A little back story first. I do not require a lot of sleep. I never have. Most nights I get between five and six hours of sleep. This is a good thing, too, because I battle with insomnia as well. There have been times in my life where I may get an hour or two of sleep for weeks at a time. I’ve taken medicine. I’ve tried herbal remedies. Nothing works.

I did find, though, that part of the reason is I’m too busy. When i get that busy, my mind doesn’t have time to do anything. It can’t process or be creative. That and the fact that I was extremely overweight were a bad combination when it comes to trying to sleep. Fast forward. I have lost 50 pounds and I try to purposely allow my brain to be creative (blogging, podcasting, etc) and my insomnia has been much better.

Something else you should know is I am not a news person. I never have been. When I scroll through Twitter and see a headline that peaks my interest, I go and ask someone at work (who watches the news religiously) what’s going on. That’s the extent of my news consumption.

There are two times I can remember paying attention to the news for a while. The first was in September of 2001. After the attack on 9/11, I was glued to the TV for a while. I say a while because, the truth is, I couldn’t take a lot of it. Watching those planes slam into the World Trade Center over and over again was too much to handle at times.

The second time has been the past month during this pandemic. I find myself reading and watching everything I could get my hands on. It was becoming compulsive. I was checking my 401K and checking to see what the stock market was doing. I wanted to know how many new cases there were. Did anyone else in my area contract the virus? I wanted to know.

Two things happened. My stress levels started spiking. I could feel it. I was anxious and worried about things. Second, my insomnia started making an appearance again. There were nights where I would fall asleep and then wake up for hours in the middle of the night. I didn’t put two and two together until a week and a half ago. I realized what was happening and made a conscious decision to stop watching the news. I didn’t need to know what was going on that bad.

I decided to go back to my previous way of doing business. If I see something on Twitter that peaks my interest, I’ll ask a friend. They can fill me in. It’s worked for me for years. Why try and fix what isn’t broken, right?

Now, that being said, I will continue watching SGN.

What John Krasinski is doing each week on this YouTube channel is genius. With all the bad going on in the world, we all cand use Some Good News right now. So, stop the presses. Put down paper. Don’t get tangled up in the news. Well, unless it’s Some Good News.