Tim Geithner? Who’s that?
Today my topic has been anxiety and the economy. I don’t know anyone who isn’t at least a little anxious about how things are going. For months we’ve been hearing about banks crashing, the auto industry failing, retirement accounts shrinking, and hundreds of thousands of jobs vanishing. And that’s not all. Two wars, climate change, global unrest, and…wait for it…swine flu!
All of this reminds me of a conversation I had the other week with my business coach, a woman who has built a small business herself and advises me well. I said something like, “I’m afraid of hearing what Tim Geithner has to say whenever I turn on the radio.” She looked at me blankly and said, “Tim Geithner? Who’s that?” She honestly didn’t know.
And maybe you don’t either. If not, that’s good! That means you’re not listening to too much bad economic news. My business coach helped me see that it’s a bad idea to be so plugged into the news cycles. It drives up anxiety. It distracts. It nags. Don’t do it! In her defense, she said she had heard of Tim Geithner. She wasn’t completely unplugged from our current economic crisis. But she had kept the main thrust of her energy elsewhere.
All of this reminded me of a college friend who liked to go on fasts–not food fasts, but news fasts, reading fasts, television fasts. “I’m not reading this week,” she’d say. No newspapers, magazines, books…nothing. “What about street signs?” I would tease. “Nope. Not even those,” she’d say, unflustered. (That’s easy enough: combine your reading fast with a driving fast, and you’re set.) Her purpose was to find out how much of her life was caught up in all of those things. It was always a large amount.
For me, I can’t go cold turkey. I can’t forget who Tim Geithner is, and inevitably, the next time I’m in the car, I’ll turn on NPR and listen to the latest crisis. But I might catch myself and turn it off just as quickly.
Give it a try. Unplug for a while and find out how anxious you’ve gotten by being so hyper-aware of our national anxiety. Tim Geithner will do fine without you, and you’ll do fine without him!
