Ignore all the headlines

I think I spend too much time reading the headlines, especially in the category of health news. If I believed them:

• I will get the flu because it is rampant across the country
• The cure for many things can be found in some obscure arctic bacteria
• Booze is so bad for you, you could poison yourself easily.
• Pain killers are now the street drug of choice.
• Our phones are suffocating us.
• Cancer is due to back luck.
• The cure for some obscure form of cancer will be found shortly.

I am so done with all that. I am going to be healthier this year and am promising myself, I will stop  bouncing through the news headlines. We know Dr. Google doesn't know anything. So we should also assume that Dr Internet knows nothing.

Emotionally, grabbing at headlines can be very stressful. The yo-yo effect of the constant ups and downs are significant. Its sort of like scanxiety at a lesser level. I need to take more control of more levels of my life, as I have blogged about before, and this is just another one.

With bad medical diagnoses, we tend to grab at straws looking for the magic cure. Then we develop the bad habit of following anything we can find - usually ending at disappointment - and keep repeating the process because it offered us a small glimmer of hope however fleeting.

So I am going to stop reading the over-hyped headlines that offer false hope and start looking for real information. I can't live on false hopes and the ensuing roller coaster.