Times of change
15th January 2021
What on earth is going on?
The news at the moment is so chaotic, another Covid-19 lockdown (v3.0), the challenges of Brexit, businesses closing and only a minority of others succeeding through the stressful times we live in. There doesn’t seem to be a great deal of good news anywhere.
Having grown up in the 70s and 80s, we had a rough mix of stock market crashes, fears over nuclear war between the USSR and the USA, little tolerance of self expression, not to mention the peak of the AIDS pandemic. Even after all that, everyone looks back nostalgically at how culturally rich the 80s were, especially if you like big hair, dungarees, long coats and heavy make-up!
I can’t remember a time when fear was so actively propagated by the media and broadcast so consistently across the globe. Fear has gone viral, literally. The current reason for this is clear, to drive people to follow restrictions the government deems necessary to combat the Covid-19 pandemic. The problem with this approach is that fear and stress have their own negative impact on health. From an evolutionary perspective, activating these systems was a response designed to minimize the energy put into maintenance of our body and our immunity, to ensure the energy could be redirected to help us evade an immediate threat. This role for fear and stress as a survival reaction is not as relevant today and I don’t imagine many of us are spending our time trying not to be caught and eaten!
Living in an environment of fear and stress has the same impact on us, releases the same stress hormones and downregulates those same systems that we need for long term health, a robust immune system and maintenance of our body. This is why people with very stressful jobs are more likely to have poor health if that stress is not managed properly. This makes it hugely important that we all find ways to manage the stress inducing messaging we are receiving from the media. I don’t just hold governments responsible for this, our religious institutions need to take a long hard look at themselves too. As human beings we are not designed to live under high, continual stress - at the moment our leaders are not taking responsibility for the messaging being delivered and so we have to.
Fear should never be the force that drives us to action, it belittles the spirit, stifles the journey of self discovery and limits our view of the endless, amazing possibilities that life holds. We all have more time on our hands than we are used to, take that time to invest in yourself in whatever shape that may be.
The world is not going to stop changing, it has been changing for thousand years, an ancient Greek, Heraclitus of Ephesus, wrote “the only constant in life is change”, that was 2,500 years ago and illustrates that we haven’t changed much since then. The question is what are you going to do about it? Why not choose to do something positive about it, using the time you have to share your experiences of life, your own truths about yourself with the world around you - the world will be a far richer place for it.
