Overwhelmed by watching the News

Dear Lindsay,
Looking at the world right now, what’s the balance between staying informed, maintaining sanity, and taking action? I swing between devouring the latest news, to feeling depressed and hopeless, to feeling galvanized to take action, then back to hopeless. Thoughts? 

Sincerely,
Newsy Neighbour

Dear Newsy Neighbour,
Yeah, it’s a strange and challenging time to be alive. And I’m sure people have been saying that for ages. What’s even more strange about living now is how much information we have access to.

I hear in your question the desire to make the world a better place. I guess that’s what I assume you mean by taking action. I share that with you.

Like pretty much every adult around now, I’ve been faced with the question of how to handle the question of world affairs and the news.  You may disagree with me, but here’s where I personally am coming from:

I spend hardly any energy keeping up with the news because I’ve decided that I have a very limited bandwidth for caring and I want to be able to care about things that I can change. I make my world small enough that I can care about it and not be exhausted. Also, I like seeing the world as a beautiful, hopeful, love filled place and in my interactions with actual humans, that’s how I experience it.  I feel very privileged that most of the worlds problems are far enough away from me that I don’t really feel them. That’s an incredibly blessed place to be in. I’m choosing to use my limited extra energy to respond to questions like yours, hoping to extend some of my care out into the world to make it a bit of a better place.

There’s a technical explanation for my methodology.  It’s called “Sphere of Concern” and “Sphere of influence”.  I have the therapist Jeff Guenther of the podcast “Problem Solved” to thank for giving me the words for this idea that I’ve carried with me for a long time.  Let me explain.  The sphere of concern is everything thing that we hear about that we could feel concerned about.  If you watch the news, that sphere gets really big and with the internet it could basically include anything and everything that is worrisome going on in the world.
The sphere of influence is what you, me, as single people can actually affect.  It’s the realm we have power to change.  The size of this of course depends on our life-circumstance and resources.
When these two spheres are very different sizes When we hear about and are concerned about way more than we have power to influence, it leads to despair.
It could perhaps even be a strategy to immobilize people to keep them over-informed and therefore paralyzed!
My advice is to shrink your sphere of concern to be closer to your sphere of influence.  Get informed about the things you can have an influence to improve.  Or grow your sphere of influence to get closer to your sphere of concern.  Either way.  Try and bring these two more to match.

It sounds like right now you’re more imbalanced in the direction of your sphere of concern being bigger than what you can influence. So I’d suggest starting with shrinking that.  Limit the information you are getting about things that you can’t affect.

Here are some questions for you that I think bear considering:
What are you trying to accomplish by “devouring the latest news”?

It sounds to me like you want to take action and then make the world a better place so what actually helps you make the world a better place? Does staying informed about your country’s every political move help you make the world a better place?
What helps you be a good neighbour, a good lover, friend, parent?
That’s where I would start.

Also, it’s worth considering the motivation of the creators of the particular news you’re getting.  Why are they sharing it? The news outlet is making choices about how and what to tell you.  What’s behind this? Are they formatting it in a way to grab and keep your attention so you will see the advertisements in between or is it thoughtful, nuanced and mature?  The bit of American politics I have followed has been through podcasts which are long form, thoughtful and well-researched.  They are motivated by a desire to inform the public and ask good questions.  There’s nothing flashy or particularly catchy about it.  If you want to have some news sources, make them the most boring possible.

Consider how the delivery method of the news affects your physiology. For example, flashy loud video sources that go quickly from one topic to the next are very high stimulation on your body.  You’re literally releasing a bunch of stress chemicals.  And adrenaline.  You’re being hypnotized and traumatized.  Which is why this process can feel rather addictive.  You’re subject to a dramatic hormonal cocktail which is kind of its own drug. There is no way engaging in that is making you a better person in the world.   

The high stimulation news use to be the five o’clock news cycle and now has sped up even more to smaller snippets on Instagram or TicToc.  Even apart from discussions on reliability of information, getting your news from TicToc will have a different affect on your body than listening to human voices speak for an hour (podcast format) or reading text in a book. You’re a human body with very physical reactions, so the very literal way you get your information matters.  Again, I would suggest completely avoiding the high-stimulation input so you can save your energy for making the world you can touch better. If you are one of the rare people called to look very deeply into affairs and really get to the bottom it and make some meaningful collective action, then by all means don’t let me stop you.  But I don’t think that’s where you’re coming from.  I think you, like most people in regular society, are caught in a draining addictive trauma cycle, complete with guilt about getting out of it.  Get only the news that actually does make you a better person in the world and to hell with feeling guilty for not keeping up with the rest.  Keep up with yourself, your loves ones, your trees.

Some people are passionate, ethical journalists who are good at digesting what’s happening and making it into coherent statements.  It doesn’t sound like you’re one of those people, so let those people do the work for you so you can go back to doing something else useful to make the world better. Turn to these thoughtful experts for your information.

And let it be said that you are by no means obligated to keep up with the news. It is not required to be a good person. Sustainable action comes from the really harried, adrenaline pumped up place.  Change we can actually sustain comes from a pretty calm place. I hope you find that.   
I know your phone in your pocket makes you think that you should be all up to speed, but really, you’re never going to be because the machine is designed to keep you frantic.  Trying to keep up will drain you of any useful energy you might have had to make the world better.  Put your phone down, go see your neighbour.  They are likely lonely and hurting and have some news about their cat to share.  Talk about it together and make a plan for how to plant a garden in your boulevard.  Share the kale with anyone who walks by and learn about where the drain water goes.  Make your world as small as you need to so that you can change it for the better. And then, if, after making your small world a better place, you run out of ideas of what to do to, go read the newspaper.

I wish you all the news of your neighbourhood and not much more.

I hope this helps.

Lindsay.