The Story of Woineshet Zebene

Woineshet Zebene grew up in a rural area in Ethiopia where the customary way of getting a bride was for a young man and several of his friends to kidnap a girl and rape her, thereby making her unmarriageable to anyone except the one who deflowered her.

This happened to Woineshet when she was 13 years old. She was taken from her home in the middle of the night and repeatedly raped for two days.

In the time-honored tradition, if the boy was ever accused of rape, the court and the village elders would essentially say to the girl and her parents, “Look, he’s a nice boy. If you prosecute him for rape, he will be ruined. It will disrupt our society. So just go along with it and marry him.” Almost all the girls did.

But Woineshet did not, and her father backed her decision. She didn’t want to marry the boy and she thought the whole custom was wrong.

She sought an education.

She went on to become a lawyer and then returned home to change the custom through education — showing boys that these girls are human beings, that they have a right to choose, that rape is brutal and cruel, etc.

Believe it or not, the boys weren’t thinking that way. They were thinking that when they had a crush on a girl, the only way to make sure they married her and nobody else did, was to rape her and then offer to marry her to save her from a life of being shunned.

Over the decades, this logic had solidified into a custom.

But Woineshet destroyed the custom. A social value was overridden by an intellectual value (read more about different levels of values here). Whatever disruption it caused to the social structure was worth the gain in “rightness.” It isn’t right to force a girl to marry by rape.

“That’s not right” is a moral-intellectual principle, and it overrode a social value (that this is our custom and if you change it, you will upset the social order).

This is one of many excellent illustrations of overriding well-established social values with higher “intellectual” values in the book Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide and in a film by the Girl Effect.

Adam Khan is the author of Principles For Personal Growth, Slotralogy, Antivirus For Your Mind, and co-author with Klassy Evans of How to Change the Way You Look at Things (in Plain English). Subscribe to his blog here. You can email him here.

Why Does News Lean Toward the Negative?

People who work in the television business are under intense pressure. The competition is unbelievably stiff. In any given hour, a television show is competing with lots of other stations for your attention. When you're watching television — you or any other viewer — it's very easy to change the channel, right? You don't even have to get up out of your chair. A television show is not only competing with other shows, it is competing with anything else you might want to do: Go sailing, read a book, visit a friend.

If a station can't capture enough peoples' attention, the station loses advertising and they go out of business. So a top priority of any television producer is to prevent you from changing the channel. One of the most effective tricks a television producer can use is to scare you. Fear compels attention better than anything else. The threat of danger is captivating, arresting, mesmerizing.

When a station is thinking up ways to let you know about an upcoming program on healthy living, for example, they have a variety of possibilities. They could appeal to your natural desire to be healthier. They could appeal to your self-esteem, implying that watching their program proves you're a good person. And so on. Or they could threaten you with danger.

Here are two possible announcements of the same program; which is more compelling?

1) "Find out if your children are safe from this terrible disease."

2) "Get some health tips from a doctor."

The fear appeal is more upsetting, but it's more likely to get you to watch the program.

Other kinds of appeals work, of course, and television isn't all bad. But it is an important point of vulnerability. You are vulnerable to lamprey invasions (metaphor for pessimism, cynicism, and defeatism) when you watch television because producers and advertisers use fear to compel your attention. They even use certain kinds of voices to tell you about programs coming up. Listen to how the announcer tells you about an upcoming news program or drama. It sounds like he's telling you something of vital, life-saving importance. They do everything they can to make you feel you must watch the program.

In the Christmas movie, Scrooged, Frank Cross (Bill Murray) is a television producer. His staff shows him their latest ad for an upcoming Christmas special. Frank watches it and then gets angry at his staff. They protest: "People like the ad; it's getting a great response."

Frank bursts out, "That isn't good enough! They've got to be so scared to miss it! So terrified!"

Scrooged is a comedy. Frank's response is obviously a joke. But one of the things that makes a joke funny is the truth in it.

Producers and advertisers and television executives read about psychologists' experiments on what holds attention. Unfortunately, the threat of danger does very well in these tests. Our ancestors didn't survive by ignoring danger or potential danger. No animals could survive very long ignoring danger. So our emotional and perceptive systems are on stand-by alert for anything that seems threatening. Add to this the stiff competition between stations and what do you get? You get television stations that try harder and harder to scare you into watching their programs.

What do you think that does to your general perception of the world? What effect do you think it has on your world view?

Television is the most unprecedented point of vulnerability for lamprey invasions that has ever occurred. The television-watching population gets infected with pessimism, cynicism, and defeatism — against their will and without even supposing a single evil intention on the part of anyone.

I'm not saying there are no evil intentions in the television business. I'm sure there are, and I'm equally sure they're a minority. But even if a producer wanted to emphasize good news or create a positive attitude in viewers, or to simply slant the news in a less threatening way, what would happen? Imagine a viewer channel surfing. He'd find pleasant stuff on one channel, and gripping, compelling, threatening, can't-take-my-eyes-off-it stuff on another channel.

Guess which channel will have the most watchers over time (even against the watchers' will). Who will get more money from advertisers? Which station will eventually get taken off the air because it wasn't pulling in enough money from advertisers to support it?

After decades of this kind of competition, what we have are a lot of negative, alarmist, danger-oriented programs. Even some positive programs are advertised using the threat of danger. Television watchers are compelled by millions of years of natural selection to be taken in by it. Television programmers are no more likely to be evil than the rest of us. But like the rest of us, they need to pay their bills. To stay in business, they need to stay on the air. They need to get enough people watching their programs so they can have enough advertising money to keep going.

The result of all these ways of trying to exploit your most fundamental drive for survival is that you get the impression the world is a more dangerous place than it really is. You can easily get the impression things are getting worse, even when things are getting better.

News Infection

If you emphasize some points and play down trivial details when you're telling a story, it makes the story more interesting, more entertaining, or more attractive. Emphasizing some points and underplaying details is called "sharpening and leveling." Because of the pressures people in the media are under, and the fact that they are all competing with each other for your attention, they sharpen and level their stories fairly often, and the result is a misleading view of the world, broadcast to millions.

For example, a student at Duke University named Lee Fried gave an envelope to the president of the university. Supposedly the envelope contained a prediction about an important event.

A week later, the envelope was opened. Inside was a description of two 747 jet airliners that crashed into each other. The event had happened that week, killing 583 people. Astounding!

News media people interviewed Lee Fried. In the interviews, Fried told the interviewers that he was a magician and the "prophesy" was just a magic trick. The magician James Randi tried to find all the newspapers that covered the story. He found seventeen. Only one of those newspapers passed along the "trivial" detail that it was a magic trick.

In the process of making a story more compelling, sometimes stories fail to give an accurate impression of what really happened.

Along the same lines, Michael Kinsley, writing in Slate.com says U.S. citizens are suffering from a terrible sickness called social hypochondria. This is an unreasonable terror of horrible diseases and trends that are wiping out or traumatizing huge numbers of Americans. Child abuse, suicides, teen pregnancies, cloning, whatever. Americans are worried. Why? Is it because we're stupid? Gullible? Prone to anxiety? Or because we have enough wealth and leisure to watch enough television programming that results in the seemingly legitimate point of view that the world is a frightening, dangerous place?

I remember once asking thirty-four people I worked with whether they thought the world was going to be a better or a worse place a hundred years from now. Thirty-three said worse. I couldn't believe it.

If you get your information about the world primarily from the evening news, you'd definitely say "worse." If your main source of news is Scientific American, you'd definitely say "better." Why? Science is all about solving problems.

Think about the headlines you normally see in any given newspaper. The most common kind of headline says something terrible has happened or is happening or is about to happen. Contrast that with some headlines from a typical ScienceDaily (an email update on what scientists are working on) for the week of January 7th to 11th, 2002:

CANCER-FIGHTING DRUG MAY WORK IN PREVENTION AND TREATMENT

NEW CONTACT-LENS MATERIALS WILL REVOLUTIONIZE THE INDUSTRY, UT SOUTHWESTERN RESEARCHERS REPORT

MICROBE FIRST TO BREAK DOWN PCBS

PHYSICS RESEARCH SUGGESTS IT MIGHT BE POSSIBLE TO LENGTHEN BATTERY LIFE

CLINICAL TRIALS FOR "CYTOBRUSH" DETECTION TECHNIQUE SHOW PROMISE IN FIGHT AGAINST ORAL CANCER

NEW TREATMENT EXTENDS LIFE FOR PATIENTS WITH SMALL-CELL LUNG CANCER

PROTEIN POINTS THE WAY TO SALT-TOLERANT CROPS, PURDUE SCIENTISTS SAY

I didn't give you all the headlines for that issue. There were fifty in all. But you get the idea. A few were negative findings, some were neutral (about the composition of the sun or primordial air). But as you can see, the overall impression is that things are being found out and problems are being solved. Smart people are spending their time making the world a better place. That is an entirely different impression than you get from television news.

You're not just getting facts from news sources. You're getting a feeling about the world you live in, and often that feeling is not an accurate reflection of the world. The more you know about how it works, the easier it will be for you to protect yourself against a "pessimism infection."

When Newscasters Catastrophize For Profit

I was watching CNN'S "Situation Room" today. They were covering the story of the collapsed Minneapolis bridge. I try to avoid programs like that, but it was right in front of me when I was on an exercise machine. As much as I've ranted about the media's negative bias, I was still amazed. Every statement they made and every question they asked seemed overloaded with catastrophizing. They tried their best to make the worst of everything. Yes, it was an unfortunate event, but they made it as upsetting and disturbing from as many different angles as they could.

The word "catastrophize" was coined by cognitive-behavioral therapists to describe one of the errors people make in their thinking that makes them upset needlessly. It is a style of thinking used by people who suffer from anxiety disorders and depression. It leads to unnecessary misery. Catastrophizing makes mountains out of molehills.

Remember one of the ways to protect yourself from a pessimism infection is to question the motives of the source of your information. A news producer's motives may not be evil, but they may not be in your best interests. Newscasters and news producers catastrophize to make a story more dramatic, or to find the alarming angle to a story. They're trying to get your attention. They're trying to get you to keep watching and not change the channel. They're trying to get their story on the air rather someone else's story.

In other words, they are motivated by ambition and competition, which is fine for them but when you watch it and listen to it, you are tainted by it because while you watch, you are not only getting facts, you are also getting a perspective. You're getting a point of view. In this case, you're getting a cynically pessimistic worldview that shines a spotlight on every possible negative, alarming, upsetting angle they can find.

I've talked a lot about thought-mistakes, otherwise known as "cognitive distortions." These are mistakes all of us make. The reason we make these kinds of mistakes in our thinking is that the human brain is wired up a certain way, which makes us 1) very intelligent compared to other animals, and 2) prone to certain kinds of mistakes.

Researchers and therapists have listed these thought-mistakes in various ways, and all the lists cover the same ground but divide it up differently. Catastrophizing is a combination of overgeneralization, black-or-white thinking, exaggerating, false implications, and negative guessing.

In other words, these catastrophizing news programs are literally sick. Mentally unhealthy. For your own sanity, I strongly urge you to stay away from them, no matter how tempting it may be to watch.

You may be surprised that something so negative could be "tempting." But our brains are tuned to survival. And potentially dangerous information is keenly sought by your brain. If something seems scary or upsetting, your brain will pay attention, and that's exactly why these news programs use it. So it "sucks you in," sometimes against your will. Your brain overrides your conscious will if survival seems to be at stake, just as you cannot kill yourself by holding your own breath.

So if those news programs are in the vicinity, you almost can't help but watch. They are too tempting in a negative sort of way. So don't allow them in your vicinity if you can help it. If you want to find out what's going on in the world without having to be exposed to the catastrophizing pessimism, I highly recommend The Week. It is not "positive news," but it doesn't go out of its way to alarm, anger, or frighten you. It only informs you.

The media is one form of negative bias you are exposed to. Find out what the other three are and what you can do about them by clicking here.

Adam Khan is the author of Antivirus For Your Mind: How to Strengthen Your Persistence and Determination and Feel Good More Often and co-author with Klassy Evans of How to Change the Way You Look at Things (in Plain English). Follow his podcast, The Adam Bomb.

How News Distorts Reality

Frightening, alarming, bad stuff sells. Our brains are especially attuned to danger. The people who sell news know this, at least intuitively, and use it against you for their own benefit.

Your attention gets arrested by an alarming headline, and arrested attention sells newspapers, so any paper that tries to sell newspapers without alarming headlines is out-competed by newspapers with alarming headlines.

During the first half of the 1990's, the murder rate went down, but during that same period, media coverage of murders tripled! The headline of a small child who gets murdered works to get us to buy the paper, which is good for the newspaper people BUT it leaves you depressed. It is a pessimistic communication that makes your view of life worse than it is and makes you less willing to act.

The overselling of bad news (and underselling of good news) is darkening the viewpoint of people at large, which actually creates worse conditions, which leads to more bad news!

The REAL world is not in a magazine, no matter how realistic. The magazine is a distorted view of reality. In the example given in The Profit of Doom, Colors Magazine depicted a man in a polyester jump suit standing on a well-manicured lawn with a nice house in the background, and he was feeding a tidbit to his well-groomed poodle. The other picture was five or six young boys, dirty and ragged, living in a hole in the street.

This is a distortion. The rich guy was perfectly rich, the poor kids were perfectly poor. The magazines that flaunt everything that's terrible in the world are out after your money. Other magazines, like the Christian Science Monitor, win awards because they care first about journalism and trying to accurately relay the truth. Of course they make money, but they don't sacrifice reality to sell copy.

The tabloids that sell "news" about things like an alien mating with the ghost of Elvis constantly sacrifice reality to sell news. The eleven o'clock news isn't as blatant, but they also distort reality to sell news.

There are billions of people and billions of stories to be told. Yes, terrible things happen, but so do magnificent feats of courage and great love. The bad-news hawkers are ruining your attitude. And the horror about that is that in the real world, the world you find yourself alive in right here before you, in this real world, this actual real live world where your butt sits, in this world, a bad attitude means less good gets done in your life. Not only did you lose the moments absorbing the bad news, your state after absorption leads to less achievement, less love, less happiness, less health...less life. Bad moods rob us of energy and drain all who interact with us, so they also get less done and so on.

what you can do about it

Alarm and fear sells papers and gets people to watch the program, which makes the station more money from the advertisers. Our perceptual apparatus wasn't designed to deal with news. It isn't equipped to handle the woes of the far corners of the earth. The unfortunate incidents of our own life, including the people close to us, is about all we can deal with well.

Merely seeing a news story about a tragedy makes that kind of incident seem more prevalent, more common, than it really is. If we only went by what we actually saw in real life, the world would not seem very dangerous.

Here's what you can do about it:

Stop tuning into any news that makes you feel helpless, distrusting, fearful, hopeless, and that doesn't give you the sense that you can do something about it. If you want to "stay up on the events of the world," try to find sources that don't create pessimism.

Pick the global problem that most bothers you and do something about it. If you think there's nothing you can do, then first cure yourself of your own pessimism. The resources on this web site can help you (see links below).

Share this page with people you know. And if someone emails you some bad news, tell the person about this page.

If a friend of yours seems pessimistic, help her or him become more optimistic. Optimism does not include burying your head in the sand or in the clouds. It is a balanced look at reality. It is practical and effective. As I say in the second chapter of Self-Help Stuff That Works:

In a study by Lisa Aspinwall, PhD, at the University of Maryland, subjects read health-related information on cancer and other topics. She discovered that optimists spent more time than pessimists reading the severe risk material and they remembered more of it.

“These are people,” says Aspinwall, “who aren’t sitting around wishing things were different. They believe in a better outcome, and that whatever measures they take will help them to heal.” In other words, instead of having their heads in the clouds, optimistic people look. They do more than look, they seek. They aren’t afraid to look into the situation because they’re optimistic.

Optimism will give you the strength to confront difficult realities with open eyes. Optimism has the potential to be even more contagious than pessimism. If nothing else, optimists tend to have more energy. But there is something else: Optimism is more ethical. It is more life-giving, more enjoyable. It is more right.

If you would like some information about becoming optimistic, check out the Attitude section of the book, Self-Help Stuff That Works.

If you would like some information about how to help other people become more optimistic, read the People section of Self-Help Stuff That Works.

Go to the following sites and get the email addresses of your representatives and senators and put them in your address book, and write to them now and then. Urge them to vote on the bills you feel strongly about. Let them know what you think. This is an easy way to have an effect. The important thing is to do something about what you learn. This prevents you feeling like a helpless victim, which is the end result of watching or reading mainstream news. Feeling helpless is bad for your health and impairs your ability to accomplish in this world.

Learn more. Take action.

Adam Khan is the author of Antivirus For Your Mind: How to Strengthen Your Persistence and Determination and Feel Good More Often and co-author with Klassy Evans of How to Change the Way You Look at Things (in Plain English). Follow his podcast, The Adam Bomb.

Profit of Doom: Why the Media Has a Negative Bias

It started out innocently enough. I asked a friend of mine whether he thought the world would be a better or a worse place a hundred years from now. "Worse," he said. We had a short conversation about it and then went on about our business.

A few days later, he said he wanted me to look at a magazine called Colors. Published in Italy, it illustrated some of our global problems graphically. For example, on the back cover were two pictures: One was a man in a polyester jump suit standing on a well-manicured lawn with a nice house in the background, and he was feeding a tidbit to his well-groomed poodle. The other picture was five young boys, dirty and ragged, living in a hole in a street.

The magazine did a good job contrasting how wealthy many of us are in industrialized countries with how horribly many people live in developing countries.

Later, my friend asked me how I liked the magazine.

I replied, "It was disturbing."

"It's real!" he said with a kind of I'm-not-afraid-of-facing-the-truth-like-most-people self-righteousness.

What disturbed me was not the reality of it. I'm well aware how miserably much of the world lives compared to how even a poor American lives. What bothered me was that the "information" in the magazine was delivered in a context of hopelessness. There wasn't any indication anywhere in the magazine that you, the reader, could do anything about it. "The world is a horrible place," it seemed to say, "and you are helpless to effect it."

If the information had been delivered in the spirit of, "Here's some bad news, but here's what you can do about it," the same information might have been motivating.

But if a reader feels helpless about global problems or thinks the situation is hopeless, the reader would be better off not reading it, and I'll tell you why.

Studies have shown that most television news leaves the viewer depressed because it is primarily bad news that the viewer can do nothing about. The problems shown on the screen are too big or too far away or too permanent to do anything about. This sort of news nurtures a pessimistic view of the world.

In an experiment, a research team edited news programs into three categories: Negative, neutral, or upbeat. People were randomly assigned to watch one category of news. The ones who watched the negative news became more depressed, more anxious about the world in general, and had a greater tendency to exaggerate the magnitude or importance of their own personal worries.

The point of view from which news is presented is similar to the negative bias of depressives. It is a fact that feelings of helplessness and hopelessness cause health problems. And studies have shown that the greater majority of network news is about people with no control over their tragedy. Christopher Peterson, one of the first researchers to show that pessimism negatively effects health, said, "What the evening news is telling you is that bad things happen, they hit at random, and there's nothing you can do about it." That is a formula for pessimism, cynicism, and their inevitable result: anxiety and depression.

In one study of network news, seventy-one percent of the news stories were about people who had very little control over their fate. This is neither an accurate nor a helpful perspective on the world. Highly trained professionals scour the world to find stories like that and the way the stories are presented gives the impression that those kinds of events are more common than they really are.

The Center for Media and Public Affairs did a study on network coverage of murder. Between 1990 and 1995, the murder rate in the U.S. went down thirteen percent. But during that same period, network coverage of murders increased three hundred percent. If you happened to watch a lot of news during that period, you would probably have gotten the impression that murders in America were escalating out of control, when in fact the situation was improving.

Pessimism produces a feeling of helplessness. Pessimism leads very directly to depression and anxiety, mild or severe. This is not just an opinion. Lots of research has been done on this subject. A tremendous amount of evidence exists and it all points in the same direction. Pessimism makes people less capable of acting effectively, even in their own best interests. It produces apathy, hopelessness, and lethargy.

Pessimism is bad for your health, and bad for the planet because pessimism not only saps motivation to take constructive action, it is contagious.

Raw, in-your-face reality is fine but is only halfway there. The other half is what can be done about it? If nothing can be done about it, why tell anyone? If something can be done about it, why not give that news too? It is a crime against humanity to do otherwise.

Because of the shock value and attention-getting power of tragedy, horror, and cruel irony, a pessimistic, unconstructive attitude is infecting the minds of more and more people.


A SOURCE OF ADRENALINE

A survey by the Harvard School of Public Health found that although a person's risk of getting seriously injured in a car accident is only about five percent, most people believed it was more like fifty percent. Men thought they had a one in three chance of getting prostrate cancer, but it is actually more like one in ten. Women thought they had a forty percent chance of getting breast cancer when actually it's more like ten percent. And for diabetes, HIV and strokes, most people thought they had twice the chance as they actually do. That's a lot of unnecessary and unwarranted worry and anxiety.

Where do you think we get these worries? Newscasters have a vested interest in scaring the bejeezus out of us.

Many forms of media besides television use fear to capture your attention or motivate you to buy. Why? Because it works. A scary sentence or image arrests attention better than an interesting, helpful, or entertaining sentence or image.

Our brains were not carefully designed. They weren't designed at all. They evolved and are not perfect in any sense of the word. The human brain evolved in a world where it was obviously adaptive to respond to potentially dangerous information with increased alertness. During the millions of years of our evolution, there were no advertisers or news media. If there had been, we might have evolved some defense against them. But we haven't. So we have a built-in reaction to potential danger. News media and advertisers exploit those natural instincts — they use our instincts against us for their selfish purposes.

This is not an indictment against the people in the news business. This is just a description of how things work out when you have different channels competing against each other for viewers and advertisers. There are quality programs and plenty of journalists with integrity, bless them, but they can't stay on the air unless they compete successfully against the competition.

You can fight it if you want. Write your congressmen, boycott products, etc. But you know what? It will continue anyway because it will evolve on the basis of "survival of the fittest."

To see how this works, let's imagine a major ban on scaring people with advertisements. Imagine it becomes illegal. What would happen? Some would use other appeals, as many do now. But others would simply use scare tactics more subtly and even though it was subtle, it would still have more attention-arresting power than other appeals, so it would bring in money to the company that uses it, thus producing more offspring than its rivals (more clients for the advertising company). This new mutant would spread and propagate, just like bacteria exposed to an antibiotic that kills all but a few organisms which just happen to have a little resistance to the antibiotic. The drug has killed off the mutant's rivals, leaving the field clear to reproduce without competition.

What good does it do you to know this? Simply this: You subject yourself voluntarily to adrenaline-inducing sources when you watch the news or watch TV with commercials or read a newspaper. And you can reduce your general perception of the world as a scary place by spending more time dealing with reality — solid reality like your neighborhood, your friends, your real life — and less time in the artificially-selected, artificially-created, designed-for-impact world of the news media and advertisements.

Specifically, I recommend canceling your subscription to the newspapers, not listening to news on the car radio, never watching television news, watching rented movies rather than TV, and getting your news from a clean source (for example, I use Google's news service — I tell it what kind of news I want and that's all they send me, ad-free).

I've had many debates with friends of mine about the virtues of "knowing what's going on in the world." It is of doubtful value. It is a common belief, almost as universal as was "people can't fly" before the invention of airplanes. If you have that belief, I invite you to really examine its merit and I think you'll find it comes up short. It is probably another fear-tactic used by the news media: "Something bad will happen to you if you don't know what's going on in the world."

I haven't read a newspaper or watched TV news or listened to it on the radio for about 18 years now, except for very few brief glimpses, and nothing bad has happened to me. And something good has happened: I have saved myself from being steeped in a world view that makes the world a scarier, more depressing, and more dangerous place than it really is.

Keeping abreast of current events gives workmates something to talk about besides the weather, but that's not much of a benefit, considering the cost of living your life in a frightening world, which from what I've seen is the end-product of years of "keeping up on the news."

Because of the constant use of scare-tactics to arrest attention — to get you to watch channel six's news rather than channel five's — the end result after years of this is a general world view that would never have formed if the only thing you dealt with was the real world you live in.

You don't need it. Give your adrenal glands a break.

Adam Khan is the author of Self-Reliance, Translated and Principles For Personal Growth. Follow his podcast, The Adam Bomb.

An Unusual Way to Become More Optimistic

Watch the evening news a few weeks in a row and you’re likely to feel less optimistic about the future of humankind. The majority of the stories are about tragedies and mistakes and cruel deeds. For the most part, they aren’t making these up. Tragedies and mistakes and cruel deeds happen every day all over the world.

But that’s not all that happens. Many other kinds of events happen every day and if you got as much exposure to those, you would naturally become more optimistic.

But how can you get news about the millions of smart people all over the world successfully solving important problems? How can you find out about the universities and governments and wealthy private donors pouring their money into ending poverty, curing diseases, and making important discoveries? If you had a source of news like that, it would be fairly easy to become more optimistic.

I’ve got good news for you: There is such a source: Scientific American Magazine. No, they didn’t pay me to write this. They don’t mean to be optimistic, and they cover important problems of the world, but always in the context of what is being accomplished and what is being discovered.

And because it is a peer-reviewed scientific journal (which means their fellow scientists are scrutinizing and double-checking their discoveries to see if they’re really true), you will find almost no thought-mistakes. This almost guarantees optimism. Thought-mistakes are the root source of pessimism, cynicism, and defeatism. Read more about that here.

If you get your news from the radio, television, newspapers, or online sources, your chances are very high you’re getting your news from a source that is competing with other news sources to capture your attention. They rely on advertising for their income, and to make money, they need an audience. They must capture and hold your attention. And what captures and holds attention best is tragedy, mistakes, and cruel deeds. That’s just how our brains are wired up, for survival reasons. News sources exploit this natural way our brains function.

They look at the events of the world and try to find events they can cover that will capture and hold your attention, and then they try to present it in the most compelling possible way. And what captures and holds and compels best is whatever makes you feel endangered, worried, or angry.

Keep exposing yourself to news like this, and your point of view about the world becomes skewed. It gives you a generally pessimistic, defeatist, cynical outlook. This outlook is becoming “normal.”

But even if you watch the news, you can balance it out with Scientific American. They are trying to do something entirely different. Yes, they also make money with advertisements, but their audience is made up of scientists and people interested in scientific development. Because of this focus, the requirements to capture and hold the audience are quite different. Scientists are not necessarily more optimistic, but the unintended side-effect of covering stories about the scientific endeavor is its readers will naturally and spontaneously become more optimistic.

I’ve got a few issues here in front of me. Besides covering things like astronomers’ recent discoveries and new discoveries in medicine, there are stories like these:

The Next 20 Years in Microchips: Designers are pushing all the boundaries to make integrated circuits smaller, faster and cheaper.

Boundaries for a Healthy Planet: Scientists have begun to quantify red-alert levels for environmental problems.

Regaining Balance with Bionic Ears: Electronic implants in the inner ear may one day help patients suffering from disabling unsteadiness.

The Rise of Instant Wireless Networks: Wireless networks that form on the fly bring communications to the most foreboding environments.

A Plan to Defeat Neglected Tropical Diseases: A new global initiative may break the cycle of poverty leading to sickness and more poverty.

These are major, important news items you’re not likely to find in normal news sources. They’re just not scary enough. Or tragic enough. Or upsetting enough.

So let’s say you accept the idea that you could become more optimistic if you read science magazines. There are several major scientific magazines, so why do I recommend Scientific American, specifically? Because some scientific magazines are not written for laymen and are difficult to read. Some are sensationalized and focused on future possibilities. Scientific American is the one you want.

I’ve subscribed to Scientific American for about 26 years now, and what I’ve come to appreciate is the reliability of its content. They don’t play around. They don’t get lost in wild speculation. They don’t cover things that are not important. They don’t cover urban legends as if they were real stories. It’s solid. You can count on it.

When you’re trying to cure yourself of pessimism and cynicism, one way is to try to convince yourself of positive thoughts. This doesn’t work very well. If you don’t believe something, it has no impact on your level of optimism. And trying to make yourself believe something is an exercise in futility because the very effort of “making yourself” says to yourself very directly, “I don’t believe this is true.”

A better way to become more optimistic is to disabuse yourself of false negative notions. Read more about that here. Why is it better? Because you’re standing on solid ground. You’re committed to truth and reality. You’re not trying to live in the clouds or stick your head in the sand. You’re not trying to avoid any facts.

Regularly reading Scientific American can do this for you. But don’t take my word for it. Conduct your own scientific experiment. Take an optimism test (by following this link) and then subscribe for a year. Read something from every issue. And at the end of the year, take the optimism test again. I think you’ll see a tremendous improvement.

Your general outlook on life has an impact on your health, on your relationships, on your ability to be effective in the world, and on your day-to-day mood. Of all the ways of changing your outlook and becoming more optimistic, reading Scientific American is the easiest and most interesting.

Adam Khan is the author of Antivirus For Your Mind: How to Strengthen Your Persistence and Determination and Feel Good More Often and co-author with Klassy Evans of How to Change the Way You Look at Things (in Plain English). Follow his podcast, The Adam Bomb.

A Compelling Source of Bad Moods You Can Easily Avoid

It started out innocently enough. I asked a friend of mine whether he thought the world would be a better or a worse place 100 years from now. Worse, he said.

We had a little discussion about his answer and then went on about our business. A few days later, he said he wanted me to look at a magazine called Colors. Published in Italy, it illustrated some of our global problems graphically. For example, on the back cover were two pictures: One was a man in a polyester jump suit standing on a well-manicured lawn with a nice house in the background, and he was feeding a tidbit to his well-groomed poodle.

The other picture was five or six young boys, dirty and ragged, living in a hole in the street.

The magazine did a good job contrasting how wealthy many of us are in industrialized countries with how horribly many people live in developing countries.

Later, my friend asked me how I liked the magazine.

I replied, It was disturbing.

It's REAL! he said with a self-righteous tone that said "I'm not a person who is afraid of facing the truth."

And that was the beginning of my crusade against bad news. What disturbed me was not the reality of it. I'm well aware of how miserably much of the world lives compared to how even a poor American lives. What bothered me was that the "information" in the magazine was delivered in a context of hopelessness. There wasn't one tiny scrap of any indication anywhere in the magazine that you, the reader, can do anything about it. The world is a horrible place, it seemed to say, and you are helpless to influence it.

If the information had been delivered in the spirit of Here's some bad news, but here's what you can do about it, the same information would have been motivating rather than demoralizing.

But if the reader feels helpless about it or thinks the situation is hopeless, the magazine did harm, and the reader would have been better off without it. Studies have shown that most television news leaves the viewer depressed because it is primarily bad news that the viewer can do nothing about. The problems are too big or too far away or too permanent to be able to change. This sort of news encourages a pessimistic view of the world.

Pessimism produces a feeling of helplessness and hopelessness. In other words, pessimism can lead to depression. This is not just an opinion. Lots of research has been done on this subject. A tremendous amount of evidence exists and it all points in the same direction. Pessimism makes people less capable of acting effectively, even in their own best interests. It produces apathy and lethargy. It makes people give up.

Pessimism is bad for your health, bad for your relationships, and bad for the planet (because pessimism not only stops constructive action, but IT IS CONTAGIOUS).

Raw, in-your-face reality is good, but only halfway there. The other half is what can be done about it? If nothing can be done about it, why tell anyone? If something can be done about it, why not give that news too? It is a crime against humanity to do otherwise.

Because of the shock value and attention-getting power of tragedy, horror, and cruel irony, a pessimistic, unconstructive attitude is infecting the minds of more and more people.

It must be stopped. And you can help. Here's how:

1. Stop tuning into any news that makes you feel helpless, distrusting, fearful, hopeless, and that doesn't give you the sense that you can do something about it. If you want to "stay up on the events of the world," try to find sources that don't create pessimism.

2. Pick the global problem that most bothers you and do something about it. If you think there's nothing you can do, then first cure yourself of your own pessimism.

3. Share this article with people you know. And if someone tells you some bad news, tell the person about this information.

4. Read some good news.

5. If a friend of yours seems pessimistic, help her or him become more optimistic. Optimism does not include burying your head in the sand or in the clouds. It is a balanced look at reality. It is practical and effective. As I say in the second chapter of Self-Help Stuff That Works:

In a study by Lisa Aspinwall, PhD, at the University of Maryland, subjects read health-related information on cancer and other topics. She discovered that optimists spent more time than pessimists reading the severe risk material and they remembered more of it.

“These are people,” says Aspinwall, “who aren’t sitting around wishing things were different. They believe in a better outcome, and that whatever measures they take will help them to heal.” In other words, instead of having their heads in the clouds, optimistic people look. They do more than look, they seek. They aren’t afraid to look into the situation because they’re optimistic.

Optimism will give you the strength to confront difficult realities with open eyes. Optimism has the potential to be even more contagious than pessimism. If nothing else, optimists tend to have more energy. Optimism is very good for your mood.

But there is something else: Optimism is more ethical. It is more life-giving, more enjoyable. It is more right. Pay more attention to the news you bring into your mind and you will enjoy a healthy good mood more often.

Adam Khan is the author of Self-Help Stuff That Works and Cultivating Fire: How to Keep Your Motivation White Hot. Follow his podcast, The Adam Bomb.

Predictors of Doom Are Notoriously Wrong

In a Newsweek article, Daniel Gross surveys America's economic recovery from the Great Recession and explains some of the elements that helped.

He doesn't try to explain why so many experts (and people who should know better) seem so hell-bent on scaring us with dire predictions of the future. But he doesn't really have to, because I've already explained it so eloquently here: Why is News so Negative?

But he does a beautiful job of highlighting the kind of pessimism that ruins so many perfectly good moods. Here's an excerpt from the article:

The current pessimism is part of a historical economic inferiority complex. To hear some critics tell it, things have been going south in this country since the cruel winter in Jamestown, Va., in 1609, when most of the settlers died.

And for most of the 19th century, America was the immature, uncouth cousin that required huge infusions of European capital to build its railroads. The U.S. emerged from World War II as the globe's industrial, financial, and technological leader by default—the rest of the developed world had destroyed much of its industrial capacity. Yet Americans were insecure about their rising status.

In the 1920s, many Progressives returned from Mussolini's Italy convinced that Il Duce had a superior economic model. During the New Deal, bankers and industrialists earnestly fretted that Franklin Roosevelt would ruin the nation's prospects for growth by establishing a new safety net. The U.S.S.R.'s launch of the sputnik satellite in 1957 inspired fears that the Soviet Union's presumed technological lead would allow it to triumph in the Cold War.

And in the 1980s, Japan threatened the U.S. with exports of electronics and cars and by buying trophy properties like Rockefeller Center and the Pebble Beach golf resort. "The Cold War is over, and Japan won," as Sen. Paul Tsongas put it in 1992.

Pessimism fixates attention better, so those are the predictions that get published. Find out why: The Normal Course of Events Will Almost Inevitably Lead to a Pessimistic View of the World.

The Newsweek article is worth reading. Check it out: The Story of America's Amazing Comeback.

Good News You Probably Haven't Heard

The following is an excerpt from an article by Nicholas Kristof, originally published in the New York Times:

Students in Harper, Liberia.

We journalists are a bit like vultures, feasting on war, scandal and disaster. Turn on the news, and you see Syrian refugees, Volkswagen corruption, dysfunctional government.

Yet that reflects a selection bias in how we report the news: We cover planes that crash, not planes that take off. Indeed, maybe the most important thing happening in the world today is something that we almost never cover: a stunning decline in poverty, illiteracy and disease.

Huh? You’re wondering what I’ve been smoking! Everybody knows about the spread of war, the rise of AIDS and other diseases, the hopeless intractability of poverty.

One survey found that two-thirds of Americans believed that the proportion of the world population living in extreme poverty has almost doubled over the last 20 years. Another 29 percent believed that the proportion had remained roughly the same.

When 95 percent of Americans are completely unaware of a transformation of this magnitude, that reflects a flaw in how we journalists cover the world — and I count myself among the guilty. Consider:

• The number of extremely poor people (defined as those earning less than $1 or $1.25 a day, depending on who’s counting) rose inexorably until the middle of the 20th century, then roughly stabilized for a few decades. Since the 1990s, the number of poor has plummeted.

• In 1990, more than 12 million children died before the age of 5; this toll has since dropped by more than half.

• More kids than ever are becoming educated, especially girls. In the 1980s, only half of girls in developing countries completed elementary school; now, 80 percent do.

Read the whole article here: The Most Important Thing, and It's Almost a Secret.