Why You Shouldn't Watch The News

“To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week’s newspapers.”
– Nicholas Nassim Taleb

Dear reader, When do you watch the news? First thing in the morning, blinking the sleep from your eyes, as you reach for your phone? Over the breakfast table, instead of paying attention to your kids? Or at night, because you can’t sleep?

An American Psychological Association study revealed that while most adults (95%) say they follow the news regularly, 56% say that doing so causes them stress, and 72% believe the media blows things out of proportion. They also feel conflicted between their desire to stay informed about the news and their view of the media as a source of stress. The news today is designed not to inform you, but for one purpose only: to fire off the fight/flight response in your amygdala.

“What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.”
– Herbert Simon

Why has this happened? One reason is a fundamental shift in the economics of the news. Production costs have dropped dramatically. We are absolutely inundated with too much information, coming at us from every direction – whether we like it or not. Anyone, anywhere can publish things online and push them out on the Internet and their social media networks. Gone is the age of fact-checking and editors.

Secondly, the speed of news delivery has increased rapidly. The Washington Post put out an ad a while ago for a blogger to post at least 12 times a day. Today we can not only access the news at a click of a button; it also gets pushed to us through notifications on our many devices. Many writers have near-zero understanding of the subject they are writing about, and push that same state of ignorance upon everyone else.

Thirdly, behavioural science’s deepening understanding of what drives human behaviour has allowed media companies to explicitly design content to take advantage of the way our brains work. Clickbait is a prime example of this. Those attention-grabbing headlines and pictures are used precisely because they work. Another is the use of variable rewards. If all news were positive, we’d get bored by it. If all news was negative, we wouldn’t want to pay attention. But because there is variety, and our brains don’t know that to expect, we get addicted.

Instagram, as one example, uses this to great effect. One of their algorithms holds back “likes” on a new picture, releasing them all at once 30 mins later. The initial disappointment people have from getting less “likes” than they’d hoped for is later replaced by euphoria when they flood in all at once. This effect takes advantage of the exact same brain pathways as slot machines.

“If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid with regard to external things.”
– Epictetus

So what can we do about all of this? Realise that this is not a new problem. Over 2000 years ago, the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote in his Meditations: “Are you distracted by breaking news? Then take some leisure time to learn something good, and stop bouncing around.”

Try this: go on a “low-media diet” for two weeks. See if you can survive: or if you are actually addicted to the constant dopamine hits from those constant pings of the “news”.

Focus on what you want; not what you don’t want. Actively curate the content that you consume. Watching just 3 minutes of negative news in the morning makes viewers 27% more likely to have a bad day; watching transformational stories makes viewers 88% more likely to have a good day.

Interestingly for those of you who run businesses, people who read positive news stories also come to associate those feelings with the juxtaposed advertisements and brands. They are also 24% more likely to make a purchase than if the ad followed a negative news story.

Read books. See what would happen if you only read books that have been in print for more than 20 years. The way to solve big problems is to get bigger perspectives. To move from reacting to the endless barrage of the 24-hour news cycle, to connecting with our shared human condition. Understand this: almost every challenge that you face, someone, somewhere in history has faced that very same problem. And they have probably written a book about how they have overcome it.

All of this doesn’t mean that you should ignore the negative in your life. I believe fundamentally though that belief is relative. We can choose the meanings of our stories. A story about an earthquake can be a tragedy of loss and suffering; or an empowering tale of overcoming and the resilience of the human spirit.

Remember: information is not knowledge: it is just noise.

And knowledge is only potential power, if you don’t execute on it.

Yours Sincerely,
Henry Chong