Leslie Rangel loved her job as an on-air reporter at a television station in Oklahoma City. But covering devastating fracking-related earthquakes, chasing tornadoes, and interviewing people on their worst days started to take a toll on her.
Rangel found some balance in the yoga classes she’d taken since her days as a student at the University of Texas at Austin back in 2008. Then, in 2015, she started a 200-hour yoga teacher training at Ashtanga Yoga Studio in Norman, Oklahoma, and something clicked.
“The big question posed to us as students was, ‘How are you living your yoga off the mat?’ ” says Rangel, who is now a morning anchor for a television station in Austin. The training led her to completely reevaluate her life. “I knew that there was a way to continue in this mission of journalism, but to have it be different.” She began applying yogic principles to her reporting life: meditating and using pranayama techniques like
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Whether it’s yet another video of a police altercation gone wrong or alerts about the latest mass shooting, we face a seemingly unrelenting deluge of disturbing news in our media feeds, timelines, and DMs on a daily basis. And it’s wearing us down.
About two-thirds of Americans say they’re worn out by the amount of news that’s coming at them, according to a Pew Research Center study. The 24-hour news cycle is not just exhausting; it can be traumatic so much so that researchers believe watching violent videos causes symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Even people who view videos of merely confrontational situations suffer, according to the Dr. Margo Jacquot, founder of the Juniper Center, a Chicago-area counseling agency.
Outcry over bright lights around Austin amid energy conservation call
FOX 7 Austin s Bridget Spencer asked why the downtown area remained bright and Austin Energy released a statement saying that the downtown network is excluded for now from load shedding (power outages) during controlled outages mandated by ERCOT.
Officials say it s a complicated, inter-connected network which includes critical buildings like the Dell Seton Medical Center, warming centers, the COVID-19 Alternate Care Site, Capitol Complex and Austin City Hall, as well as other critical infrastructure and government buildings. Shutting down the downtown network would also cut off electricity to these critical buildings, which may also house vital communications equipment.