Something I just learned....

What was the first thing you did when you woke up this morning? If you reached for your phone and scrolled through the news — scanning headline after headline blaring bad tidings — you're doing something called doomscrolling. And you're definitely not alone.

First I have ever heard of "doomscrolling".

The phenomenon of doomscrolling — one of the Oxford English Dictionary's words of the year in 2020 — rose to prominence during the pandemic when our upended lives prodded us to relentlessly track the latest COVID casualties. But more than four years later, we're still living through tremendous social, political, and economic unrest, and doomscrolling has emerged as an insidious threat to our minds and bodies, Harvard experts say.

With the media's propensity to blast mostly bad news (as the saying goes, "if it bleeds, it leads"), "we're not getting any messages about hope — it's all negativity," says Dr. Richard Mollica, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.

"It has been one onslaught after the other," agrees Dr. Aditi Nerurkar, a lecturer in the Division of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. "Our brains and bodies are expertly designed to handle short bursts of stress. But over the past several years, the stress just doesn't seem to end. Doomscrolling is our response to that."

Having learned this just today I have decided that perhaps I need to say something positive in my blogs to alter that and bring a ray of sunshine to the 'doom'. Previously I used to post a Holiday, one I chose from many offered up, each and every day giving myself and others a reason to celebrate that day. It was uplifting.

Due to lack of interest after several years, I decided to stop those postings and do this instead. Now I am wondering about that choice.

So maybe I will start today with something that will at least make ME feel a bit better. I can use a little boost today.

I think the opposite of doom might be curiosity because isn't doom a belief that we know how things are going to go? Or is it hope?

• "Hope never abandons you, you abandon it." – George Weinberg

• "May your choices reflect your hopes, not your fears." – Nelson Mandela