How Our Personal Choices Empower Our Enemies.

I was making out with Alice as a war movie raged on-screen. We were in the second row of the balcony of a Times Square theater. Alice was gorgeous. It was our first date and I wanted more of her. But the guy in front of us was starting to distract me. He kept banging around, twitching in his seat. It was messing with my concentration. I was just about to say something when Alice said, “Hey, don’t worry about him, just look at me.” She pulled me back to her lips and I forgot about the fool.

A few minutes later, Alice pushed my face off hers and, with a look of horror, screamed over the booming noise of the movie: “Jeff! Look! Act!” I turned to see that the guy had climbed out of his seat and onto the rim of the balcony. In the next second he was going to either fall or jump 40 feet to his death, and probably kill someone in the seats below. Without thinking, I lunged forward, grabbed the guy by his coat, hauled him down from the ledge and onto the floor. He sputtered, “Huh? What?” I dragged him out of the theater, through the double doors to the lobby, and pushed him into the arms of the off-duty cop who worked security there. I knew Officer Murphy. I told him what just happened. The big cop slapped some cuffs on the guy and said, “Thanks, he’s mine, now.” Murphy then turned to the disturbed and incoherent would-be jumper: “It’s off to Bellevue psych for you!”

An hour later, in her fifth-floor walkup on the Lower East Side, Alice pulled a carved wooden pin from the tight bun of her pale blonde hair. It unfurled, reaching almost to the floor. I could barely breathe. She made love to me then. I felt like I was flying. After she came, she clung to me, smiled, and said, “My hero!” (She was talking about the incident at the theater, I think.)

I was 19. I didn’t realize it until I sat down to write this article, but ever since that brush with potential calamity and the delicious night that followed, I’ve been looking for every opportunity to be a hero. That’s how we humans are wired. Brain scientists call it the “reward system": You do something that gets you paid with a rush of pleasure, then you want to do whatever it takes to get you paid like that again and again and again. That ecstatic moment made me want to intervene in other people’s emergencies. Not because I expected sex at the end of the day — though that was always great. But because I’d been rewarded for doing the right thing. 

Twelve years later, while covering a black-tie event in the Grand Ballroom at the Waldorf Astoria for the TV station where I was an anchor, I saw a man dying in a room full of people. He grabbed helplessly at his throat while everyone around him looked in the opposite direction — toward the Secretary of State, who was speaking at the podium. The only reason I saw the choking man was because I was running a videotape of the first part of the speech to a motorcycle courier who could take it to the station for the 10 p.m. broadcast. The moment I saw what was happening, I put down the tape, ran up to the man, pulled him out of his chair, wrapped my arms around him, and heaved. The Heimlich maneuver forced air up his windpipe, and drove out the food that had been blocking his breathing. The partially chewed chunk of filet mignon plopped onto the white tablecloth.

Imagine his plight: He probably thought he was dead. Then a stranger whose face looked vaguely familiar materialized and saved him. The stunned gratitude on the man’s face as I said good-bye was almost as rewarding as that outrageous sex with Alice.

I’ve had a long career as a journalist, chasing the world’s pain and reporting back from the edge of one dramatic abyss or another. This has earned me a pretty good living, great friends, applause, and some wonderful sex along the way. All this feeds into the brain’s reward system. It feels good. The brain then wants more, and the body and mind do what’s needed to get paid with more.

My brain became addicted to the rewards of what philosophers call “right action.” This brings an endless flow of reassurance about your worth as a human being. But not everyone has it as easy as I did. There are folks who come from families and cultural roots and life experiences that reward fear, hatred, anger, and violence. Neuroscientists say it’s the same reward system buried deep in the brain, but it has none of its values. It’s all about chemistry. People simply do what makes them feel good.

I’m from New York City. I was brought up to respect everyone no matter their race or religion. When I saw news pictures of lynchings or Southern whites beating the crap out of black college kids who wanted to eat at lunch counters, I just didn’t get it. It wasn’t my life. Next thing I knew, I was chasing after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Mississippi, covering the civil rights movement. Pursuing that story, I learned about a culture that was completely alien from mine, even though I looked a lot like the white people in question. They were part of what was called the Invisible Empire, aka the Ku Klux Klan. The Civil War had been over for a hundred years, but the Klan was still secretly running things in some small towns, like a Dixie version of the mafia. Many elected officials and police officers were in the Klan. Its fingers were in everything.

“My brain became addicted to the rewards of what philosophers call “right action”

While in Mississippi, I learned that some Klan-sympathizing women were known to send their men out to beat up and kill African-American men with the promise of sex if they came home with black skin under their fingernails. Same reward system.

The physical brains of Klansmen and women were not the problem, it was their behavior, which was based on their culture. In their culture, the “hero” was the person defending segregation, defending the brutalization and control of black people through violence, intimidation, and fear. It was a parade of evil actions, but it was their culture.

Federal law enforcement, financially crippling civil litigation, and rapid changes in society destroyed most of the Klan culture in less than 20 years. Then in 2008, in the Deep South and in northern cities, descendants of slaves flocked to the polls and, with their white allies, put Barack Obama into the White House, and kept him there for eight years. Meanwhile, most of the children and grandchildren of the KKK have found other things in life that gratify them. Many of them are kind and decent human beings. 

Today, all of us — no matter our color or our religion — are being victimized by something new, and it has a huge component of self-infliction as well as participation by the brain’s reward system. The good news is that we don’t have to keep doing it. I’m talking about the way we take in news. Specifically about the routine viewing of 24-hour news channels and the replaying of stories about terrorism or other shocking acts of violence. A single screening of a terrorist act and its bloody aftermath is upsetting all by itself. Seeing it over and over again is guaranteed to heighten your level of stress, damage your emotional well-being and, for some, your physical health. 

On the internet, repeat clicks on images and horrific videos ramps up the stress even more. Unless you’re actively taking control by limiting your exposure, by the end of the day of a terror-related incident, your mind has been marinated in sights and sounds that produce fear, rage, frustration, insomnia, and even sexual impotence. And when the word “Islamic” is plugged into the stories, consuming those broadcasts over and over makes Islam itself — not just its lunatic fringe — seem part of the incremental assault on your sense of safety in the world.

After a number of repeat clicks or views on a webpage, those inputs cease to be informational and become what I call EPIDE: electronic packages of increasingly damaging emotion. The technology that makes possible the endless consumption of what is no longer knowledge but fear, now exists not only on cable TV, but in millions of smartphones, laptops, and workstations. None of those machines force us to watch (or to watch again) or to click (and click and click). We do it to ourselves. Some people become so ensnared by the terror on their screens that they walk around feeling as though it’s happening close by, or most surely soon will. This phenomenon has altered the political landscape in the U.S. and overseas. It has made all of us easier prey for demagogues who would manipulate our fears and our anger, and the unconscious feeling of helplessness that is fed by our fears and our anger. 

Take a moment and observe next time there’s a news story on ISIS or some stinking coward who kills innocent people in the name of his or her warped sense of God. You’ll see that most of us sit in front of the TV and computer and click on everything that wounds us by repetition. We do that as though we have no choice, because repeat clicking on such fear also lights up the reward system. Otherwise, people would never go to horror films. Only these horrors are all too real, and each click is a small wound on our psyches, with cumulative impact.

Awareness of the drop-by-drop impact on our brains of sucking in all of those horrific pictures over and over again is important knowledge for you to have and to act on. Let me show you how things have changed in this arena.

Except in the case of the Oklahoma City bombing 21 years ago, and then the attacks on 9/11, most past terrorist incidents were reported no more than two or three times a day on TV, and until the mid 1980s, you had to be in front of the TV when the live broadcasts were on or you couldn’t see the stories. CNN was launched in 1980, but there wasn’t universal access to it, or to any other 24-hour news channels, for years. Now it’s everywhere, and so are computers of every size and description.

As you read these words, your intuition as well as your analytical skills are telling you that what I’m reporting is true. So why subject ourselves to this digital echo chamber of pain, fear, and suffering? Because we like it. A lot. Repeat exposure triggers a reward-system response. And it feels good. Click!

Most of us — me included — behave as though we are helpless victims of our desires instead of masters of them. But this is simply not true, and is an example of cowardly surrender. We are adults. We choose by action or inaction. Choose good works and life tends to reward you with experiences that are good for you and those with whom you share this life.  

If a person finds pleasure in bringing pain and fear to others (like terrorists, some politicians, criminals, a small percentage of cops), that’s their reward system at play. But they are still responsible for their behavior. If they play with the dark side of power, the karma is all theirs. However, the rest of us are are responsible for how we react to anything that happens at a speed slower than the time it takes to pull out a knife or a pistol. In those seconds, all we have is instinct and training. If we’re lucky, we’ve had the appropriate instruction and have paid attention.

Think of the wonderful off-duty cop shopping in a Minnesota mall this past September. A man in a security-guard uniform is on the loose, stabbing everyone in sight while screaming, “Allahu Akbar!” (God is great!) The off-duty cop — who turns out to be the local police department’s firearms instructor — puts two bullets in the idiot, quickly ending the discussion. (Thank you, officer. He should be rewarded with community adulation and a huge check from the shopping mall.) 

Fortunately, we are a society that’s rich in heroes trained to respond to such emergencies. We need to honor them and discourage frightened amateurs from getting involved, and from walking around with rapid-fire weapons.

Earlier this year, the Washington Post profiled a disabled man who was so afraid of terrorism he carried his AR-15 rifle to Walmart and had it at his side as he drove around in a motorized shopping cart. This fellow had spent long hours peering into his computer, soaking his brain in survivalist propaganda about impending attacks by legions of Islamic terrorists who are in the U.S. and plotting against the rest of us. He does this because his broken body and upset mind find pleasure in his actions.

“For many of us, what is required for our sanity is a self-generated reboot of the mind.”

Click! Click! Click!

Amplifying fear is as great a device for the arms industry as it is for terrorist groups, as it is for conspiracy theorists, as it is for unscrupulous politicians. It produces the desired results. But only if the rest of us buy into the drama with our irresponsible consumption of media.

And we don’t have to. 

For many of us, what is required for our sanity is a self-generated reboot of the mind, which lets us trade fear and stress for peace. The process is empowering and will lead to more mastery of your own life. It can also mean better sex, which will make your brain’s reward system even happier. 

Begin your reboot by unplugging everything that beeps or speaks for one full day. No computers, smartphones, radios, or TVs for 24 hours. (Be sure to let family, colleagues, and friends know ahead of time.) If you must have access to a phone, make it a dumb one that offers voice communication only. During the rest of the week, try to never watch a news story about terrorism or any other horrorific event more than once. If you first learn of the story online, limit yourself to just one click, and try not to discuss the story with friends. The idea is to not keep reliving the experience. As you mindfully take control by sharply reducing the number of fear-inducing impressions on the brain, you can simultaneously add some peace-inducing equipment: your nose and your mouth. 

Begin with the daily practice of sitting in silence for one whole minute. If you’re comfortable sitting cross-legged on the rug, that’ll help. Or use a simple chair. Sit still. Breathe normally through your nose. Concentrate on the breath. After sixty seconds is over, add one more minute of alternative nostril breathing. This practice brings a sense of calm and lowers the blood pressure. Using the thumb and forefinger of your right hand, close one nostril as you exhale through the other. Now breathe in through the same nostril. Switch nostrils and do the same thing again. Do this ten times.

If you’ve never meditated before, congratulations — you just have. If you enjoyed the effects, add a minute a week to your practice. By the end of the first week — seven minutes total — you’ll feel a subtle shift in who you are: more relaxed and slower to be upset, by anything. Meditation is such powerful stuff it’s becoming the norm with hip, creative corporations, professional sports teams, and law enforcement agencies which need to get the best out of their people.

Adding a gentle form of yoga to your meditation will also bring a spectrum of benefits to your overall health. You can take a free yoga course online, or check out a nearby yoga studio or gym. Commit to trying two classes either at home or in a studio. When you’re done with each session, you should feel as though you’re more in control of yourself.

Now watch what happens when you let your body and mind enjoy all this at the same time that you sharply reduce your terror/horror inputs. If you choose to do the reboot program with your partner, add in a slow massage — in silence, for five minutes at the end of each day. If you don’t know how to do massage, you can trust your instincts so long as your moves are slow and gentle. But you don’t have to make it up. There are plenty of free, easy websites that will show you how.

If you follow this very modest reboot program, you will experience reduced fear, anger, depression, and insomnia (another common by-product of our media-amplified stress). Not only are you certain to be healthier inside and out, I predict you’ll have better and more sex, and in a more connected way. 

Lastly, as a journalist who studies the impact of language, I’ve come up with one more simple way to disempower the bad guys: Stop using the word “terrorists.” It’s highly charged emotionally, and it perversely gives them special status and a bit of magical power, when in fact they are the cowards of the earth. They murder innocent people, sell girls into slavery, and intoxicate themselves with blood. Here are the words I want you to try as substitutes for the word “terrorists”: Cowards. Idiots. Garbage. Trash. Watch your mind’s reaction when you use any one of those words. See how much smaller, less dramatic, and more manageable those guys now sound. Remember, our heroes in the military and law enforcement will find them and kill them. Your responsibility is to not get played emotionally by these cowards, idiots, garbage, and trash.

PHOTOS: GETTY IMAGES / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS ARCHIVE; JEAN-PHILIPPE KSIAZEK / AFP / GETTY IMAGES; BOSCH, HIERONYMUS VAN AEKEN, THE GARDEN OF EARTHLY DELIGHTS; 1503-1504, CENTRAL PANEL OF THE TRIPTYCH, FLEMISH ART, OIL ON WOOD, EVERETT-ART; MAX SKY / SHUTTERSTOCK