I don’t know about you, but I am fed up of hearing bad news. After Brexit, Covid, all the political shenanigans, I’ve really had enough, you know. I follow my own advice that I often give to patients, and have taken a very long ‘news fast’ for the last year or so. I don’t watch, listen to, doom-scroll or read much news now at all, although I do still watch Politics Live most days with my lunch – maybe I should stop as half the time I’m chuntering at the telly!
But we have to also remember that bad news reporting sells papers – as they used to say; nowadays it’s more about getting clicks! Our brains are also ‘Teflon for bad news,’ part of our evolutionary survivalist brain settings; knowing what’s coming keeps us safer, of course.
But it’s really not that bad. WDDTY this week made this very point and shared some interesting facts from Private Eye magazine:
Every day, around 100,000 planes take off around the world—and they almost never crash. If newspapers and the media focused on the planes that took off and landed safely—and listed every single successful flight—people would soon tire of such an endless stream. So, only when a plane crashes does it become news—because it’s an exceptional event. This suggests the world is a far safer and friendlier place than you’d suppose from the news reports.
WDDTY
To illustrate the point, here’s some good news about health, courtesy of Private Eye magazine:
• A child born today has a 50 percent chance of living to 95
• Just 3 percent of people in the UK aged between 70 and 74 has dementia (and it’s just 11 percent by the time we reach the age of 84, and the rate is 30 percent among the 90- to 94-year-olds
• Less than 4 percent of people aged between 80 and 84 are in care homes, and even in the over-90s, only 20 percent are not living in their own homes.