Making Yourself Miserable Reading the News?

Huffington Post:

Does watching cable news, reading the newspaper or browsing websites (including this one) make you personally miserable? Chances are high that you’re making one critical mistake and likely adding to our societal woes in the process. The good news is that it’s fairly easy to fix this common mistake and in this process quickly boost your own inner joy.

It’s simple: be less partisan, less biased and less antagonistic toward your fellow human beings.

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As I wrote about extensively in The Bliss Experiment, our choices and outlook, whether positive or negative, greatly shape both our inward mental state and even our outward environment.

An amazing series of studies published in the journal Psychological Science demonstrated that between two groups of people with the same quality of eyesight, those who were encouraged to feel positive about their visual acuity (specifically the ability to see at a distance) scored better on eye exams than those who had negative beliefs about their ability. Think about that: both the pessimists and the optimists had the same physical capabilities and eye functionality, but those who believed they could see well really did see more. Optimism and pessimism literally changed the subjects’ perception of reality. Put another way, their beliefs changed their physical reality. Positivity literally helped them see more clearly.

Read the whole story: Huffington Post