#and i wont feel as restricted in reaching out to folks and starting things cause i wont be worrying as much?

[lostcndfound]

found a blog i made over ten years ago and never used. But it was one I could sill access the email for, so I'm repurposing it. My fave little demon might be reappearing.

[our-dailyimpact]

Read Why News is Bad For You

News is bad for your health. It results in fear and aggression and hinders your creativity and skill to think deeply. The solution? Stop consuming it altogether

In the past few decades, the fortunate among us have recognized the hazards of living with an overabundance of food (obesity, diabetes) and have begun to change our diets. But most folks don't yet understand that news is to the mind what sugar is to the body. News is straightforward to digest. The media feeds us small bites of trivial matter, tidbits that do not really concern our lives and do not require thinking. That's why we experience almost no saturation. Unlike reading books and long magazine articles (which require thinking), we will swallow limitless quantities of stories flashes, which are bright-colored candies for the mind. Today, we've reached an equivalent point in reference to information that we faced 20 years ago in reference to food. We are starting to recognize how toxic news is often.

News misleads. Take the subsequent event (borrowed from Nassim Taleb). A car drives over a bridge, and therefore the bridge collapses. What does the journalism focus on? The car. The person within the car. Where he came from. Where he planned to travel. How he experienced the crash (if he survived). But that's all irrelevant. What's relevant? The structural stability of the bridge. that is the underlying risk that has been lurking, and will lurk in other bridges. But the car is flashy, it's dramatic, it is a person (non-abstract), and it's news that's cheap to supply. News leads us to steer around with the completely wrong risk map in our heads. So terrorism is over-rated. Chronic stress is under-rated. The collapse of Lehman Brothers is overrated. Fiscal irresponsibility is under-rated. Astronauts are over-rated. Nurses are under-rated.

We aren't rational enough to be exposed to the press. Watching an airplane crash on television goes to vary your attitude toward that risk, no matter its real probability. If you think that you'll compensate with the strength of your own inner contemplation, you're wrong. Bankers and economists – who have powerful incentives to catch up on news-borne hazards – have shown that they can't. the sole solution: cut yourself faraway from news consumption entirely.

News is irrelevant. Out of the approximately 10,000 news stories you've got read within the last 12 months, name one that – because you consumed it – allowed you to form a far better decision a few serious matter affecting your life, your career, or your business. the purpose is: the consumption of stories is irrelevant to you. But people find it very difficult to recognize what's relevant. It's much easier to recognize what's new. The relevant versus the new is that the fundamental battle of the present age. Media organizations want you to believe that news offers you some kind of a competitive advantage. Many fall for that. We get anxious when we stop the flow of stories. actually, news consumption may be a competitive disadvantage. The less news you consume, the larger the advantage you've got.

News has no explanatory power. News items are bubbles popping on the surface of a deeper world. Will accumulating facts assist you understand the world? Sadly, no. the connection is inverted. The important stories are non-stories: slow, powerful movements that develop below journalists' radar but have a reworking effect. The more "news factoids" you digest, the less of the large picture you'll understand. If more information results in higher economic success, we'd expect journalists to be at the highest of the pyramid. That's not the case.

News is toxic to your body. It constantly triggers the visceral brain. Panicky stories spur the discharge of cascades of glucocorticoid (cortisol). This deregulates your system and inhibits the discharge of growth hormones. In other words, your body finds itself during a state of chronic stress. High glucocorticoid levels cause impaired digestion, lack of growth (cell, hair, bone), nervousness, and susceptibility to infections. the opposite potential side-effects include fear, aggression, tunnel-vision, and desensitization.

News increases cognitive errors. Newsfeeds the mother of all cognitive errors: confirmation bias. within the words of Warren Buffett: "What the person is best at doing is interpreting all new information in order that their prior conclusions remain intact." News exacerbates this flaw. We become susceptible to overconfidence, take stupid risks and misjudge opportunities. It also exacerbates another cognitive error: the story bias. Our brains crave stories that "make sense" – albeit they do not correspond to reality. Any journalist who writes, "The market moved due to X" or "the company went bankrupt due to Y" is an idiot. I'm uninterested in this cheap way of "explaining" the planet.

News inhibits thinking. Thinking requires concentration. Concentration requires uninterrupted time. News pieces are specifically engineered to interrupt you. they're like viruses that steal attention for his or her own purposes. News makes us shallow thinkers. But it's worse than that. News severely affects memory. There are two sorts of memory. Long-range memory's capacity is almost infinite, but memory is restricted to a particular amount of slippery data. the trail from short-term to LTM may be a choke-point within the brain, but anything you would like to know must undergo it. If this passageway is disrupted, nothing gets through. Because news disrupts concentration, it weakens comprehension. Online news has a good worse impact. during a 2001 study two scholars in Canada showed that comprehension declines because the number of hyperlinks during a document increases. Why? Because whenever a link appears, your brain has got to a minimum of make the selection to not click, which in itself is distracting. News is an intentional interruption system.

News works sort of a drug. As stories develop, we would like to understand how they continue. With many arbitrary storylines in our heads, this craving is increasingly compelling and hard to ignore. Scientists wont to think that the dense connections formed among the 100 billion neurons inside our skulls were largely fixed by the time we reached adulthood. Today we all know that this is often not the case. Nerve cells routinely break old connections and form new ones. The more news we consume, the more we exercise the neural circuits dedicated to skimming and multitasking while ignoring those used for reading deeply and thinking with profound focus. Most news consumers – albeit they wont to be avid book readers – have lost the power to soak up lengthy articles or books. After four, five pages they get tired, their concentration vanishes, they become restless. it isn't because they got older or their schedules became more onerous. It's because the body of their brains has changed.

News wastes time. If you read the newspaper for quarter-hour each morning, then check the news for quarter-hour during lunch and quarter-hour before you attend bed, then add five minutes here and there when you're at work, then count distraction and refocusing time, you'll lose a minimum of half each day hebdomadally. Information is not any longer a scarce commodity. But attention is. you're not that irresponsible together with your money, reputation, or health. Why divulge your mind?

News makes us passive. News stories are overwhelmingly about belongings you cannot influence. The daily repetition of stories about things we will not influence makes us passive. It grinds us down until we adopt a worldview that's pessimistic, desensitized, sarcastic, and fatalistic. The scientific term is "learned helplessness". it is a little bit of a stretch, but I might not be surprised if news consumption, a minimum of partially contributes to the widespread disease of depression.

News kills creativity. Finally, things we already know limit our creativity. this is often one reason that mathematicians, novelists, composers, and entrepreneurs often produce their most creative works at a young age. Their brains enjoy a good, uninhabited space that emboldens them to return up with and pursue novel ideas. I do not know one truly creative mind who may be a news junkie – not a writer, not a composer, mathematician, physician, scientist, musician, designer, architect or painter. On the opposite hand, I do know a bunch of viciously uncreative minds who consume news like drugs. If you would like to return up with old solutions, read the news. If you're trying to find new solutions, don't.

Society needs journalism – but in a different way. Investigative journalism is usually relevant. we'd like reporting that polices our institutions and uncovers the truth. But important findings do not have to arrive within the sort of news. Long journal articles and in-depth books are good, too.

I have now gone without news for four years, so I can see, feel and report the consequences of this freedom first-hand: less disruption, less anxiety, deeper thinking, more time, more insights. it isn't easy, but it's worthwhile.