.png)
1 day ago
6
For as long as I can remember, I have been addicted to broadcast news. At least, I used to be. I would wake up to the babble of Radio 4’s Today programme and for the rest of the day subject myself to a bombardment of destabilising sound effects from the Middle East, Trumpland, PMQs and the odd shouty phone-in.
It was a habit that was formed long before I became a journalist. My father, a doctor, was a devoted consumer of current affairs. “What’s happening?” he would ask at breakfast. If you started to tell him about your plans for the day, he would listen politely and then say: “I meant, what’s happening in the world?”
So, being a news addict seemed normal to me – until one day, a few months ago, I burst into tears while watching a broadcast.
I had been aware that this sensory overload was taking its toll. Some time ago, I completed the mindfulness-based stress reduction course created by Jon Kabat-Zinn, the celebrated guru of secular meditation. Honestly, I found it tedious, but there was a standout exercise that stayed with me. We were instructed to experiment with 20-minute meditations at different times of day and to journal our experiences of each. It was a shock to notice that when I sat in stillness, even a couple of hours after consuming a news bulletin, my consciousness was teeming with anxieties about people, places and things.
The discovery troubled me, but also elicited a sense of self-righteousness. “Well, OK, it has a negative effect, but we should all be caring about the suffering of others.” But, eventually, I decided to impose a blanket ban on all current affairs and radio for a week, to see if it made any difference. It wasn’t easy – especially first thing in the morning, when, in zombie mode, I kept tapping on the BBC Sounds app. Yet the impact was immediate: it felt as if I had finally stopped banging my head against a brick wall.
Admittedly, it took a while to adjust. I felt calmer, but I also felt a sense of empty anticipation. What was happening in the world? Rather than continuing to go cold turkey, I decided instead to set aside an hour each day to read print media. I discovered that I was able to focus more clearly on facts and dwell less in fear and drama.
This may sound simple, but in practice it wasn’t that easy. I realised how much I was in the habit of listening to news, reading the paper and doomscrolling at the same time. When I forced myself to focus on only one thing, I realised that I could recall details of what I had read more easily. It also felt weirdly satisfying. I was aware of the research about multitasking being the enemy of productivity, but I had always chosen to ignore it.
After the first week was up, I decided to make the trial permanent, with a few tweaks. For one, I reinstated my 5pm daily fixture with Evan Davis on Radio 4’s PM programme – I have always found his calm voice and wry observations soothing, no matter how grim the headlines.
after newsletter promotion
The new approach made me question the usefulness of trying to care about too many things – a subject tackled by Oliver Burkeman in his new book Meditations for Mortals. In a chapter entitled “You can’t care about everything: on staying sane when the world’s a mess”, he writes that he first noticed how our relationship with current affairs had changed in 2016 after the Brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump.
“It wasn’t simply that people were addicted to doomscrolling, although they certainly were. It was that they had started living inside the news,” Burkeman observes. “The news had become the psychological centre of gravity in their lives, more real somehow than the world of their home, friends and careers to which they dropped in only sporadically before returning to the main event.”
That was the real problem with my news habit: it was giving me the illusion of doing something. Soon after my big switch-off, I started to brainstorm ways to contribute to the causes I care most about – volunteering, participating in sponsored runs, selling unwanted items then donating the proceeds to charity were just three ideas I came up with. Now that my news intake is no longer all-consuming, I feel as though I have the capacity to make a small but tangible real-world difference. And I don’t tend to burst into tears while watching TV any more, either.
