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Do you find yourself being unnaturally troubled by issues over which you have no control? Are you becoming obsessed with matters of social or political concern? If so, there is something that might help you... and it doesn't need a prescription. At least it helped an American woman I met in March. When her doctor said that her blood pressure was too high, she offered to come back and have in taken again three days later. Three days later, it was back to normal. All she had done was to temporarily avoid listening to the news. Now this is not a pitch against news and current affairs programmes, and certainly not a suggestion than a news embargo is better for your blood pressure than medication. What the woman in question had done was to confirm what she had suspected – that she had developed an obsession with bad news, and this was affecting her outlook and her wellbeing. This woman reminds me of Lot's wife. She appears in an early biblical story in which her husband has been told to take his family and flee from a city which is about to be destroyed. The divine command is not to look back. But Mrs Lot does look back and becomes immobilised. When we become fascinated by what is corrupt, unhealthy, worrying or degenerate, we risk losing the ability to move positively into the future. Of course, someone might want to cite Edmund Burke's famous dictum that, “the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” That is indisputable, but taking a break from what obsesses and debilitates us is not doing nothing. It is making a healthy, albeit temporary, choice. It is the profound wisdom behind the observation of the Jewish Sabbath. God wants people to have a rest, because continual engagement with whatever saps our energy and dulls our imagination is not good for us. And it is the possibility of being refreshed by sources of inspiration which we can easily forget when we are consumed by pessimism or worry that St. Paul points out in the closing words of his letter to the church at Philippi Whatever is true, whatever is honourable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable ...think on these things.