Escaping toxic beliefs & goals: beware of “greyhounding”

If you don’t break this pattern, your life will go to the dogs

Having a breakdown? Try naming capital cities. That worked for me last week.

My emotions were threatening to send me deeper into my spiral and prompt a Chernobyl-scale meltdown. I yelled to my partner, “Name state capitals! World capitals! Anything! Just quiz me!!”

He pulled up a web page with a list of capitals and started calling them out. States were easy, but Caribbean and African nations I’m not so hot with. Still, forcing my mind to focus on a cerebral task sapped my freakout. In 5 minutes, I’d calmed down.

The wild thing is, my spiral had been coiling itself for weeks, caused by a deep emotional crossroads about my career. New opportunities are emerging, but old ambitions are on life support (hospice?) like never before. The shakeup has left me feeling unbalanced and adrift, struggling to make sense of things. Were my aspirations really ever noble? They had toxic impacts on me, but did they at least serve others well? Plenty of self judgment in that spiral, with little comfort to be found.

I spent my whole life being such a good boy. No wonder I ended up like so many dogs.

I grew up a few miles from the Palm Beach Kennel Club, one of Florida’s longstanding racetracks. Greyhounds had been raced there since the facility opened in 1932. The complex was hard to miss, standing right next to the main airport. I went there a few times, mostly for kid-friendly events, but I did see the dogs race at least once or twice. The Kennel Club even funded the multicultural youth choir I was part of. Florida’s Amendment 13 outlawed these races, taking effect in 2021. 11 of the nation’s 17 dog tracks were in Florida at the time.

I remember being fascinated by greyhounds: fast, sleek, focused. They also puzzled me. Why did these dogs race at all? When they came out of that gate, what made them follow that oval course with such precision and aggression? Dogs tend to run wherever they want. How do you make a greyhound that obedient?

Simple. You give it something it can never have.

It’s been 75 years since Warner Bros. released “The Grey Hounded Hare”. Bugs Bunny causes chaos at a greyhound track after falling in love with the mechanical hare the dogs chase. It’s a wonderfully complex undercurrent, with the rabbit and the racers both lured by the same thing. The dogs are chasing something they’ll never catch, and Bugs falls in love with something that’s not even alive.

This cartoon feels particularly archaic, considering how Americans feel about making animals entertain us. The Michael Vick animal abuse scandal galvanized a lot of people. Then Sea World got in trouble for its treatment of marine mammals because of the documentary Blackfish. As I write this the Miami Seaquarium is fighting an eviction order from Miami-Dade County. NBC filmed the classic TV show Flipper at the Seaquarium. The US Dept. of Agriculture says in recent years the facility had been routinely mistreating animals.

No one wants to be driven mercilessly for the amusement of people who have no regard for our welfare. (Some of us get enough of that at work.) Seeing an animal go through that arouses our empathy and, since they can’t speak for themselves, we speak for them. It’s a noble impulse, and I’m glad so many people feel that way about other living things.

But do we also feel it for ourselves?

The fact is, a lot of things are luring us in meaningless races we can never win. We get on social media and consume an ocean of FOMO-inducing foolishness, then walk through life and try to act like well adjusted human beings. We consume way too much news and then suffer the helplessness of living in a world we cannot control. We immerse in politics and then brace for “The Most Important Election of our Lifetime”… until the next one becomes the “Most Important”. And on, and on.

These acts aren’t always destructive. Social media can be fun and connective. News can make you an informed citizen. And dogs love to run even when there’s nothing to chase. The issue is neither the action nor the motivation: it’s the misdirection. When our instincts get manipulated and monetized, the consequences can burn us out. I call this “greyhounding”, and I think we all need to be on the hunt for it in our own lives. So how do you break these cycles?

The bad news is… maybe you can’t. At least, not on your own.

Imagine if a greyhound escaped the track. Suppose they were able to run off-course, evade the staff, outrun the trainers, scamper through the parking lot and… then what? Where does the greyhound go? What does it do? Then we realize this poor creature has a new problem: being a stray. No direction, no help, no shelter, no food, no idea how to dodge cars. Enormous danger, even compared to the conditions on a dogtrack.

The key for them, as for us, is to be rescued. Someone who’s not bound to that track has to get you out of there safely, nurse you back to health if needed and take you someplace better for a new life. The sudden jump to another environment is what causes the problems for the runaway stray. Making a sustainable, nonthreatening transition is vital, and that can mean easing them in. Rescues can be amazingly hard without careful help.

So you’re addicted to social media. Quitting it cold turkey might work, but the sudden drop in dopamine could send you into a tailspin. It might be easier to have a friend connect with you — maybe even on a social network — and arrange some outside, real-world activities. Then you’d find reasons to use your phone less, or at least differently.

Perhaps you over-consume news, too hypervigilant to look away from the troubles of the world. Maybe a fellow news lover (I detest the term “news junkie”) could share stories with you that are fascinating, enlightening, hopeful and solutions-oriented. That would give you a different kind of validation when you discuss those stories with them: not just being loaded up on news to complain about.

What if it’s your career? A veteran of the industry, someone you respect, might have the influence to cast that job in a different light, sharing their lived experience of its costs. That happened to me back in 2022, a few months before NBC News let me go, upon the death of legendary CNN anchor Bernard Shaw. He was always one of my main inspirations: unimpeachable, unflappable, unforgettable. But back in 2014 he told NPR’s Michel Martin that his achievements were not worth the sacrifices.

“…When I think about all the things that I did, but all the things that I missed within my family because I was out doing [the news] - I don't think it was worth it,” Shaw said. “Honestly I'm telling you that after 41 years in this business, given what I missed, it was not worth it.”

That’s a reversal from what he told a group of young journalists a few months prior, in a conversation moderated by CNN’s Wolf Blitzer (watch below):

And even now, two years after getting canceled, I still struggle. I don’t yearn to be back on the dog track, so to speak… but I do hate having nowhere to really run. Today my limbs ache, and my paws chafe, and my tail doesn’t wag much at all (not even out of nervous tension). Broadcasting took far more than it gave, but my profession gave me purpose. Granted, that path would’ve likely ended in disaster for me, at least spiritually if not medically.

Still… what good is a greyhound with nowhere to run?

Maybe that’s why I’ve struggled all these years: because moving on often requires help. I wouldn’t know where to begin asking for support. Ex-Anchors Anonymous? We can only help ourselves so much with positive self-talk and capital city quizzes: sooner or later, someone else has to step up with love and care.

The world needs more rescuers: more people with the courage and compassion to patiently help us when we cannot help ourselves. Or worse, when we cannot even see we’ve been greyhounded. Breaking toxic patterns can cost you the comfort of captivity, but it’s necessary for freedom and growth. I’m grateful that after all these years I can finally see the track I’ve been stuck on. Things are improving, but I still need support to break these patterns for good.

Let’s hope I still know how to wag my tail.