Hurricane Irene (or, why a restricted media diet is a good thing)

It's one thing to be prepared. And so staying tuned to the news and making sure you have the latest information is important, especially in the event of an emergency (or a Pending Emergency, as this storm really turned out to be). It's another thing all together to continually bombard yourself with images and information that serve to do nothing but raise your blood pressure and anxiety levels. And I don't think it's actually the media's responsibility to monitor how much of the information you take in. That's your call. (Would I like it better if the news channels weren't fear-mongering for ratings? Yes, yes I would. But it's kind of their job to get ratings, right?)

I survived hurricane Irene easily, as did virtually all of my friends, so it's easy for me to be fairly blithe about this. But there was so much build up, so much tension before the actual storm that I started to get worried even though my apartment (and the apartment where I weathered the storm) were not in a threat zone. I made sure we took necessary precautions -- had water on hand, secured items on the roof, etc. -- and then that we turned off the TV. We checked in periodically, just to see if anything had changed, if there was any chance we'd be directly hit or otherwise affected, but as soon as the news looped back around to information we already knew, we turned it off.

Same thing with facebook. Some of my friends online were posting nothing but terrifying updates about the death toll or the misery of the flooding. And I'm not saying they shouldn't post those things, especially because they were true. Facebook can be a good way to get information shared. But I'm saying that I should be careful about how much of it I take in -- especially when the cause of the drama is something that I can't do anything about.

So should we all just sit around and be ignorant? No, of course not. But monitoring how useful the information is that we're processing and balancing that with how anxious it makes us feel is important. And we'll all have different levels of acceptability.

I think people like a little bit of drama in their lives. It helps to make us feel alive. And so a storm like this can provide us with that little bit of adrenaline. But adrenaline, not burnt on some task (like fighting or fleeing, which it was created for) can turn into stress and be quite harmful to our bodies. And the bodies of our friends and families. And we forget this.

So it's your choice as to whether or not you look at the Glenn Beck article that called Irene a blessing. (Yikes!) And it's your choice -- if you read it, how much do you read? (Two paragraphs.) And it's your choice -- you can close that window and focus instead on something where you really can make a difference. Like calling a friend. Helping a neighbor. That kind of thing.