Turn Off News Notifications Now!
(I mean, only if you want to...)
So, while I’ve been on my social media sabbatical, I’ve realised that I haven’t quite been able to shut off in the way I thought I would. And I couldn’t quite figure out why that was until very recently.
When I say recently, I mean today.
I had not thought about turning off the notifications for the news and media apps I have on my phone. Despite wanting to take a break from Instagram because of all the things I was continuously reading and subjecting myself to, which has led to a sense of overwhelm and exhaustion, I found that the notifications I was getting for BBC, Sky News, the Guardian, Apple News, X, etc., were still keeping me in that state of exhaustion and overwhelm and making me feel agitated.
I don’t know if you’ve ever paid attention to the notification banners that come up for news apps, but they are never fucking pleasant. Especially recently. There have just been so many news notifications about people being stabbed or killed, particularly young girls and women, and the atrocities in Gaza. Then, more recently, there was the news of the violent and racially motivated riots around the country. I didn’t quite realise until now that a large part of my psychological and mental exhaustion came from seeing yet another depressing, shocking, disturbing, and ultimately horrific news banner.
So, as of today, I have decided to turn off the notifications of these apps on my phone and will instead be choosing to not be instantly notified when anything horrific happens or wake up to a whole host of multiple notifications telling me that whilst I’ve been asleep (or at work or spending time with my children and family) that further horrific, depressing, demoralising, and horrible things have happened in that time.
And whilst I’m not one to tell you what to do - because you are all autonomous individuals who can make up your mind - I will say that in the hours since I have turned those notifications off, I feel so much better. I mean, this might all be a placebo effect, but at this moment in time it feels like a really good decision.
That is not to say I won’t keep in touch with the news. I used to be very ignorant and oblivious about world events and had the view that I did not need to know about things that were going on around me (one of the aspects of my privilege I was not aware of at the time). I mean, when those 33 Chilean miners got stuck underground for 69 days back in 2010, I only became aware of it when they were being rescued and thought it had happened a couple of days before. When I mentioned it to my partner, she was like, “You know they’ve been stuck there for like months?” At that point, I decided that it would probably be a good idea to keep on top of things news-wise! But today, I’ve decided that I would like to choose when I engage with the events of the world. I would prefer to make an active choice to find out about what’s happened in the news rather than being told about world events as soon as they happen, and effectively against my will.
As I said above, this is not me telling you what to do, but there is something to be said about how frequently we are fed bad news and how that might impact our day-to-day well-being. This is also not a suggestion to stick your head in the ground and not take note of things that are happening around us (like I did pre-2010), but to be more discerning about when and how much of this kind of news we take in. To summarise this, here is a quote from an article posted on the American Psychological Association (APA) website in 2022:
In today’s hypercompetitive and incessant news delivery ecosystem, slightly more than half of U.S. adults report that they get their news through social media “often” or “sometimes,” according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted from August 31 to September 7, 2020. To drive “clickbait,” news coverage and social media postings also tend to highlight the more negative or dramatic news.
So, just some food for thought.
All the best (and I hope you have a great news-app-free time),
Nice-ish.