Every morning, I make a coffee and read about the end of the world.
Wars, elections, the planet slowly cooking, AI coming for our jobs (and also very possibly for mankind, no biggie).
Then I put my cup in the sink, brush my teeth and go on about my little day like nothing happened.
It’s honestly so Black Mirror, right??
I’m very much a recovering news addict.
The Guardian app lives on my home screen and my thumb often opens it on its own.
It’s also on a 20-minute daily timer, but it’s not been very helpful because I usually just add an hour when the timer runs out 🙃
Obviously I still believe staying informed is super important, and there’s still some brilliant journalism out there. But the endless news we consume all day isn’t really about being informed. It’s about people’s opinions, it’s for our entertainment (horrible entertainment but still) and it’s becoming seriously unhelpful.
The news starts a stress response that your day rarely processes
So, after the Boston Marathon bombings in 2013, a team of psychologists asked nearly 5,000 Americans how much of the coverage they’d watched in the week after.
People who followed it for 6 or more hours a day were more stressed than people who were actually at the marathon.
Yep, more stressed than the people who were actually there.
How mental is that?!?
That’s because our stress response evolved to help us deal with an actual threat, not to absorb a whole planet’s worth of crises before we’ve even finished our coffee.
Think about it: something stressful happens, you see it, your body gets ready to run or fight, you deal with it by maybe telling your tribe around the fire, you rest.
The news hands your body every fucking threat on the planet, all before breakfast. How are you supposed to process that?
And you can’t exactly run away from a headline about AI, no matter how dystopian it is.
So the stress from the headlines can hang around long after you’ve closed the news app.
Emily and Amelia Nagoski, who wrote Burnout, explain it really well: dealing with the thing that stressed you isn’t the same as dealing with the stress itself.
Basically, the stress gets stuck in your body: your heart’s going a bit faster, your breathing’s all shallow and your shoulders are somewhere up by your ears. It has to go SOMEWHERE. And no, closing the Guardian app doesn’t count (trust me, I’ve tried). What does count is doing something that shows your body the danger is over. (I wrote more about this back here.)
You can carry on like nothing happened. But your body doesn’t always get the memo.
Staying informed and consuming the news all day are 2 different things
When we were travelling, we didn’t have the news playing in the background for hours like we used to in Singapore. Instead, we’d put on a 10-minute news podcast with our morning coffee: The Economist’s The World in Brief, Reuters, Bloomberg Daybreak.
And do you know the best part of a news podcast: it ends. After 10 or 20 mins, the podcast actually finishes.
So we can get on with our day.
By nature, 24-hour cable news (and their horrible panels full of horrible screaming people) never ends, literally.
So yes, 10-minute news podcasts from now on and I feel as informed as ever.
I’m just not marinating in it.
⚡️ Try this: give your news an ending
Pick news that ends. A 10-minute podcast with your coffee, 1 newsletter, the evening bulletin, whatever works for you, as long as it actually has an end. The endless scroll does NOT count.
Then close the loop. When it’s done, do 1 thing that shows your body the danger is over. Hug someone properly (a real one, not the awkward back pat), dance to 1 song in the kitchen, walk round the block, or take a few slow breaths with really long out-breaths. Obviously it won’t fix the world, but your shoulders will thank you.
Write it down: “After the news ends, I will…” and pop it in your notes app so you don’t forget.
That way you still know what’s going on in the world, and you still care (obvs), but your body isn’t stuck on high alert till lunchtime.
For better or worse, the end of the world will still be there after your coffee.
With love,
Noemie x
What does your news habit look like right now?
Key Sources
E. Alison Holman, Dana Rose Garfin and Roxane Cohen Silver, ’Media’s role in broadcasting acute stress following the Boston Marathon bombings’ (2014) 111(1) Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 93 <https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1316265110>.
Emily Nagoski and Amelia Nagoski, Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle (Ballantine Books 2019).
Noemie Mooney is an ACE Certified Health Coach, ICF-trained Behaviour Change Specialist, certified yoga instructor, and creator of the MAKE SPACE Method™. Trained in design thinking at the Stanford d.school, she writes Unwritten Potential, a newsletter about evidence-based wellbeing, sustainable habits, mental wellbeing, and health behaviour change for smart, health-curious people who want to feel their best without making it a full-time job.