I am not built for dealing with more than one major stressor at a time. The day I found out I had kidney disease, I had scheduled outpatient laser eye surgery, as well. It was supposed to be the second of four appointments based on the patient’s pain level, but the emotional strain made me compress the last three appointments into that one. On that day I was just done.
These days the stressor is the deluge of information intended to keep us up to speed on the various crises flooding the country. It’s hard to avoid. We want to know what is going on – COVID, civil rights protests, and the state of the economy all directly affect our lives. But more and more the information we collect only serves to cause us anxiety over things we can’t control.
I am perhaps in the worst offender category for news consumption. Because information gathering is my safe place, I have always read from multiple sources every day. But historically my news consumption has balanced the good with the bad, or at least been mostly neutral. Now, it feels like everything is negative. Even the good news stories serve to remind us of how bad things have gotten these days.
If there was no coronavirus, no protests over police brutality and systemic racism, no economic crisis, no leader who seems to know only how to hate and divide, I would probably have cable news on just to fill the silence. I don’t think I can do that now. I have enough to deal with just trying to stick to my unemployment plan without being, even occasionally, by more stories or interviews reinforcing what I already know. Right now, all I can do is wear masks when I leave my apartment and brace myself for the next 117 days until I can vote.
It was a discussion with my dad that made me start thinking about changing my habits. He takes the New York Times News Quiz every week, and a high score started feeding his anxiety instead of being a sign of how informed he was. I told him to try for a lower score. He didn’t like that. He thought I was suggesting he purposely fail. I wasn’t. I was suggesting he invert how he measures success. I thought, perhaps it is healthier to be less informed.
Of course, that made me a hypocrite. I wasn’t as stuck in all the negative stories as he was, but reading as much as I did wasn’t harmless, either. When I started taking the news quizzes, I consistently got nine out of 11 right. I think I even got 10 once.
I think it is time to do the unthinkable for an information gatherer like me. I think I am going to cut off my sources. Most of them, anyway. An hour in the morning and one pass through my news sites. It feels a little drastic, but my life has already undergone some major changes, so why not change one more thing while I’m at it? I really don’t want to burn out under the weight of global and national crises. I am going to try to practice what I preach. A reasonable intake of news. No more overload.