When Fear Influences Your Mental Health
With all the negative news about the coronavirus on the verge of becoming a pandemic, the stock market crashing and the global economy on the brink of destruction, it’s no wonder why our mental health suffers in the process. All of this negative news has an influence on your unconscious mind, which pulls the strings of your conscious mind. Turn off the mainstream media and start engaging in positive activities.
A psychological tactic used since the beginning of time, whether intentionally or not, is the instillation of fear into the human mind. Fear easily influences your mental health by altering your behavior in negative ways. Fear is the seed of many mental health disorders, such as anxiety, depression, PTSD, OCD, phobias, etc.
So why does the mainstream media do this? Intentionally or not, their objective is to report what is happening in the world. But unfortunately, fear is not excluded in the process of reporting. For instance, the way the information is presented on the coronavirus, it has many people starting to experience anxiety, worry and fear that it will soon make massive landfall in the U.S. and other parts of the world.
When your mind starts to become altered by negative news, you slowly start to become distracted from your work, relationships and positive states of thinking. Rather than focusing on bettering yourself, you start to worry about how to avoid getting infected with the coronavirus. Of course you want to avoid an infection, but this does not mean that you have to remain preoccupied with the idea.
When events such as the coronavirus occur, your best way of dealing with these kinds of situations is to continue your life as if nothing has changed. Remember that you should always be in control of your mind; never allow outside forces to influence the way you think and behave. The moment that you do is the moment that you make yourself vulnerable to developing a mental illness.
Are you Ready? (This is Defeating Stigma Mindfully)
DSM (Defeating Stigma Mindfully) 
Great post! thank you for sharing. And yes, unfortunately the mainstream media really likes scaring people to death. Not sure if they do it intentionally but they’re very good at panicking. So I just prefer not to check the news – not because I think we shouldn’t worry about the coronavirus but because anyways…it’s something I can not keep under control. One thing that helped me a lot was reading a few 2009 articles about H1N1 – the wording and pretty much everything of those articles were almost the same as the ones that we have nowadays about the coronavirus. So this kind of helped me calm down right at the beginning.
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Absolutely. The key is to continue living a normal life. Just be more cautious but it’s not necessary to get all worried.
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Also having a peace of mind of having an emergency supply of food and supplies for about a month per person can help curb anxieties many may not think about. Panic can cause worse damage than whatever virus is happening at the moment. Plus having extra supplies is great for other scenarios such as bad weather conditions. So be prepared, kick up your healthy game and be aware.
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Agreed! Stockpile your basement can’t hurt
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