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Giving up news was harder than I thought.
- I'm a news junkie who decided to pay no attention to current events for a week.
- The logistics of unplugging from the news cycle are more complex than you might think.
- I thought it would feel like a vacation, but it turned out to be much more difficult to complete my assignment than I anticipated.
- In the short-term, this experiment may prove useful in reducing stress. But long-term, it can be dangerous to remain ignorant to what's going on in the world.
As a journalist, I'm a bit of a news junkie. While I don't cover news on a daily basis, I've always prided myself on keeping myself informed, and I've thought of my obsession as a healthy, responsible habit.
But after the 2016 presidential election, it started to feel like more of a chore to keep up with everything that was going on in the world. The news cycle began to weigh heavier on my mind, and that feeling only compounded over time.
So I decided to give myself a temporary break from the news to see how it would affect me. It seemed like a simple task, but to accomplish this, I almost had to unplug from the internet completely. Here's how I avoided the news:
- I stopped logging into my Feedly account, which I use to keep up with about 40 different sources of news. During this time, it racked up thousands of articles.
- I disabled all push notifications on my phone to avoid accidental exposure.
- Many of my non-urgent emails, like newsletters and Google alerts, went unread.
- I still used social media, but only as much as was necessary to do my job and share my work.
The results of this experiment were mixed, but mostly negative: