One small actionable commitment I'm taking is to not refresh covid numbers or vaccine numbers or check more than a few times a day...
Between covid and election polls/results, this one habit of checking a chart which updates every so often has been... addicting.
I don't have a strict rule of checking this many times a day or anything like that, but by committing to this I'm being healthier.
If you're also addictively refreshing some news dashboard, maybe you could do the same as me and dedicate to kicking this habit.
I'll be sharing more little things like this more often here on flowstate when I find myself identifying them. Follow me for more like this. ❤️
Top comments (4)
Great suggestion @ben . I identified the same thing with the breaking news ticker bar on the Sky news channel in the UK before I eventually dropped watching mainstream news. It never stops, amazing how it can just draw you in, disrupt your thoughts, affect your mood and mental state.
News addiction is real. Some people sit around watching their news channel all day long.
I think it's important to not conflate the unhealthy side of this with a push to become totally uninformed, but balance is key and in times of noticed unbalance you have to make choices.
Absolutely. Choosing news sources are just as important, for me trying to find something that isn’t mainstream and therefore doesn’t use the same addiction tactics is pretty hard to do really.
Thanks Ben, it's these small, important steps that helps us break these addictive tendencies. I'm also consciously trying to change this habit as the pandemic has created a bit of an obsession for it. I'm gaining back more of myself day by day.
News addiction is real, just like social media and I question the culture we live in that perhaps invites and permits this.