Back in 2011, Glenn Beck started getting “very, very sick.” His symptoms were strange and severe — loss of feeling in his hands, tremors, macular degeneration in one eye and macular dystrophy in the other, chronic pain, brain fog, and a psychological phenomenon researchers called “time collapse,” where the distinction between past, present, and future blurs.
For two entire years, he sought help from multiple doctors and specialists, all of whom concluded that he was “being poisoned.”
Except all his tests kept coming back clean.
“I wasn’t ingesting chemicals,” he says, noting that “no foreign agents” were ever found in any of his medical tests.
More time passed and Glenn continued getting sicker until one day, the root of his problem suddenly stared back at him: He was poisoning himself.
“I was being poisoned, but I was poisoning myself … I was consuming poison with the relentless diet of ‘the republic is dying,’ the news, the history, the media, everything that was going on for nearly a decade, ” he says.
“From 2001 to 2010, I barely slept. … I worked from 5:00 a.m. until well past midnight every day. Each day I was on stage, off stage, back on stage multiple times. By 2009, I wasn’t just battling what I believed were forces trying to reverse American freedom and evil; I was fighting for my life — in business, in media, in smears; physically, I was under threat all the time,” he recounts.
Eventually, Glenn got a proper diagnosis: “Adrenal fatigue.”
“I had been in fight or flight mode for over a decade — all day, every day — and your body is not built to live under constant siege like that. Mine broke, and I still pay the price for it,” he recounts.
Glenn shares this story today because he’s concerned that people are making the same mistake he made with the media content they constantly consume.
“We are poisoning ourselves,” he warns, “and I’m not speaking theoretically; I’m speaking from experience.”
“When you constantly call on your body to produce more cortisol, you’re not just stressed, you’re rewiring the brain; you’re reshaping your body; you’re altering the outlook on life.”
While cortisol is the body’s life-saving “alarm system,” it was “designed for dinosaurs and lions, not headlines and social media,” he says.
Sadly, because of the digital age’s insatiable appetite for virtual content, most of us are hooked up to a feeding tube that pumps us full of “outrage, catastrophe framing, existential politics … Nazis, pedophiles,” and every other form of soul-sucking content out there, Glenn warns.
When this happens, “cortisol stops being a tool and starts to become a poison” that throws our nervous system into a state of chaos, makes our bodies susceptible to chronic diseases, and causes emotional dysregulation, memory loss, decreased impulse control, and overactive fear triggers in the brain.
What can we do to avoid this pitfall?
To hear Glenn’s answer, watch the video above.
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