Feeling Anxious/Depressed

It seems to me that the concept of being stressed out is a common condition of the twenty first century but a good deal of that stress may be coming from one of the activities many people use to relax. Sitting around and vegetating in front of the television set is a way of getting all of the daily work related stress replaced by an imaginary world designed to make us laugh, cry and be entertained in some way so that our day to day problems don’t seem quite so bad. Right? Not so fast.

Now I must admit a lot of the television shows leave a little to be desired in that the violence being depicted can be stressful but we still recognize it as fiction, fantasy, something that’s made up and not real. Where the problem begins is with the commercial breaks in the show. “Is the food you’re eating safe? Major meat recall announced. Details at eleven.” Excuse me. It’s just past eight, I have three hours to wait to find out if I’ve been poisoned? “Sexual predator escapes. Are your children safe? Details on how to protect your family at eleven.” Now what am I supposed to do? Sit quietly and continue to watch a show about a terrorist plot to blow up the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland while waiting for my teenage daughter to come home from studying with a friend?

Rationalization is good: Well if it was really an emergency they’d break into the current program and tell me to throw away all my ground beef or they’d have a special report about the escapee, provide a picture of the suspect and indicate where he was last seen. Yeah, right. How many times have we seen that happen?

So what to do? What everyone has learned to do – ignore it. Local television news should be called the “Wolf Report.” How many times a day do they cry wolf to get you to watch a news cast, which is never what it was advertised to be: the meat recall occurred in Edwards, Nevada and was limited to a regional meat packer that doesn’t ship out of the state and the sexual predator was recaptured five miles from where he escaped – Munroe, Texas. Of course you knew that would be the case, so relax and watch the next terrorist get caught; besides there will probably another update during the next commercial break. No, not this time. Three commercials in a row: acid reflux disease, diabetes and prostate cancer. That’s comforting, I only have to worry about having my esophagus erode away, and contracting two life threatening diseases.

Well back to the terrorists. At this point they seem pretty tame; in fact the show is becoming pretty boring so why not channel surf? Ah, here we are: a police chase – cars banking into one another as the perp goes the wrong way on the freeway during rush hour. Definitely less stressful. Here come the commercials to break up the action: enlarged prostate, migraine headaches and a house with bad odors. Nothing to worry about here other than: is my large prostate a sign of cancer, is my headache a brain tumor and are my friends staying away because my house stinks?

There must be something less stressful on television; what’s on the other network? Ah, something definitely entertaining: the emergency room from hell. Just what I need, a place to go to escape the terrorists, take care of the car crash victims on the freeway and treat my decaying esophagus, enlarged prostate, brain tumor, heartburn, cholesterol, and urinary tract leakage. Will have to check with This Old House to see if I have to sell my house to get rid of the odor I might have, unless my mortgage rate goes up again and I lose the house to the bank.

The truth is that ones home is no longer a safe haven from anyone or anything. It is easy to say that all you have to do is turn off the television set, put away the cell phone and ignore the world around you. Nice idea but it just isn’t practical. You can’t be a hermit and expect to live a normal life. However, there is hope. People are beginning to learn how to tune out and to focus around the interruptions. The younger generation, in particular, has learned to multi-task to the extent that they are becoming able to selectively control access to themselves. They mentally tune out the internet ads as they focus on the application with which they are dealing. That’s great for them but for the rest of us who are being bombarded with the health related ads on television, the office may be the least stressful place for us to be.