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Fears

And the Cats Watch

July 4, 2019 by Elizabeth Drake

I fear spiders. Note, there will be no pictures of spiders in this post. You will have to Google them if you want to see them.

I didn’t always fear spiders. When I was a child, I would play with them. Yeah. I know. I had a deprived childhood. But I would hold them in the palm of my hand and giggle as they ran across my forearm. Or I would build little labyrinths for them, which they mostly just climbed over the walls.

All of that changes when we moved to Seattle, and spiders went from being a run-of-the-mill insects (okay, arachnids), to creatures that could necrotize flesh.

FoundSpiderDealt
Exactly what you need to do if you find brown recluses nesting in your vents.

Seriously.

My sister was bitten by a spider. I won’t describe how awful it was, how painful, or the scars the bite left.

If you want an idea, go look up brown recluse bites. Yeah. They are awful.

That completely changed my view on spiders, and I went from playing with them to smooshing them. Or fleeing from them, as the case may be.

Then I moved to New Orleans.

In addition to brown recluses, they have black widows. And brown widows. And a slew of other really nasty and unpleasant things.

AlCaponeSpider
And the basement, too.

So, yes, my fear was solidified.

These days, I have two cats. One is a former barn cat. These boys should be able to take out a mere spider, right? Especially now that we live in the frozen tundra, and there are no brown recluses or wolf spiders here.

Yeaaaaah, about that. Apparently, we didn’t set expectations properly.

As I was getting out of the shower the other night, both cats had managed to get into the bathroom. If you don’t close and lock the door just right, they can jiggle it open. And both cats love to join me in the shower.

Whoever said cats hate water don’t know my two.

As anyone who owns cats knows, cats love to get their hair all over you. And one of my cats is a 26 pound long-haired Maine Coon. What better way for him to get hair all over me than to rub up against my bare wet leg?

CatHair
And the sofa, and the floor…

As I was about to step out of the shower, I noticed a spider on my floor roughly the size of my palm.

I managed not to scream.

But I am in the shower. I don’t have shoes on.

So, I do what anyone else in my situation would do and call for my husband without trying to scare the kids.

He must have heard he urgency in my voice, as he came before I called for the third time.

During this entire process, both cats are simply watching the spider crawl across the bathmat as I stand in the shower waiting to be rescued.

KillSpider
Might do the trick. Maybe.

Fortunately, my husband arrived and squished the spider. At which point, both cats had the nerve to be disappointed that the thing was gone!

I swear, those little beasts aren’t worth the cat food we feed them!

 

 

Filed Under: fear Tagged With: cats, fear, Fears, romance author, Romance Novels, Romance Writer, spiders

5 Reasons Science Says We Should Consume Less News

April 19, 2018 by Elizabeth Drake

What Common Household Item is Killing Your Children? We’ll tell you, tonight at eight.

Except, if it really is killing my children, shouldn’t I get a news flash across my phone telling me what it is and how to get rid of it, much like an Amber Alert?

localnewsmeme
If they were honest, this would be the news in my area.

 

 

 

Here are six reasons why research says you should consider changing your news consumption habits.

 

1. News Outlets are Here to Make Money, Not Inform

With the wave of “fake” news lately, this hardly needs explanation. But we need to remember that news doesn’t usually cover what’s important anyway. They’re looking for the “human” element, the element that sucks you in and gets you to keep watching or clicking.

If it bleeds it leads.

fear
Fiction shines light on reality.

If a building burns to the ground, what do you think the media is going to focus on? The building. The people in the building. Injuries. Fatalities. All of which is relatively inexpensive to produce. They don’t actually have to dig to get to the guts of the story. Do they ever tell you why the building burned? Changes to the fire code that should be enacted to save those lives?

No, because that doesn’t get clicks.

With this emphasis on the dramatic, we focus on the wrong things, and those things are then overblown in our minds. We all fear terrorism, but no one thinks too much about chronic stress. Total US deaths, worldwide, due to terrorism from 2004-2014 was 112.  Think about that for a moment. 112 people in the Unites States died from terrorism over ten years. That’s 11.2 people, on average, per year.

How much news did it get?

But how many people die each year of heart attack? Stroke? Cancer? Yet, how much emphasis has any of this gotten?

Stress affects 143M Americans, and 81M are under extreme stress.    The causal connection between chronic disease and stress is growing .

So why don’t we hear more about this? Reducing stress is something we might actually have control over, and it can have a direct impact on our lives. Imagine if reducing stress could reduce the number of people with heart disease or cancer by 10% or even 1%.

The news doesn’t cover this because it doesn’t get clicks.

News is a for-profit organization. They are not here to inform. They are here to make money.

 

2. Doesn’t Really Matter to You

How many news stories have you watched or read in the last year? The last month?  What did you do because you read or watched it? What decision did it help you to make, particularly about anything of consequence? Did you become a better parent? A better spouse? Did you make a serious financial decision? Do something to improve your career?

I ask this is all seriousness. If it is meant to inform you, it should be doing so in a meaningful way. We’ve already established that it’s not really informing you. Rather, it’s telling you things to get you to tune in, and we should be challenging the value of tuning in.

I can honestly say consuming news did little to engender action from me. News stories didn’t even help me make a decision on the candidates I voted for. I got that from their stated positions on their websites.

fear2

 

3. Teaches You Not to Think Too Hard

This article really says it all. News programming is designed to make you think you’re seeing both sides of a story and getting the low-down, but you’re not. Most of what we get are news bites, little pieces of information meant to fit into an allotted amount of time. Deep, complex subjects require time to digest. Truly difficult concepts can’t be understood in the five minutes they get.

We’ve all heard “climate change”, but how many of us have actually taken the time to understand what it is and why it’s happening? What are the macro effects? What does it truly mean to the planet and to us? (Give you a hint, the planet doesn’t care. It’s already survived numerous mass extinctions.) What are we really sacrificing by not dealing with it, and what would it really take to reverse it?

You see this superficiality with a lot of “news” reports.  They are interested in giving you bite-sized pieces, but nothing too meaty. They don’t make money informing, remember? They make money on you tuning in or clicking.

Yet, without this deeper level of understanding, you lose sight of the bigger picture. Events become singular and contained instead of part of the broader view. Hard to make truly informed decisions when you see a very small piece of the whole issue.

 

4. Seek Conforming Opinions

With the sheer volume of news out there, we no longer have to expose ourselves to ideas that don’t conform to ours. If we don’t want to believe in climate change, we can find plenty of articles denying it to fill our screen.

As Warren Buffet said, “What the human being is best at doing is interpreting all new information so that their prior conclusions remain intact.”

If this is true, then we’re really not seeking information or enlightenment. We simply want to be told that everyone already agrees with us. That we’re right.  That’s called confirmation bias, and it’s very detrimental.

It means you never hear the other side, you never have the chance to understand their way of thinking. You can’t find a compromise because why would you compromise when “everyone agrees with you?”

But what if we’re wrong? Even Albert Einstein was wrong on occasion.

 

5. Induces Stress 

News, particularly what’s splashed across our networks, triggers our  fight or flight response. The same stories that get clicks activate this center.

When you hear about a family dying in a fire, you have a very different reaction than if you’re hearing about alternate routes to avoid a fire. That’s why so many of us felt panicked and twitchy after all of the 9/11 stories, particularly as we watched people, human beings, plummet from those upper stories.

That’s one image I will never, ever forget.

The “human” side of these stories releases glucocorticoid  which has a whole slew of effects on your body. It’s the fight or flight response. And what does this constant fight or flight response bring? Remember that stress we were talking about and how we know it contributes to heart disease, stroke and cancer? Yeah, that. 

It’s like being constantly told there’s a monster under your bed, and knowing there is nothing you can do about it.

fear3

 

6. Crushes Creativity

I’m not sure if news in general does this, or just bad news.  I won’t say this is an unbiased or researched article, because I couldn’t find any with hard facts, but it states what I’ve seen myself.

The more news I consume, the less creative I am. Or, perhaps, the less time I have for creativity.

Not sure, but I do know that switching off the news, even for a week, made it much easier to focus on my novel. I felt more relaxed and able to bring more of myself to my writing.

Why?

Not sure, but I figure the reduced fight-or-flight response is part of it. As is not allowing the news to snatch at my already divided attention. Kids, spouse and day job already get most of it, I’m not letting things I can’t impact take more.

Of course, tuning out the world burning may not be ideal, but there is very little I, personally, can do for the issues of the day.

 

Yet, despite the science that says to ignore it, we keep coming back to the news. Makes me think they’re in the same camp as social media. They’ve figured out how our brains work and how to keep us coming back for more. How to suck our precious time from us for profit.

I am done.

I will continue to read the Economist, and I will never know what household item is slowly killing my children until they send me an Amber Alert to my phone.

 

How about you? Do you watch the news? Do you get anything out of it? Does it inform your decisions? Has it ever affected your sleep or given you nightmares?

Filed Under: News, Uncategorized Tagged With: confirmation bias, fear, Fears, local news, News, Stress, Stress kills creativity, Think, Turned off the News

The Fear of Regret

December 26, 2016 by Elizabeth Drake

“Enjoy it now, because you’ll miss it later,” is a refrain I hear all the time.

I have two small children, a spouse, I work full-time, and I carve out time to write.

aa

My life seems full of regret.

  • I regret the time I’m at work and not with my family.
  • I regret not pushing harder in my career.
  • I regret the time I spend writing.
  • I regret when I don’t write.

DD2 insists on being on my lap all the time. She’s going through a powerful “momma” phase, and while it’s super sweet, it also seriously limits my ability to stuff down around the house. If I try to slip away from her, she’ll grab my arm and pull it around her. If I leave her anyway, we have a full melt down including real tears.

I can’t walk away from that no matter what anyone says. She’s my toddler. So, yes, it’s a tough time for both us, but whenever I mention it, I’m told how much I’ll miss it when it’s gone.

Yes, I probably will. And, in a few months, I probably won’t remember the dishes that needed to get done, the floor that needed to be swept, or the laundry that needed to be folded.

I probably won’t regret how much time I spent holding her and being there for her.

But fear of regret holds me back.

Have I tried for some of the toughest jobs in my field? No, because I’m afraid I’ll regret spending less time with my family, that I won’t be the spouse and mother they need.

I feared I’d regret it if I didn’t dedicate myself to our family and soak up every precious moment. So when we decided to have that family, I put aside writing for years. How could I not regret taking time for writing when I only had a few hours with my spouse and daughter?

Yet, I also regret the years I didn’t spend writing. I frequently wonder where I would be and what I could be doing if I’d taken it more seriously. I’ve known I wanted to be a writer since I was a kid. It’s one of the few things that’s remained constant in my life.

I want to shove regret aside. Learn to live in the moment. Learn to follow my heart (and learn to accept a messy house with two small children).

 

ab
My role model!

 

How about you? Anything you don’t do because you’re afraid you’ll regret it? Or are you like a cat and regret nothing? Have you learned to accept a messy house?

Filed Under: fear, Regret, Uncategorized Tagged With: children, Family, Fear of Regret, Fears, Miss it later, Regrets, Writing

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