For years I found myself gradually accumulating various websites that I would check daily to keep up with the “news” until I was spending hours a day reading. I eventually started to get tired of spending so much time on it, and trying to fit it in around all of the other stuff that I wanted to do as well. I’d finally managed to start narrowing down what I was reading, trying to only pick out things that looked important, but that didn’t really have as much of an effect as I’d hoped.
I read Eight Weeks to Optimum Health by Dr. Andrew Weil, during which it was recommended to try a news fast. At first the prospect of skipping the news for a day was worrisome, thinking about how much I would have to catch up on the next day. But as I started doing it each week, slowly increasing the number of days I “fasted” I began to look forward to the days when I didn’t read the news, as I could do other things I wanted to, without feeling like I was missing out on something, or being uninformed.
It was after weeks of news fasting that I finally started to gain control over my craving for news. As I’m looking at headlines now before I open something, I stop and ask myself if I really need or want to know anymore beyond what the headline already tells you, and most of the time, it turns out that it’s all I really need to know and I can move on.
I have also asked you to try a one-day news fast this week. I do not want you to become uninformed about the state of the world, but I note that paying attention to news commonly results in anxiety, rage, and other emotional states that probably impede the healing system. I have given you many suggestions about diet, about nourishing your body. I think it is useful to broaden our concept of nutrition to include what we put into our consciousness as well. Many people do not exercise much control over that and as a result take in a lot of mental junk food. My goal in asking you to practice news fasting throughout the Eight-Week Program is for you to discover that you have the power to decide how much of this material you want to let in. I have no objection to your turning on the news for information you really need; I worry about people who turn it on compulsively or unconsciously, who are addicted to the news and the emotional ups and downs it provides. Observe any difference you feel in your state of mind and body when you opt to ignore the news. Are you less anxious? Less stressed? Less angry? Less fearful? When you get to the end of the Eight-Week Program, I will ask you again, and at that time you can decide how much news you want to let back into your life.
After trying the fast I still wanted to allow some news into my life, but I found that by skipping the unimportant stuff, the filler stories and click-bait, I could still stay informed in much less time. More often than not, before, I’d click on a story because it sounded interesting and would have no actual affect on my life, I’d mostly forget what I’d even read about after a day or two, so why waste my time on it?
Ryan Holiday in his summary of what he learned over the course of another year had this to say about the news.
Stop following the news—or most of it. It doesn’t affect you that the CEO of Twitter stepped down or whatever is in the news right now. It’s so liberating to not have an opinion about these things. Or at least, to not be riled up about them.
The media has more time and space to fill than actual important, meaningful world events can possibly fill, so much of what gets passed off as news is of little actual value to anyone, beyond those reporting on it for the sake of having something to report. In Walden, Thoreau already recognized most news for what it really is, gossip, well before our 24 hour news networks and the Internet giving us constant access to the news.
And I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper. If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter–we never read of another. One is enough. If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications? To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea. Yet not a few are greedy after this gossip.
We now have entire publications and television programs dedicated to nothing but gossip, mostly about celebrities and people who become famous for no other reason than that they’re famous.
I’ve now managed to get my news reading under control, by taking the time to consider the potential value I can get out of something before reading it, and completely eliminating some sources that rarely published anything of substantiative value. What this means for me is that I now have more time to read articles with real informative content and books. I also find myself getting dragged down much less often now that I’m no longer reading about the worst things happening in the world each day, although of course bad news is impossible to avoid.
Now none of this is to suggest anyone should stay uninformed about world events, obviously there are some news stories that can’t, and shouldn’t, be ignored, it’s a responsible citizen’s duty to stay generally informed about the latest events in their country, and the world. But being more selective about what we choose to spend our time reading each day can leave us more time to do something with real value instead.