Reduce your stress–a user’s guide to following the news

The news is too much for all of us right now and I think many of us feel frozen and helpless because we don’t know what to do. Covering our heads in a blanket and not emerging again for 4 years may sound appealing, but most of us want to do something, so that’s not an option. The answer may be not even trying to read about everything–delegate and prioritize. Here at Indivisible NWI we are doing that with our Working Groups, each tackling different areas of interest and concern, but individually we need to do it too. These tips are from Lawfare, a very highly factual and nonbiased news source. I’ve shortened the following, but I strongly urge you to read the whole article.

For those of us deeply stressed about the news: excellent words of wisdom from Lawfare

Principle #1: Slow Down.

Stressing about the news doesn’t make the news better. It just makes you feel worse. You need to accept that you can’t follow all the news. There’s too much of it. It’s coming too fast. Not only does your anxiety not accomplish anything productive, it actually inhibits productive thought on your part. How are you supposed to think creatively about what you might do about Thing A if you finished worrying about Thing A four hours ago, because you’ve already motored through Things B, C, D, and E and you’re currently fretting about Thing F? What if you had spent those four hours baking a strudel with Thing A vaguely on your mind instead? You might have had a great idea of something useful to do about Thing A during that time—and you’d have a strudel. 

Principle #2: Feel Free to Ignore Important News

There’s an important principle that follows from not being able to follow all of the news: You have to ignore some of it. Grant yourself this indulgence. If you follow everything, you follow nothing well. Allow yourself to specialize. You’ll be better at the stuff you do follow.

Principle #3: Let Others Do The Work For You.

There are many different levels at which one can follow the news. It’s critical, if you want to keep your head above water, to choose the right altitude at which to understand a given issue you have decided to follow. Once you decide you don’t need to do things right now, you actually have the option of letting experts do a lot of the work for you. For example, instead of plowing through all the Trump executive orders on military matters involving the border—or the tweets about them—you could just read this careful walk-through by Chris Mirasola. Want to understand the orders affecting the civil service—that whole scary Schedule F stuff? Nick Bednar has you covered. Alan Rozenshtein can take you through the TikTok order. The quality of the information in these pieces is dramatically better than you’ll get by doom-scrolling. You just have to be willing to wait 12 hours, or 24, or 72 until someone has taken the time to do the work—rather than getting your news hit at the speed of the feed.

The point, rather, is that whatever issue you care about, there’s someone out there who knows it well and will provide you with resources through which to understand it. Use those resources. They will help. They will also slow you down—and that increased slowness is a good thing.

Principle #4: Choose Trusted Sources

This is really important. There’s a lot of garbage out there. And a lot of it is specifically intended to rile you up. If you’re reading something that sounds dramatic, consider the possibility that it may not be true. There are very few news items that are so urgent that you need to react right now and can’t give yourself time to breathe, evaluate, and check against other news sources. 

Principle #5: Don’t Get Your News From Social Media

Although social media appears to put control of the news in your hands (you decide whom to follow, after all), it actually does something else: it lets you decide to whom to subcontract your sense of what is important. And it asks an algorithm to decide for you what is “for you” or what you should “discover” or what is popular among your friends. If you get your news principally by scrolling, you are likely to speed things up, be less cautious about information, and be more anxious about it. 

Principle #6: Use The Information You Are Taking In

It is good citizenship to be informed. But the ideal citizen is not one who voraciously inhales news and does nothing with it except fret.

It is better to absorb less news and use that which you take in efficiently in the exercise of thought and civic action than to take in more than you know what to do with and just stew on it.

Principle #7: Don’t Be Afraid of Primary Sources

For those issues you decide you really care about and want to follow most carefully, get into the habit of reading the primary sources themselves.

One of the reasons we make a point of posting primary source materials on Lawfare is so that people have the option of going to the sources themselves and not trusting us.

The bottom line is that consuming information, not unlike consuming food, is a matter that requires a certain amount of deliberation and strategy. Otherwise, you feel gross.