I’ve always thought of the adage “you are what you eat” in terms of physical food and the shape of our physical body. If we eat healthy food we are more likely to have a healthy body. If we eat junk… Yet it seems as if there may be much more to the old phrase than that. What about our media diet? How does it affect who we are as people? How does it affect us physically? I’m beginning to think that it may be much more substantial than many think.

A couple years ago, I went to a group psychotherapy conference where a keynote speaker said something to the effect of, “The self exists at the intersection of our internal neural network and our external social networks.” As a person fascinated by both neural networks and social networks, I really liked this idea and I’ve thought about how what is going on in our social networks affects our internal neural networks.

On a mailing list recently, a good friend talked about hearing Andrew Weil speak at “The Evolution of Psychotherapy Conference”. He suggested that to maintain one’s health one should stay away from the news. This brought an interesting response where one person responded quoting Pastor Martin Niemoller, “They came first for the communists…” We need to pay attention to the news, lest there be no one paying attention to the news when they come for us.

Yet what should we be paying attention to? In this world of constant partial attention on our social networks, of advertisers trying to grab our attention, perhaps even to repeat their message and help it go viral, it becomes harder to find what we really need to hear. This is perhaps most pronounced in the political entertainment industry with commentators breathlessly talking about what we need to fear in politics.

Fear has always been a great selling tool, whether it is fear that our smile won’t be bright enough and we won’t have any friends or fear that someone is going take what we cherish most, whether it be our guns, our right to make our own choices over our bodies, or something harder to nail down, like ‘freedom’.

Fear and the stress it produces can cause our bodies to produce cortisol, “the stress hormone”. Cortisol, in proper amounts is beneficial and can help blood pressure, memory, immune functioning and so on. Yet too much cortisol increases blood pressure and screws up our metabolism.

In the fight for attention, news organizations, advertisers, and perhaps even our friends on our social networks, feed our cortisol addiction in an effort to gain attention in this increasingly competitive attention economy. This is just not good for us. So, what do we do about it?

Cortisol is useful in a fight or flight situation. We need to find ways to get our cortisol in real fight or flight situations where we can act on the situation and then let it go. Even on American Idol, the fight or flight situation when our favorite star is chastised by the judges provides an opportunity to respond. Text your votes to… News reports that have suggestions about contacting elected officials provide an opportunity to respond. Yet neither example wants you to let it go afterwards. You need to stay tuned to keep your cortisol up.

There have also been discussions about blogs and anonymous comments on online newspaper articles. Much of what goes on there also seems to be feeding a cortisol addiction without any meaningful opportunities to do anything other than call our opponents Nazis, Socialists, or Communists.

Likewise, it seems that so much of prime time television is about feeding our cortisol addiction. Do you get your cortisol rush from Lost or 24? Is it good for you?

So to the mailing list discussion, I suggested that we need to think globally and act locally. We need to listen for news that we can do something about and then we need to act locally and move on. Beyond that, perhaps we need more opportunities to de-stress, to try and lower our cortisol levels and our addiction to cortisol.

What do you think? Does this make sense to you? What affects your cortisol levels, both for better and for worse?

Update: A friend on Facebook commented about this pointing to a very interesting podcast about what's happening in our brains during times of stress. For more information, check out Yale Stress Center. More food for thought...