Most media and all advertising are designed to hook you in because you are being enticed to buy something. You are hooked when you have an emotional or visceral reaction. Any emotional response, from want and need to disgust and outrage, will do. In this way, your prefrontal cortex and ability to critically think is bypassed and your limbic and reptilian brain is being stimulated. From this part of your brain you react, you don’t respond.
Now, this doesn’t mean there aren’t things to be outraged about or concerns that don’t need to be addressed. So what to do? Every time you have a visceral reaction of disgust or outraged to a headline in a newspaper, the subject line of an email, or the title of a FB post, realize that someone is trying to hook you into agreement or attack. Your job, just like in your daily life, is to stop, take a moment, and ask yourself to examine what’s really going on. If you can’t get facts and truth from what’s in front of you, seek it out. Fact-check everything before you share it or pass it along. You could be inadvertently spreading an intentional virus of fake news. Once you have discerned that it is both real and true, then respond as your heart chooses.
You have learned to unhook and observe the drama created by unconscious reactions in your own life. Use these same tools to unhook from the sensationalism that is being used to sell you ideas and stuff. You are a discerning, spiritually aware, conscious being. Every time you seek greater truth and clarity about what’s going on, you actually raise the vibrational rate of the consciousness on the planet! Your awareness brings light to the whole world! And you become the distributor of truth, awareness, and the commitment to a better reality.