News is Blues: How Media is Slowly Killing Us

In May, the family and I had taken a two-week vacation together, our first such break after we’ve had kids, so about six years since the last one. We were on Oahu in Hawaii, in a hotel with Wi-Fi, so we weren’t exactly off the grid, but because of the hectic days, the relaxed evenings, and a couple of thousand miles separating me from my work computer, I generally stayed off the internet.

This felt unsettling at first, like I was missing out on something big that everyone was a part of, but as the weeks progressed, the silence that filled the space of constant news, and Reddit and Twitter updates felt refreshing. It’s as if a stormy sea had calmed and I could now relax on the gently rolling waves. And this is when it hit me: news was slowly poisoning me.

There’s been some general consensus that tuning into the news cycle is closely associated with feelings of stress and anxiety, and even general fatigue and sleep deprivation, and this seems like a fairly common sense conclusion. Yet it’s one thing to nod along to an intuitive concept, and another thing entirely to experience it as acutely as I had towards the end of my vacation.

I can’t emphasize enough the benefits of vacation, especially where you can leave work behind, or when you get to spend precious time with your family. In this case, there was also the added benefit of allowing myself to detox just enough to actually feel the difference from not exposing myself to the news on a consistent basis. Imagine that every time you read a bit of negative news, you activate your normal stress responses. Now take a moment to consider how many snippets of negative media coverage you consume a day, and think about how that puts your body in a near-constant state of stress. Think that’s doing you any good?

So why do we do it then? Personally, I want to refer again to that feeling of unease; the sense that I’m being excluded from a very large and important conversation. I enjoying being an informed individual. So many things are happening in the world that I can’t submit myself to ignorance, whether it be ignorance of international politics or pop culture. “Ignorance is bliss” is simply not an option, and I’m sure many others feel the same way too; that “ignorance” is the salient point here, and “bliss” is just appended there tongue-in-cheek. Maybe it’s actually the reverse.

Firstly, I took a critical look at the “ignorance” I was actually risking subjecting myself to. It’s useful for me to know that there is a trade war between us and our closest neighbour, and that it involves steel and dairy and other products. But do I need to consume every article on the matter? Do I need to know every product, the actual numbers, what the trade ministers have said, and what Joe and Jane Doe think about the situation in the comments section? I know the world is filled with noxious politicians, but what am I doing to myself by perusing all their vile tweets and comments, every ignorant decision, and every racist or sexist bleat of support in their favour?

And then there’s the ceaseless social media debates between not the most level-headed individuals on either side. Tell me, how often do you engage in, or witness, vitriolic partisan discussion in real life versus online? Social media is particularly effective at polarizing discussions and probably helps us hold unwarranted beliefs that we’re surrounded by people with such different thinking that they might as well be members of a different species. This all falls as sediment in our subconscious minds, and we carry the weight with us through our waking and sleeping hours.

There is an epidemic of stress-inducing media coverage: news articles about the latest evidence supporting climate change, or the recent erosions of democracy, refugees crises, natural disasters, housing prices, local murders. Some have compared news to being the sugar of the mind: easy to digest, mildly addictive, and absolutely horrible for you.

I think what we’re experiencing is the inevitable fallout of the Information Revolution. In the same way that the byproduct of the Industrial Revolution choked cities in black smog, so does the Information Revolution choke our minds with information that slowly poisons us. How many articles about the negative mental health effects of social media do we need before we accept that this bombardment has stark similarities with the ubiquitous smog and microplastics that we’ve accepted as being immensely harmful to us?

Now let’s take a moment to talk about the “bliss” part of the “ignorance is bliss” adage. What I felt towards the end of that two-week sabbatical from news and social media was similar to the lifting of a weight. Before leaving town, I was going through one of my lengthy episodes of negative affect. It dissipated sometime during my break and hasn’t reared its ugly head since. Of course, the conclusions I can make from this are far from scientific – there’s no way to separate this particular aspect of my vacation from any of its other benefits. That said, the clarity I experienced is difficult to ascribe to anything else.

By plugging into the world on a regular basis, I allowed it to take up more of my headspace than my immediate surroundings. By constantly worrying about the thoughts and opinions of others, strangers the likes of which I would unlikely ever encounter in real life, I allowed them to dominate my thinking instead of people with who I interact on a daily or even occasional basis. The great conversation I was worried about missing out on had actually been squeezing me out of the present moment, and the moment I embraced the present, my mood, my energy levels, my joie de vivre had also seemed to reach levels I hadn’t felt in years.

I’m not advocating shutting our minds off to the tumult entirely. Disengaging completely from issues that don’t immediately affect us only serves to exacerbate the problems that don’t go away just because we stopped hearing about them. But perhaps it would be smarter to take a more measured approach: to sip the news rather than open our gullets to the deluge and quickly drown.

This is why ever since I came back from our trip, I’ve reduced my news consumption without unplugging completely. For many articles now, I read the first few paragraphs to get the general gist, without weighing myself down with details. Other articles, which just depict heavy news, I contend with just reading the headlines. There’s an immense amount of tragedy in the world. And while we shouldn’t ignore the plight of others, what mind can withstand the weight of all their unfathomable human suffering?

The filter I actively try to apply to selecting what I read is this: 1) what benefit is this information to me, and 2) how will this help me create a more positive effect on the world. You’d be surprised at the volume of information you consume that does pretty poorly on these two criteria.

And then that leaves the comment sections, which if you’re going to extend the pollution metaphor, is the equivalent of sucking on a car’s exhaust pipe, so  I’ve tried to shut my eyes to these almost entirely. Again, I’m not recommending the extreme opposite here – surrounding yourself only with like-minded individuals who won’t trouble your world view. What I want though, is to interact with real people, who are far less likely to resort to childish name-calling or death threats during a disagreement.
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The internet has done incredible things in terms of connecting us and letting individuals reach into the far corners of the world. But if we reach too far, we risk getting pulled apart at the centre and losing the core of who we are. Pull out the IV drip of poisonous news, and enjoy breathing easier.