Brendan O’Connor steps away from the news

The hammock could change everything. I sit in it sideways, feet on the ground, rocking myself gently, self-soothing. The rocking becomes unconscious. Sometimes, there is even a child laid across me, legs over mine, in a trance

Idecided I needed to take a mental health break from the news for a few days. Obviously, given the business I am in, I am not recommending you do this. But it was nice, insofar as I managed to do it. The truly remarkable thing I noticed was that all the stuff just kept happening anyway. It didn’t matter whether I was tuned into it or thinking about it or parsing and analysing it in my head, or discussing it with other people. It still just all happened, exactly the same as it would have if I had been paying attention.

The news is impassive to all of us. It just keeps going. It happens without us. We can take our eye off it and it will still exist.

But. There’s a but. A good but. If you manage to ignore it, even for a few hours, it’s like it’s not happening at all. You can safely turn away from it for a while, and put your attention elsewhere, and you won’t suffer the ups and downs of the roller coaster. Whenever you check in again, both it and you will be in exactly the same position you both would have been in anyway — you will just have felt less anxious for a while.

It’s harder than I thought to switch off. Every time I wake up, or sit down, or walk along, the temptation is to scan the latest news, or turn on the radio and see what they’re saying.

For me, it’s a work anxiety, to make sure I’m covered on everything, but when I tried to stop, I also realised that it’s almost a compulsion now, maybe even an addiction. We crave an answer, or some certainty about the future, so we keep watching and listening and reading, as if there is an answer. It is a craving that is never sated. The answer never comes. The news never stops, so you can never stop consuming it. You have never had enough.

So for a couple of days, I forced myself to make a choice. Every time I picked up my phone or iPad, or every time I sat down in front of the TV, or every time I woke up in the morning, I chose not to immediately grab for news, or chatter about the news.

I tried to liberate myself from the idea that every moment has to be productive, that I always need to be learning more. I send myself texts all the time with random pieces of information, quotes from people, observations. I look back on last week’s string now; it reads like dispatches from a frantic madman.

It covers everything from quotes from someone called Rosa Balfour of the Carnegie Europe Think Tank, to figures about pandemic learning loss from UNESCO.

So I stop, and make good choices. I start watching all these documentaries I’ve saved on the TV box over the last three years. I watch one about people who swim in the ponds at Hampstead Heath, about the Battle for Breakfast TV supremacy between the BBC and ITV from 1983 to 1991, about Studio 54 and the downfall of Ian Schrager and Steve Rubell, and the rise and fall and rise of the Murdochs.

It’s cramming my head with a different kind of useless information, but the stakes are lower, so it’s more relaxing. But it still feels reassuringly educational.

I also read a novel not for work. I haven’t

read a novel not for work for a long time. I have read some novels recently, but under pressure of time, and only to finish them.

Now I remember the slightly illicit pleasure of being stuck in a different world. Of ducking out on the people around you and being unfaithful with a whole other bunch of people. I vow to read more novels. I decide that instead of looking at the newspapers before I go to sleep, I will read a novel for half an hour.

I will rewire my brain to the way it was before the biggest news story and the biggest thing likely to happen in any of our lives happened. I will rebalance my psyche, try to cure the monomaniacal and obsessive behaviour that Covid has caused.

It helps that we have inherited a hammock. I feel the hammock could change everything. It’s a big, sturdy hammock and I sit in it sideways, feet on the ground, rocking myself gently, self-soothing.

The rocking becomes almost unconscious. You can be doing something else, like reading or whatever, and you will realise you are quietly, automatically rocking.

Sometimes there is even a child laid across me, legs over mine, perpendicular, in a trance, each of us barely aware the other is there after a while, rocking, like two people in an open-air asylum.

I never in my life once thought about buying a hammock. But this hammock came into our lives at the perfect time, and in the perfect weather, and I realise now that perhaps this is what’s been missing.

I am determined not to watch Micheál Martin give his momentous speech on Tuesday. It’s well known by six o’clock what he’s going to say. Even someone like me, who is on a news break, has picked up the details.

I feel that this will be proof that I am able to look away for a while. I look forward to casually telling people, when they discuss the announcement, that I didn’t watch it. It will blow their minds, that it is even an option not to watch.

And then at twenty-pastsix, I decide it would do no harm to have a look, so I watch the news on delay. Then obviously I get curious and switch over to the RTÉ news channel for the post-announcement press conference, and before I know it, I’m back in the game.