I Quit The News 20 Years Ago — It Changed Everything
Why Emotional Regulation Is Your Most Powerful Tool In Chaotic Times
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Atrocities pumped into your living room. Horror stories beamed into your pocket. Modern tech brings us together, but it also tears our hearts out. The Media? This is how they make their profits. The powerful? I swear this is how they prefer us. Paralysed and powerless.
Consuming the news is like swimming in sewage outfall. It infects us with hopelessness. It might even kill us.
So why do we do it? We have fundamental need to stay informed. Blame our “social ape” roots. Better know what’s going on. In case you can grab a banana. In case you need to run. And our amygdala, our fight/flight/freeze/fawn responses, are geared for the occasional sabre-tooth tiger, not constant bombardment. No wonder we are all falling ill.1
I weaned myself off the news two decades ago. No TV news, no radio news, no papers. The most significant factor in improving my mood. Why start the day angry? Why end the day in despair? Switch off the news, take up meditation; golden.
Some say it’s amoral to avoid the news. I’ve seen “moral duty” bandied about. A moral duty to poison our psyches, really? Well, don’t worry, moral dutyists. This is only a media diet, not starvation.
Because of course, the news is everywhere. It’s unavoidable. It bleeds into my feeds. My friends are affected. Substack is full of Americans. Yes, even news-avoidant me, I’m well aware of what’s going on. And sometimes I seek out details, too, devour every toxic morsel I can binge it — the Pelicot case, ICE arrests, horrific child deaths — you can hardly believe it. Real-life friends sometimes need to offload, too, and despite my protestations, they do.
If I have a moral duty, it’s this: be useful to the world. Especially now, as humanity faces its existential metacrisis. If I’m powerless and paralysed, I’m useless. So I clean the news from my psyche, daily, just like I clean plaque from my teeth. And for similar reasons. Stop the rot before it causes bigger problems.
If there’s any news distressing you right now, EFT tapping is a practical tool you can use to clear it. There are loads of free resources on Youtube etc if you want to learn how to do EFT. Or, there’s more instant version: I made this video for paid subscribers to tap along to if you have news-focused distress. That’s just £6 if you want to subscribe for a month to access it . You’ll need a space where you can’t be overheard. I swear, in 15 minutes, you can make the shift from distressed to surprisingly calm. And you’ll swear too, if you play along, because it involves some very therapeutic f-words.
Tapping (and other forms of relief) don’t make this shit okay. But it can help you reduce your stress levels; it facilitates the Serenity Prayer:
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can,
and Wisdom to know the difference.
And if you want to go further, get empowered and inspired with ideas to change things for the better, this is truly powerful shit. Because…
Emotional Regulation is More Than Survival
Negative emotions are like static on the line to the Divine (however you conceive of that; it needn’t have an old-school name like “God”). What else shall we call it? How about a combination of:
the joyful state you arrived in
instinctive wisdom
interconnected universal consciousness
I know, the last one’s a mouthful. But I believe it’s the substrate of existence, and I have proof. Okay, nothing that you could test in science; nothing that would convince you if you haven’t had a few weird experiences. Like a moment where all of reality dissolved, as I described in my novel Devotion:
A strange open buzz in the centre of his chest like the fist of his heart finally unfurled and plugged into some universal power source. At the sun’s periphery, particles, he can see actual particles of energy, streaming down onto the grassy clearing, connecting with the grass.
Instantly, all is particular; shaken out of its packets into a vast network of energetic charges. He can sense it all. He too is part of it: a vast and endless arrangement assisting itself, translating one form of energy into another. One giant organism that connects all living and non-living things, exchanging sunlight for heat, movement for sound, so that even the shush of the cars on the road that cuts through the forest half a mile beyond is the whispered transaction of energy into energy; nothing lost, only transformed, and now into his ears, forming thought.
For is it not true, as Gabrielle said, that an electron can be part of your own eyeball one second and in the next, jangle the bell of a child’s bicycle in Holland, kiss a coffee cup in Boston, harden a crab claw in Australia. He looks down at Achilles. She too is knitted into the fabric of him, as he is knitted into the fabric of the forest and everything beyond. Somehow, the joy of his understanding has reached her tail and is thumping the leaves, every millipede and woodlouse in her wagging radius drummed into the same knowing.
Experiences like this are rare, but they change everything. Far more common is the “psychic telephone” experience. Here’s an example I described in a Note.
Last week, reworking a stage version of The Marlowe Papers with my friend Nicky, she said,
“I’ve brought the original tracks James wrote.”
“How is he?” I asked.
“I haven’t heard from him in months.”
We listened to the music as we worked. She dropped links to James’s short tracks into the script, and we sat there appreciating his talent. When we took a break for lunch, she checked her phone.
“You won’t believe it. I’ve got a message from James.”
Of course I believe it. That shit happens to me all the time, when I’m emotionally clear. When I’ve been brushing the news (and other forms of dis-ease) from my energetic teeth. It’s like you’ve flushed the gunk out of the channel; it’s so much easier to receive a free flow of the good stuff. Synchronicity. Creativity. Inspiration. How else would I write what I write?
So this is a good thing to do, if you want a little extra power in your pocket. And if you do this every time you get distressed by the news, you’ll soon have a black-belt in emotional bad-assery. An unperterbality that’s practically a superpower in this fucked up world that’s training us to reach our higher selves.
That’s it. That’s the news.
Over to you:
News junkie? Recovering Newsaholic? Eschew the News? Tell me your relationship to the news and whether you’d like to change it.
If you tapped along with the video (link above) let me know how quickly you got relief from the Totally Fucking Unacceptable portion and whether you felt able to let rip.
Ever had a really good psychic telephone moment?
Curiosity poll:
If you appreciate what I do, and want to support me in my mission to a) keep my head above the waterline and b) help others do the same, there are so may ways! You can buy Devotion for yourself or a friend, take out a paid subscription or buy me a coffee. You can also share this post with someone you think might like it, and most important of all, light up that little heart!
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Until next time…
Consuming significant amounts of news about the Boston bombing had a worse impact on people than actually being there: How the News Changes the Way We Think and Behave. Here’s another study showing that consumption of distressing news media has demonstrable negative effects on mental health: The Mental Health Impact of Daily News Exposure During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Ecological Momentary Assessment Study
Thank you. We need to balance being informed (and actually doing something about what we can do something about) with being in a big-picture and long-view space. Continual churn in the news cycle is just another addiction.
I'm so glad to read your thoughts on the news and cutting it away. Barry Glassner's book "The Culture of Fear" gave me the impetuous to turn off the news. I hate it. I can go back to 9/11 and having a panic attack, crying on the kitchen the floor the following day, because I couldn't escape the horrific images of that atrocious attack (and that's before social media and smart phones, of course). I see people getting obsessed with news, with things they can't do anything to stop and at the point where it's damaging you, you have to turn it off. You have to look away.
As for the psychic telephone, if I contact my mum, she usually says, "I knew I was going to hear from you because I was just thinking of you." And a nice coincidence - or a sort of psychic telephone? - we were going to Texas so my partner could meet half of his family for the first time. About a week or two before we set off, he won £1k on a scratch card, which was enough to cover his flights, hotel, etc!