Stop Feeding the Bear: How to Reduce the Stress Coming Through Your Screen
Imagine trying to eat healthily while keeping an endless bowl of chocolate on your desk.
Eventually, you’re probably going to eat some.
Now consider the information equivalent.
Your phone sits within arm’s reach for much of the day.
And through that little screen you can access an essentially unlimited supply of: bad news, arguments, crime, politics, financial catastrophes, celebrity disasters, other people’s complaints, and complete strangers shouting at one another in comment sections.
Then we wonder why we sometimes feel tense.
Your information diet matters
Being informed is useful.
Being continuously immersed in negative information is something very different.
Researchers have even developed a term for repeatedly consuming negative online news: doomscrolling.
Research has found associations between greater doomscrolling and poorer psychological well-being.
Even surprisingly brief exposure can affect our immediate state. In one study, only a few minutes of negative COVID-related news reduced positive mood compared with a control condition, while viewing stories involving kindness did not produce the same effect.
That doesn’t mean we should pretend bad things don’t happen.
It means we should pay attention to what we repeatedly feed our minds.
Try an information diet
For one week, experiment with four simple rules.
1. Don’t let your phone decide how your day starts
Try keeping news and social media out of the first thirty minutes of your morning.
Your brain does not necessarily need wars, political arguments and eleven other people’s problems before breakfast.
Start with your own life.
2. Consume news deliberately
Instead of checking the news twelve times throughout the day, choose one or two specific times.
Find out what happened.
Then leave.
Information has a point of diminishing returns.
The seventh version of the same worrying story rarely makes you seven times better informed.
3. Notice emotional junk food
Look at the accounts you follow.
After consuming their content, do you consistently feel:
angry?
frightened?
inadequate?
resentful?
helpless?
If so, ask whether that person or organization genuinely deserves daily access to your mind.
You don’t have to unfollow everybody who challenges you.
But you also don’t have to give unlimited access to people whose entire business model depends upon keeping you agitated.
4. Replace — don’t merely remove
Nature hates a vacuum and so does your phone habit.
If you stop scrolling, decide what you will do instead.
Read.
Walk.
Listen to music.
Telephone someone.
Play with your dog.
Make something.
Learn something.
Or perhaps look at a ridiculous little rubber duck sitting on your desk.
What are you feeding?
This is one of the messages behind “I Don’t Give A Duck.”
During an ordinary day there are hundreds of invitations to focus upon something negative.
Some deserve our attention.
Many don’t.
The skill is learning to recognize the difference.
You cannot completely control what happens in the world.
You can exercise considerably more control over what occupies your attention for the next sixty minutes.
So here’s an experiment.
For seven days, don’t ask:
“What’s happening online?”
Ask:
“What am I feeding my mind right now?”
Because if you’re trying to Tame the Bear and Stress Less, it makes sense to stop feeding the bear all day long.
Read “I Don’t Give A Duck…” for the full five-tool Stress Less approach.