someone sits down and the first time they get the reward because that reward could be just that next pull? So that keeps people wanting to chase the rewards. In fact, there's some famous situations at casinos where people literally will wet themselves because they do not want to get up and go to the washroom and have somebody else win the reward after they've been putting a bunch of money in, so they would rather stay there. That's how extremely addiction can be. By the way, if you're one of these people who say, "Oh yeah, some people are susceptible to this thing, but I'm not." Do you have one of these? Can you imagine leaving it in a drawer, say turning it off, putting it in a drawer for two days and not touching it? For the vast majority of the population, the answer is absolutely not. They have to have their phone with them at all times. In fact, I argue that we are all addicted to our phones and it's the same principle. The rewards come randomly. We post something on LinkedIn if you're a geek like me or something cooler if you're younger, and duke, are people liking what you posting? Are they commenting on it? Are they sharing it? So sometimes when you check, something like that has happened and that's rewarding. Often when you check nothing has happened, it's like the one-armed bandit. You're pulling the arm every time you're checking, and occasionally you're getting a reward. Those rewards in game make you think that if you haven't checked for a while, there could be rewards piling up, I'd better go and check. So that makes us continue to check our phone to the point where again, if we can't, we start to get anxious and show all the patterns of addiction. So critical point. Random rewards produce addictions to whatever it is that's delivering those rewards. All right. So on now, boom here where CNN, Anderson Cooper telling us the latest issues on Covid epidemic anyway, pandemic and what's going on. We are all living in this ambiguity. We don't know what the future will be. We're not sure what the health impact of all this will be. We're not sure what the economic impact of all this will be. We just know we're entering an unknown world and that scares our brain. Our brain really likes to be able to predict what's coming next and use the past to predict the future. When there's a stable link between the past and the future, that works really well. Imagine when every time you walk in the front door of your house, your brain is predicting what's going to be there. When it predicts accurately, that gives you the sense of calm, a reassurance. It's a stable world. It knows what's going to happen and everything is cool. Well, right now we're all feeling that the past does not predict the future. We don't know what this future is. So we're hungry for information. Information is very rewarding to us. Where do we get most of our information? From the media, from news, that tells us what the current health issues is like, tells us what's going on in the economy, are governments doing bailouts? What's going on? So all this information our brain likes and finds it very rewarding. But here's the problem. Those rewards come randomly. A lot of times when you watch the news, you're just hearing stuff you already know. Nothing new, nothing irrelevant, nothing to add to your ability to predict the future, but then every now and then there is something. Every now and then there's maybe I don't know some congress passed a spending bill to support those people who were out of work. Well, that makes your future feel a little more comfortable if you're one of those people. So that is an important reward. But again, they come randomly, and so because of that, we can become addicted to the news. We can want the news on all the time so that when that reward comes, we catch it. But what I would say to you is that's dangerous because, yes, news gives us information, but it also continually reminds us of the threat we are all under. Every moment you have the news on, every time they mention coronavirus or Covid-19 or anything about this, which they constantly do, that is telling your brain it's under threat and that is kicking up that anxiety system. Everything we talked about in the first week, sympathetic nervous system getting ready to fight or flee. So by exposing yourself to the news, you're constantly re-energizing you're anxious state. So that's what makes it really tricky. That's why I'm going to suggest that we have to be very mindful on how we consume the news. Yeah, because of that critical point, every minute you're exposed, the news is stimulating the anxiety response. So given this, here's what I suggest. First of all, budget your news consumption. Whatever you need to feel like you're in the know, but the one point I really want to stress here is, there's very little in the news that we need to know right away. Virtually, every new bit of information does not have any immediate effect, it's affecting us down the road perhaps. So what that means is if you don't hear about some new fact for a few hours after its first released, that's okay. So you can maybe budget a time in the morning at some point, and maybe a budget of time later in the afternoon when you catch up on what you've missed. Maybe even want to do that early in the evening, but early in the evening. So my point two is do not watch the news within two hours of going to sleep. Further for reasons hopefully becoming obvious to you guys are all becoming experts on anxiety here. So yeah, when you watch that news, that's going to kick up your anxiety response. The last thing you want to do is go to bed with all these worries rattling around in your brain. That is not the recipe for a good night's sleep. So at least two hours before, just don't watch any more news. We're going to talk about these palate cleansers and distractions in detail in a lecture coming up. But I use the word palate cleanser, and let's think of that analogy. When you go out for a nice dinner, often the kind food in the different courses is quite different. So when you move from one food to the next, you might want to cleanse your palate. You might want to eat something that neutralizes a lot of the flavors from that first meal. Well, what I'm recommending is when you watch the news, get the information you need, then cleanse your palate. So watch something after the news. Something that will pull your mind away from the Covid situation. I'll be talking and I'm going to reiterate some of these things, if it makes you laugh, fantastic, if it makes you sing, great. But the important thing about a palate cleanser is that it pulls your mind somewhere else. So it's just going to be something that you find engaging, interesting. Something to fill your mind and crowd out, as we'll talk about in a minute, those negative thoughts. So those are my realized that a major source of your anxiety is the news. You want the news but budget it, keep it within periods, don't do it just before sleep, and yeah, after watching it pull your mind somewhere else, get your information pull somewhere else. Cool, that's the news. We're going to talk about a number of other distractions and how they affect your mental state during this time. So let's leave this video here and I'll see you in the next one. Bye bye.
