Why consuming the news may be harming you (and what to do about it without living in a vacuum)
Ever had to run from a saber-toothed tiger? No? Me, neither. In part because they’re extinct. But, we’ve all felt the same sensations our ancestors might have had they found themselves in that situation. In fact, most of us experience that sensation multiple times a day, when doing something that doesn’t seem dangerous at all.
I’m talking about consuming the news. There are two things that turn the news from a source of information to a trigger, and they’re the difference between walking away with insight and walking away with pure outrage. Those things are frequency and mode of consumption.
More on that in a moment, but first, why does this matter?
I’m an expert in helping people to flourish (primarily at work). One way I support people is in moving from fight or flight mode (often characterized by anxiety, stress, or overwhelm) to curiosity mode. There’s a neuroscientific reason for this: when we’re in fight or flight mode (called the sympathetic state), our brains constrict and we can’t be open or generative. Our sole focus is on survival. But if we can flip into curiosity mode (parasympathetic state), we’re calm and composed, and it’s easy to create, see multiple solutions, and learn.
At work, this means we move from irritation at our colleagues, our workload or our situations to being resourceful about how we might navigate differently, increasing our productivity, effectiveness and our sense of flourishing.
The same thing holds true in the rest of our lives. I recently asked some clients to notice what experiences or situations were putting them into fight or flight mode on the regular. When I did the same activity myself a year or so ago, I realized that consuming the news was one of the top ones for me.