news addiction

Keep your feet on the ground with mindful news consumption

Bodhipaksa
on practice
2 Comments

Feet wearing shoes, seen from above looking straight down, standing on a kerb .The kerb and road are dotted with small golden leaves.

A friend of mine recently went on a trip to visit a friend and to do some sightseeing. The effects of this on her mental health were amazing — and she ascribes much of the benefit of that to having spent less time imbibing the news.

Actually, imbibing isn’t the right word. Right now, taking in the news can be like, as they say, trying to drink from a firehose. It’s overwhelming.

Outrage by design

Partly this is by design. The intent, in the words of a government advisor, is to “flood the zone with shit.” This means to keep doing outrageous things, and to lie continuously.  There are probably a number of motivations behind this.

We can be reeling so much from one outrageous news story that others slip under the radar. We can only protest so much.

As Brandolini’s Law reminds us, it takes an order of magnitude more effort to debunk lies than it does to tell them. Lying continually exhausts your opponents and the media.

Provocative tactics such as renaming an international body of water can have people up in arms about things that barely affect them, while other things are going on that will have serious effects on their lives.

And people who feel overwhelmed and traumatized by what’s going on might just tune out and not even pay attention to what’s happening at all. A passive population is helpful if you’re pushing policies that a lot of people disagree with.

Off-balance and not thinking clearly

The news is often emotive, and that’s especially the case right now for many of us. We can end up emotionally constantly on edge, off balance. And when we’re on edge our minds tell us that it’s important we don’t miss out on anything important, so we spend even more time reading, listening to, or watching the news. Which makes us even more anxious.

When we’re panicked or despairing, we don’t think or perceive clearly. We think of “solutions” that will make things worse. We lose perspective and assume that nothing can be done. We fail to notice what people are already doing, and so we don’t offer them our support.

We become convinced that our outrage will help change things. But that’s not true. Action changes things. Outrage exhausts us and prevents us from taking action.

At times of crisis it’s important that we keep our feet on the ground, emotionally. And so we need to be aware of the tendency we have to be made anxious and outraged by the news, and how this can lead to further news consumption — a vicious emotional cycle.

News fasting

A temporary total news fast can be useful as a way of resetting ourselves emotionally. Some people do this long-term and still stay informed. When I’ve gone on news fasts I’ve found that I’m still aware of what’s going on. People discuss the news on social media. They share links to news stories, which we see, even if we don’t read the stories. People tell us about the news face to face. So we don’t become totally disconnected from what’s going on. And that’s a good thing, because there are often things we should be aware of.

I tend to think of news fasts as being good when we need to “detox,” but in the longer term it’s a question of managing our news consumption — mindfully.

Real mindfulness

Mindfulness is an over-used and often misused term. Someone recently wrote me a scathing email accusing me of being “unmindful” for having made a typo in an article. I decided not to respond, but if I had I might have pointed out that mindfulness is principally a tool for monitoring ourselves. It’s for noticing whether our thoughts, emotions, and actions are beneficial or harmful for ourselves are others. If we’re mindful, we might write a kind message pointing out a typo, even if our first instinct is to get on our high horse about it.

So being mindful of news consumption isn’t just code for “reading fewer news stories” — which is what we do in the world. What it means is being sensitive to ourselves — which is do do with what’s happening inside us. What effect is our news consumption having on us? Not just in general, but as we’re actually reading or watching the news? How does it make us feel? Is it exhausting us? Making us anxious? Is it a neutral experience? Are we actually enjoying it?

This may change from day to day and minute to minute, because there are so many factors that affect our well-being, such as whether we’ve slept well, how demanding our work is, how our personal relationships are going, and so on.

We need to keep checking in with ourselves, and this gives us the freedom to change what we’re doing. If you’re having a growing sense of dread as you read story after story, maybe stop?

Notice the effect the news, and the feelings it creates, is having on your thoughts and actions. Is anxiety compelling you to stay immersed in the news? Maybe you really should stop!

Downshift emotionally

I suggest downshifting to less emotionally demanding news media. Television news is emotionally “hot.” It bombards you with moving and still images. You hear the voices of people you loathe. You see people arguing. It’s a lot to take in. The only time I ever

The radio news is a lot cooler, because you don’t get the emotional impact of all the visuals.

Reading the news is cooler still. You can pick and choose what you read, while with radio and television news programs someone else is choosing everything for you.

Choose wise sources

But even within the realm of reading about the news, there’s a spectrum. There are partisan news outlets that rely on outrage to get and keep readers “engaged.” Often do do this they will exaggerate or otherwise be deceptive. There are other news sources that are more balanced, thoughtful, and accurate.

We can be drawn to outraged commentators. We might assume that these people have the passion and anger to really change things. But often what they’re doing is a performance. It’s called “moral grandstanding.” People worked up and excited, but they end up exhausted and stressed as well. If these outrage merchants every give practical advice, it’s usual impractical.

I find it helpful to read analysis that puts things in a historical context. I’ve mentioned before people like historians Timothy Snyder and Heather Cox Richardson, legal experts Joyce Vance and Teri Kanefield, and expert on authoritarianism, Ruth Ben-Ghiat. These are people who illuminate without inflaming.

We can learn that what’s going on right now politically is part of a pattern that’s been going on for centuries. This can help us, because we have a tendency to think that when our side wins an election, everything’s going to be okay now. It’s not. These centuries-long struggles will continue. We can also learn from history that we are not alone. Others have faced challenges, too. In fact we can see that others have had things much worse than we have. Compared to the US Civil War, or either of the World Wars, we’re in a good situation. To say that is not to downplay the real suffering that’s happening now. It just helps us put things in perspective so that we don’t panic as much.

Be selective

I’m hearing people say that they’re exhausted trying to keep up with everything. That’s what your opponents want, so don’t give it to them. If you do read in-depth, limit that to the things you most care about. Adam Savage, the former presenter of Mythbusters, recently said that his news “titration” strategy is “kind of scanning the headlines from a distance and sort of getting a rough idea of what’s going on.” That’s wise. I’ve no doubt that sometimes Savage also reads in-depth about those issues he most cares about.

I used to subscribe to the email newsletters of the commentators I mentioned above, mostly through their Substack blogs. But having emails piling up in your in-box is emotionally demanding. So instead I’ve switched to using an RSS app. RSS is Really Simple Syndication, and it’s a technology that’s been around since the early days of blogging. As well as just sitting there, waiting to be read, blogs also “broadcast.” You can subscribe to them so that every post ends up on, for example, an RSS app. Using an RSS app is like having a blog you can visit that’s composed of posts from all the websites you’re most interested in.

I use an RSS app called Reeder on my computer and phone. If you go to your app store and search for “RSS reader” you’ll find a bunch of them. Some are free. Some aren’t.

So now, instead of reading emails because they’re in my in-box, nagging me, I have to go to my RSS app and see what’s there. I don’t feel that I need to read everything. Sometimes I don’t have the time.

Connect with others

We are social animals. Getting support from others online is great. Spending time with friends is fantastic. It’s grounding.

You can start or join a book group. The other week I bumped into a woman in a bookshop who was looking for Timothy Snyder’s “On Tyranny” — a book I love and have recommended to innumerable people. She needed one because she was joining a book group. That’s a great text to discuss because it’s short, informative, and practical.

You can also get together with others to plan resistance strategies from letter-writing to staging protests.

Remember there are more decent people who have empathy than evil people who lack it. There are more of us than there are of them.

Look for the helpers

Fred Rogers said, “When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.'”

Feeling alone is terrible. But we’re not alone. There are people who are working hard and who have our backs. Unions, the ACLU, and other organizations are launching lawsuits to restrain authorities from acting outside of what they’re legally allowed to do. There are journalists who are working tirelessly to uncover what’s happening. Find out who these people are. Watch what they’re doing. Let the positive be part of the news you’re consuming.

Be a helper

More than that, support organizations that are doing good. Find out how to donate to them. Mostly that information is right on their organizations’ home pages. By doing this you make yourself part of the news. You won’t be in the headlines, but few are. Most soldiers in Ukraine, who are fighting to preserve their democracy, their freedoms, their country, and their fellow citizens, are never going to be featured in newspapers or have Wikipedia pages. But what they’re doing is historic, and will be talked about centuries from now. Similarly, your much easier, much less risky contributions to support good organizations are part of history.

You can participate in non-violent action. My partner and I recently made a sign for a protest outside our state capital building (she attended — unfortunately I couldn’t). We have participated in boycotts of businesses whose politics we believe to be harmful. I look forward to more marches, demonstrations, pickets, and other displays of resistance.

Help make history. Be part of the news.

Find refuges

As you try to mindfully manage your news consumption, you will find yourself getting upset, angry, and fearful about things that are happening. That’s not a failure on your part. It’s just you having normal emotional reactions to very abnormal circumstances. You’re going to need to keep finding ways to bring yourself into balance.

Back to my friend who found that site-seeing and going on forest walks helped her to detox from the news; we can’t all do that, exactly, but we can look for other ways to turn our attention away to the news for long enough that our minds become calmer and bodies start to relax. I find I’m reading much more than I used to. I’m finding the physicality of real books, and the ability to immerse myself in the stories they contain.

Get out into nature. Make crafts. Meditate. Do things that keep you sane, and that you can connect with others over. As everything becomes more politicized, we need more things we can do that are not political.

Anyway, these are my suggestions for ways you can help keep yourself grounded. Give some thought to what might work for you.

Any other suggestions? Or examples of things you’ve been finding helpful? Please share them below.

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Jon Kabat-Zinn gives advice for unhappy news junkies

Wildmind Meditation News
news
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wildmind meditation news

Jon Brooks: Jon Kabat-Zinn was on KQED Radio’s Forum show on Tuesday, talking about his latest book, Mindfulness for Beginners: Reclaiming the Present Moment.

Kabat-Zinn is a professor of medicine emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Medical School and the founder of the school’s stress reduction clinic, which uses “mindfulness-based” techniques to alleviate stress. He is also the author of two bestselling books on mindfulness, which is defined by the clinic as “a way of learning to relate directly to whatever is happening in your life, a way of taking charge of your life, a way of doing something for yourself that no one else can do for you — consciously and systematically working with your own stress, pain, illness, and the challenges and demands of everyday life.”

After his appearance on KQED Radio, I took the opportunity to talk to Kabat-Zinn about a topic of personal relevance to me: How do you keep from being negatively affected by the news? He said a lot of really good stuff before recommending, among other things, taking a “news fast,” where you don’t read, listen to, or watch the news. At which point I remembered what I did for a living and had him escorted out by security.

See also:

Jon Brooks

There’s been a lot of bad news in recent years with the economy decimated and unemployment high and budget cuts. For consumers of news who find themselves overly affected by negative reports, what can they do in terms of mindfulness?

Jon Kabat-Zinn

If they’re very affected by it and negatively affected by it, what mindfulness would suggest is that you start to look at that and actually experience how you’re being affected by it. How it’s affecting your body, how it’s affecting the rest of your day, how much of your time are you spending consuming the news. That’s the word that’s often used; we consume the news, we eat it up. And it often consumes us; just the way tuberculosis was often called consumption. So in a way it’s a certain kind of disease process.

Why do we have to know all of that? And how much do we have to know it and in how much detail? And then why do we repeat it or read three newspapers or read the same newspaper three times and then read it on your iPad or iPhone? And maybe if it’s really having a negative affect on you, one might entertain the notion quite seriously of just for a couple of weeks taking a news fast and not doing it at all.

First of all you’ll have so much more time, and second of all real life still unfolds. You will still have a full life. And if you’re unemployed and you have to find a job then maybe you won’t be so bummed out that all the possibilities seem against you. You can tap into what’s possible, independent of what all the experts are saying is possible. That’s a hugely powerful way to work with things.

So one way is to just cut it out for a period of time and see how addicted we are to it and what the affect of it is. I had that experience once when I went on retreat right after 9/11. I was on retreat for six weeks, no newspaper, no radio, no nothing. I was just meditating and sitting and walking all the time for six weeks.

When I came out we were at war in Afghanistan and this and that, but the fact of the matter is that if you do a news fast for any stretch of time, the French have this old saying, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose – the more things change, the more they’re the same. You can miss six weeks of the news, and it’s like almost any six weeks of the news will replace any other six weeks. The same maniacs are saying the same stupid things over and over again and they’re being decoded by all the pundits and everybody’s got something to say and a lot of it is just totally empty.

And the good news that there is in the newspaper — that often doesn’t get much air time. There’s an enormous amount of good news -– you can actually start to read some of the good things that are happening, or emphasize them.

The other thing to do is to bring mindfulness to reading the newspaper or listening to the news. And notice how easy it is to get addicted to it, and how passive a process it is, and how in some sense disempowering. And that awareness is actually in itself empowering. And how you choose to be in relationship to it is of course part of the repertoire of life decisions each of us must make moment by moment and day by day.

I bought a newspaper this morning to get on BART. At a certain point I just left it on BART because I wanted to walk down the street without a newspaper under my arms. I wanted to not go back to it if I had 10 minutes to — quote unquote — kill. You don’t have ten minutes to kill; no one has ten minutes to kill. Because those moments are irretrievable and they’re your life in those 10 minutes. So how about feeling the air as you walk down the street, how about noticing the light, noticing the quality of emotion on other people’s faces or the buildings if you happen to be in the city.

And in all those ways you’re reclaiming moments of your life, as opposed to in some sense pissing them away by absorbing something that has no direct relationship to your life at all.

Jon Brooks

You mention being empowered. One thing I find is that when I read the news is I get upset because I feel powerless — I have no control over these world-changing events that can affect my life, and that makes me frustrated and mad.

Jon Kabat-Zinn

I sympathize with and understand that. It can be quite depressing and anxiety-inducing. But for the most part it doesn’t lead to any satisfactory way to take a stand. Sometimes it does – this Occupy movement for instance. People actually saying we are fed up. And the news media very often, until you have thousands of people in the street disrupting things, doesn’t call a spade a spade. But when you have a meme like the 99% — we can be frustrated but we can also feel empowered. There are ways to actually bring awareness to how much we disempower ourselves and then blame it on the media.

I have to say, I read the newspaper a lot, I watch cable news from time to time. Because I want to see what other people are saying about something; it’s like taking the pulse of the nation. When I can hear people giving very different perspectives on things, it reminds me that no one has a monopoly on the truth. And everyone’s citing it from a different coordinate system, and it’s up to me to synthesize from moment to moment what I think is actually going on.

But to a large extent, the way society changes is when we no longer accept the consensus reality and say no, I’m a citizen, my reality is going to be the reality, I’m going to inhabit it and then take action in the social domain and exercise my rights of citizenship.

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Audio: Jon Kabat-Zinn on people negatively affected by the news

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Engagement, anxiety, and news addiction

Bodhipaksa
on practice
8 Comments

twin towers attack, 9/11/2001

A Wildmind visitor called Cory asked:

I want to keep watch on world events so that I’m not naive with regard to politics, yet remain unburdened by worry, fear, and attachment of those events which I cannot conceivably control. My question to you is, what is the way to endure when a shadow of worry or fear pervades your heart? Loving Kindness has helped, but the worry returns again and again, as does foreboding of what the future will bring.

This is an issue I struggle with myself, and not always successfully. I’ve sometimes found myself addicted to the news, especially on the web. I’ve sometimes found myself endlessly browsing news stories. When I say I was addicted I don’t mean to imply that this was destroying my life or anything, but I would spend more time than was needed just to keep up with the news.

One thing I tried doing was having a “news fast” for a couple of weeks, where all I allowed myself to do was to read the headlines and lede of news stories. So I’d look at the first page of the New York Times’ website, for example, but not go any further. That definitely helped me break out of the cycle of news-addiction that I’d been experiencing, and at the end of the fast there was much less of a sense of compulsion and anxiety about my news reading.

I found over that time that I could basically get all I really needed from just the headline and lede (the one or two sentence summing-up of a news story that accompanies the headline). The rest is really just too much detail.

People’s stress after 9/11 was proportional to how many times they watched the towers falling on TV

You might want to think about your sources of news. The images on television news are designed to have an emotional impact. And the TV news will repeat images over and over again in order to heighten that emotional impact. They want you to be afraid and horrified and anxious so that you’ll keep tuning in to find out what’s happening next. It’s been shown that people’s levels of stress after 9/11 were directly proportional to how many times they watched the towers falling on TV. I don’t watch TV, so I didn’t actually see the towers falling until a long time after the event. It was horrifying, and I wouldn’t want to watch it a second time. Some people saw it hundreds of times. Newspapers, on the other hand, are much less sensationalistic. The images are static. They can’t repeat as much as TV does because you’d get bored and go away. A TV news program could show you the towers falling ten times in one show and you’d watch it. A newspaper isn’t going to tell you 20 times in one story that the towers fell, and even if it did the emotional impact would be much less. Public radio news (speaking about the US here) is also much more considered and less dramatic than TV.

There’s a notion out there that you’re avoiding engagement if you’re not subjecting yourself to all this violent imagery on television; you’re “avoiding reality.” But television takes us beyond merely knowing about what’s going on and into the realm of being a victim of what’s going on. We can become traumatized and stressed by being a participant in the world’s disasters. How does that help us? I don’t think it does. I think it disempowers us.

Another meditative method I’ve found useful in disengaging when I’ve found myself overly-caught up in news-surfing is to become aware of the craving as an object of mindfulness. So I’ll be sitting there surfing the net, becoming aware that I’m in craving mode where there’s a sense of compulsion beginning to mount. And I’ll turn my attention inwards, away from the news itself and towards the feelings I have about the news. In the pit of my stomach there is a sense of anxiety and longing, and I become mindful of that feeling. I surround it with a compassionate and gentle awareness that doesn’t judge but simply holds those feelings in my attention. At that point I can feel the emotional link with the news dissolve away, and I find it’s completely painless to close my laptop. No willpower required!

When we become addicted to the news we’re being overwhelmed by it and we’re attached to it. There’s a lack of balance in our relationship with the news. We’ve lost our equanimity.

It’s easy to watch the news and forget to be actively compassionate to all involved.

But I think Cory’s question was perhaps less about the phenomenon of being attached to the sensory input of news than to the actual content of the news itself, “attachment of those events which (he) cannot conceivably control.”

I have a few suggestions here. The first is compassion. It’s easy to watch the news and forget to be actively compassionate to all involved. Instead we get sucked into anger, or pity, or anxiety. All of these emotional responses are painful and unhelpful, and rooted in ego. When we cultivate genuine compassion for those involved in the news, not taking sides — not seeing good guys and bad guys — but simply seeing the human beings involved as human beings, there’s less ego involved. This isn’t easy for me to do. I tend to take sides. I tend to see political figures whose policies I’m opposed to as being either stupid or evil. I have to remind myself that in their own eyes their actions make perfect sense.

Having compassion where there are victims and perpetrators involved can be hard too, but it’s important to remember that everyone suffers, both those causing harm and those being harmed. It’s easy to demonize wrong-doers, but we’ve all thought of doing stupid things, and it might be wise for us to remember that when we see someone who has let thoughts turn into reality.

It’s also worth bearing in mind that there are various conditions — often hereditary — which make it harder for some people to empathize, to imagine the consequences of their actions, and to exercise self-restraint. If someone has such a condition and hurts others, their actions are reprehensible and we need to protect ourselves against them, but perhaps we could bear in mind that there’s an involuntary component to their actions. If we don’t blame a diabetic for having a faulty pancreas, perhaps we should also refrain from blaming a person with Antisocial Personality Disorder, which involves a defect in the way the brain processes information about relationships. We still have to hold people accountable for their actions — that’s not in question — but we can refrain from wishing them harm.

When we exercise compassion, we still suffer (suffering is inevitable in life) but we suffer in a healthier way. The sense of connectedness we have when we’re compassionate has an “immunizing” effect whereby suffering is in our system but can’t harm us. The pain hurts but doesn’t harm.

This reminds me that we also need to have compassion for ourselves. When we watch or read or hear the news we’re inevitably going to experience pain, and it’s important to acknowledge that. Often we can have a sense that we’ve failed if we experience pain, and we can try to push ourselves onwards, trying to ignore it. But if we’re suffering we’re suffering. And we need to respond to our own suffering in the same way we would if we were responding to the suffering of a child or a dear friend. Rather than brushing our suffering aside we need to hold it compassionately in our awareness and send it our love. In this way we can deal with our suffering in a kindly way. It’s like when you get a cut; you’d clean the wound, take care of it, and cover it in order to prevent infection. You wouldn’t just pretend it didn’t happen or see it as a sign of failure. Similarly, with our mental pain we need to take care of it. This doesn’t mean retreating to our bedroom for a week and sulking — it’s just a question of noticing our pain and being compassionate with ourselves. We can even do this while engaged in other activities.

…we also need to have compassion for ourselves

My second suggestion is that we practice rejoicing. In the Brahmaviharas meditations we start by cultivating love, then compassion, and then “empathetic joy.” And the balance of those qualities provides the basis for experiencing equanimity, which is what’s at the heart of Cory’s question. So if you hear bad news about, say, a famine in some far-off country, we can at least rejoice that there are people bringing this to our attention. Our focus can be completely on the negative — there’s something bad going on in the world — and this can lead to us thinking that there’s nothing but bad going on in the world. The very fact that someone cares enough to report on bad news is a good thing in itself. Then there are the people who are trying to help — aid workers, emergency responders, etc. And then there are all the other people out there who care; you may not be in touch with them but you can be certain they exist. Rejoicing and compassion complement each other, and as I’ve mentioned they lead to a more balanced state of mind that we can equanimity.

Thirdly, there are indeed many things that we can’t change, so it’s maybe worth thinking about getting engaged in those things that we can change. That could be volunteering one night a week, or giving a donation to Amnesty International, or writing letters to politicians. But if we do one thing where we feel we’re making a difference, we’ll feel less alone, and we’ll feel a sense of empowerment. We may not be able to do much individually, but no individual can sort out life’s problems. However many individuals doing a small amount can do a lot of good.

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