Triggering news.

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How do people deal with news that they find triggering? I was reading the paper today and a woman my age in my town died this week after a year long battle with appendix cancer. Totally triggered me. How do people cope with that kind of stuff?

My anxiety has been pretty heightened lately. So I’m sure that isn’t helping.

[BazB44]

there's 6 billion people in this world. with anxiety, we over-analyze and think every "bad news" is us. I do the same thing. One person woke up with XYZ symptom, they developed XYZ disease 2 weeks later.....dead. Oh no, that means next time I get the XYZ symptom that means I will get the XYZ disease. But there's 6 billion people in this world, not everyone who gets XYZ symptom gets XYZ disease. Why does it always have to be us? Because we think too much, we over-analyze, we think negatively too much.


So someone died of appendix cancer near you. Are you that person? No. So why are you worried? That person is different than you. Maybe she had similar symptoms....doesn't matter.

That's how we need to think about it.

[jray23]

How many people are in your town? Let's say 50,000.

So 1 person had bad thing X happen.
49,999 people did not have bad thing X happen.

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[AMomentofClarity]

Always keep in mind what the goal of news/media is.....to get clicks/viewers/readers. They use exaggeration, shock value, “click bait” headlines, etc in order to gain peoples attention to get an audience. One of the easiest ways to do this is scare people.
I often notice headlines that scream something like “XYZ Illness Rates Double”....then you read further to discover they went from 1/100,000 to 2/100,000. Even though they doubled, any 1 persons odds are minuscule, but if they mentioned that people wouldn’t read the article.

[lofwyr]

The media loves stories about rare diseases, things that jump out and scare us. It gets them readers/viewers. They are rife with implications "this could happen to you."

My favorite example was when the news media proclaimed a summer a few years back "summer of the shark" because there had been so many shark attacks that summer along the beaches in the US. But the truth was, the summer previously actually had MORE shark attacks and had garnered no news whatsoever.

The thing is, people who do not have anxiety can hear these stories and shrug and be on with their day. For many folk like us, they take root.

My first bout of health anxiety was when a kid in my class in high school died from a brain tumor his senior year. I ended up with a headache that lasted four months. I was sure I had one.

[darkside4k]

I think the connectedness of today's world has made it a lot harder for us hypochondriacs. Before the Internet, how many of us (especially the younger crowd) would personally know someone with these rare diseases? Sure, we would probably know of a few people who died, but it wouldn't seem as "everywhere" as the connectedness of the world makes it seem.

When I think back to my school experience. We had one classmate die of brain cancer in elementary school. One girl had Hodgkin's disease and survived. One eventually developed Melanoma and also survived. Only 3 people that I can think of throughout my entire schooling experience (thousands of students) that had cancer so far. Literally that number of people also died in car accidents from my school. And these aren't even people I was friends with - just people I had heard about because we were in school together.