TECHBURGER
With all the bad news, a cyber diet is the cure for doomscrolling.
My lovely wife deleted Twitter and Facebook from her iPhone last week. After spending too long scrolling though social posts and news items late at night, it was affecting her mood and her sleep. She is something of a news junkie, but for her peace of mind, it was time for the nuclear option.
That’s one way of dealing with news fatigue, which likely is plaguing us all in “these challenging times,” as the now wince-worthy cliche goes. From the coronoavirus pandemic to police violence to protests in the streets to partisan toxicity, the news bears down on us hour by hour, minute by minute, delivered in nonstop, rapid-fire succession on our smartphones, our PCs, our TVs.
There’s even a term for doing what my wife was doing, swiping through one overwhelming news story after another on her smartphone: doomscrolling.
How do you process all that, along with stories about swarms of Japanese murder hornets that rip the heads off whole colonies of bees, or hordes of poisonous cane toads breeding wildly in Florida as icing on the cake? Apocalypse now, indeed.
For a lot of folks, it’s not a simple matter of not looking at the news. Although hardly scientific, I polled my Twitter fol
lowers last week, asking if they doomscrolled and how it made them feel. The option most selected: “I can’t help myself.”
Fortunately, there are strategies and tactics you can use to control how much news you consume. They include some discipline on your part, as well as some tools on your devices and apps you can install. Think of it as drinking from a water fountain rather than a firehose.
Go on a news diet: In the dark ages of information delivery, news came to you in controlled bursts. The newspaper was on your doorstep in the morning, the news was on the family TV at dinnertime. Radio delivered news bites during the day, between spins of Top 40 tunes and commercials for the local hardware store. We can’t go back to that kind of news cycle, but you can use time to throttle the nonstop flow.
Start by setting a limited, scattered amount of time each day to peruse the news, whether on television, websites, social media, radio or smart speakers. Let’s say you want to consume only 90 minutes worth of news a
day. Spend 30 minutes in the morning checking news sites, your social feeds, maybe TV. Hit your sources again for 30 minutes around lunchtime, if work permits, and then again after dinner.
But if you find the news disconcerting enough that it may keep you from sleeping, don’t watch the late TV news or pick up your phone before bed. What happens will happen whether you look at it or not, and the details will still be there in the morning, when a good night’s sleep will make you better able to absorb it.
Turn off notifications: Your smartphone beckons when notifications fire off, and they’re often difficult to ignore. You can disable notifications selectively based on app on both Android and iOS devices, or can turn off notifications completely. I recommend the former, because even if you’re trying to cut down on your news anxiety, notifications telling you about communication from friends and family are healthy (well, usually).
You can also change how notifications are displayed by setting them so they don’t show up on the lock screen and only appear as a number displayed on an app’s icon. Fine-tune notifications so they’re not constantly calling you to doomscroll.
Use screen time tools: Current versions of both iOS and Android have built-in tools that help you limit screen time. On iPhones and iPads, they’re under Screen Time; on Android, they’re called Digital Wellbeing. They can help you enforce your news diet by limited how long you can have apps running on your phone.
In iOS you can set limits for individual apps, or for whole categories of apps, such as social media or “news and reference.”
Use Twitter Lists: One of Twitter’s most useful features is Lists, which lets you create collections of accounts based on criteria you choose. Create a list with news sources, and only dive in there as needed. Create other lists of friends, funny accounts, or those that show animal videos. Then, rather than going into your main Twitter feed, choose a list based on what you need or want to see.
Use a news aggregation app: When I don’t want a news firehose from social media, I launch Apple News on my iPhone or iPad, which shows selected stories based on my interest. Google News is similar, and is available on both iOS and Android.
And another alternative is SmartNews from smartnews.com, which is similar in format to Apple News but also is available on Android. It’s excellent at learning over time what stories interest you — as well as those you don’t want to see.
Yeah, I know, it’s ironic to get tips from someone who works for a news organization about how to consume less news. But these are offered in the same spirit as smartphone manufacturers who have included tools I mentioned to help you curb internet addiction.
It’s good to be informed, but it’s unnecessary to be overwhelmed.