OK,
I have finally decided to fess up and admit that I am a gossip lover!
From
seeking, reading, twittering, facebooking to instagramming, I am a little
obsessed with Celebrity gossip. The thing is, as much as I LOVE it, I also hate
Celebrity Gossip, like I mean, I detest it. I cringe to myself when I speak to
a group of friends or colleagues and our normal conversations somehow become
about the infamous, pseudo or wannabe celebrities! What starts out as a seemingly normal
conversation has now turned into a conversation about people we will never meet in our lifetime, yet
we all participate in dissecting, analyzing, gossiping and of course judging...therefore I
cringe.
However,
when I get home, my night time ritual of web surfing allows my hate to
fade. My once strong opinions about
them, such as what they should be doing or not doing alters because now I seek
their lives in photos, which I do INTENTIONALLY every night! I am like a fiend, I must have my fix! I feed
this need to be a voyeur then have the strong need to expunge whatever I have
seen. A true love hate relationship but I can honestly make the statement that I
truly am a celebrity gossip addict.
Like
with any bad habit that you find yourself participating in, you must do a
number of things to modify or correct the behaviour. My steps of how I tackled
this problem are listed below:
1.
Admit there is a problem
2.
Deter or delete any triggers of celebrity gossip
3.
Replace the bad habits with good habits
4.
Do it for 30 days to ensure success.
So,
I took the time to tell a few people that I am not going to watch Celebrity
Gossip or seek out their photos for the next 30 days! The common responses were:
“Are
you serious? There is no way?”
“Well
what will we talk about then?”
“Do
you really think you can do that for 30 days?”
Or
my personal favourite:
“How about I tell you about celebrity news and that way it’s not
you seeking it, but me telling you?”
Clearly
I had a lot of support (NOT!) Lol! After admitting my plan, I deleted a few
celebrities off my Instagram and then cleared my web history and deleted the
celebrity sites from my bookmarks. I thought, OK, I can do this. In order for
me to survive, I had to purge on all the gossip I could get my hands on. Once I
did, I felt confident in my plan!
Now,
for all the extra time that was spent on gossip reading, I opted to Learn. So
instead of going to my go-to celeb sites, I opted to go to regular vanilla
flavoured News sites. I started spending more time focusing on me and my goals.
I picked up some good books, corresponded with family, spent time with loved
ones and cooked a new meal that I got off the net. At work, the conversations I
had were more fulfilling and not so superficial. It was nice that I can hear
about someone’s day versus what celebrity x wore and debating the merits of his
or her body parts. #Truth #RealTalk. The month allowed me to make connections
that mattered not empty ones.
I
am glad I chose 30 days for this detox. There were many arguments on the merits
of changing bad habits within a certain number of days. Some argued 21 whereas
I read even 28 - 30 days can help. I chose to detox for 30 days since I wanted
it to be a full month with 1 day of Celebrity Gossip overload, which I did
indeed!
Once
the 30 days were up, I have to be honest, I felt smarter, well-rounded as an
individual and felt clear headed. After
the detox, I occasionally go on the gossip sites and pick out a few articles to
read. The time spent has been cut down
tremendously. I realized I was more attracted to Entertainment News versus the
hear-say gossip that I used to prefer reading about.
The detox worked for me! Go ahead and try your own 30 day detox and
see how it can work for you!
