So, what’s in the news? This is an interesting question since I talk about and demonstrate at my Virtual and Live Keynotes and Programs the power of positive thinking and how it affects your life. You can check this out on the video on my website where I demonstrate the Power of Positive Thinking. Go to www.Teplitz.com and scroll down to the second video.
It turns out the situation where we focus on the negative is worse than I thought according to a website called Goodable (which you can find in the app store), which aims to publish positive news stories. They did a story, which is quite interesting, on some research they did on the number of negative stories reported at the world’s top news sites.
They focused their research on only the biggest news sites, which included: Apple, Google, Yahoo, ABC and CNN. Together, these news sites have over a billion visitors per day. Here’s what they found:
Of the top 30 news stories on Apple, only two were about positive things in the world. Just two. Their top headlines were about flooding and Ukraine.
Of Google’s top 34 news stories, only ONE was about anything positive. Think about that. In a world with 8 billion people and amazing things happening everyday Google only had one positive thing in their top 30 stories.
Yahoo was only marginally better as only four out of their top 50 stories were positive, which is just 8%.
Overall, they found that the total percentage of negative news was 94.8%.
To be sure that it wasn’t just due to what was happening that particular day, they ran the same analysis the next day, and the results were 93.1% negative news.
The problem for all of us is that news is all around us.
The Goodable’s researcher’s conclusion is that the negativity in the news is everywhere and the effect it has on our mental health as well as our political and social system is catastrophic (their word).
The reason this happens is because of our survival mechanism. Our five senses are always alert as to what’s threatening our survival. We’re always looking around for the saber tooth tiger, even when we are not aware of it and even if you know it’s not there.
Focusing on the negative feeds this survival instinct. Which means we need to consciously focus on the positive. And I know there are positive things happening all the time, yet the impression we are left with is that everything is going to pot.
You might want to check the Goodable website out. Another site that has at least one report every day on multiple good things that are happening is on the website DailyKos.com.
So…focus on the positive and not the negative!
(Reported DailyKos.com)
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