I quit news for a week and this is what happened
For the past 15 months, I’ve had this on my Now page:
I still haven’t been wanting to spend much time on social media, but I get a daily dose of Reddit.
My Reddit routine was a great comfort to me after hubby and I said goodbye to Truffle, but here’s the truth. My daily dose was more like 2+ hours of scrolling every night plus several shorter visits throughout the day. I found myself looking longingly at the couch every few hours, anticipating the next moment I could catch up on my feed: a delightful mishmash of cute and funny animals, food, finances and investments, houseplants, tips for simple living, randomly interesting things, and just a little news.
Reddit helped me relax but a thought was nagging at me: Am I spending too much time on this site? And then there was all the additional time I spent checking stock prices, scanning headlines, reading articles, and listening to news podcasts from various other sources. I was consuming a lot of media, and not all of it was comforting.
During one of my daily news scans, I came across this article, which made me wonder even more what my relentless consumption of the news was doing to me, as well as what would happen if I quit cold turkey. The idea of trying this as a 30-day challenge crossed my mind, but I decided to start small. I’ll try it for a week.
Here’s what “quitting the news” looked like for me:
I moved my Reddit and Yahoo Finance apps into a subfolder on my iPhone so I wouldn’t accidentally click on them.
I decided not to open Twitter at all.
I deferred my daily TickTick tasks that involved reading the news, specifically Anti-Racism Daily and Abnormal Returns.
I created a Gmail filter so Anti-Racism Daily would skip my inbox entirely and go right into its own folder.
I decided to stop reading any corporate newsletters that came into my inbox, especially the ones that contained links to multiple news items.
I deleted This Matters, The Daily, and The Journal from my podcast player.
I decided to stop watching news segments on television and on YouTube.
I had a lot of time when I quit the news.
With my newfound spaciousness, I found myself listening to music, reading books and magazines, listening to podcast interviews and audio books, and working on my creative projects, including writing my own book. I still spent some time consuming media, but the content felt entirely different.
Instead of scrolling through endless headlines that were designed to make me click to learn more, I did quick google searches for specific items that I needed for work or that were piquing my natural curiosity. Once I got what I needed, I moved on. I felt like I was in control of the process and not the other way around.
After only a week, I noticed some pretty incredible changes:
My creativity was flowing more easily. I had more ideas. I did a ton of writing.
My sleep quality increased. I felt more well rested during the day.
I no longer felt like I needed to be in the know about current events. I didn’t worry about catching up. I just let it go.
Time felt slower and more spacious. I had time to be bored.
I felt less distracted. I felt more focused. My thoughts flowed more naturally.
And a big one: I felt less helpless. I felt less anxious. I felt more at peace.
And what was the impact on the world when I gave up the news for a week? Absolutely nothing. The world didn’t notice at all.
As I’m publishing this blog post, I’m on day 15 of my no news experiment. I miss some of the cute and funny subreddits in my feed, but I don’t miss being laser focused on the horrible things happening in the world. Some of that has still made it to my eyes and ears, but I no longer actively seek out details to feed my desire to know more.
I plan to continue this experiment as long as it feels right, knowing that it won’t be forever. Eventually, I’ll want to start introducing bits of news back into my life. But in the meantime, I’m grateful to have the space to be bored, to be at peace, and to follow my ideas and creativity to see where they want to take me.
