One enduring memory from my 1970s childhood is the Los Angeles Times sitting on our driveway every morning. My dad would walk out in his robe to fetch the paper, then divide it into sections: front page and sports for him, funnies and the arts for my mother. Later, I would find the discarded cartoons and read through them: Peanuts, Cathy, Garfield, The Far Side (which I never understood). Of course, as a budding therapist, I always read Dear Abby.
It’s probably the everyday-ness of the event that caused it to etch a groove in my memory bank. As certain as time, the newspaper would be delivered, divided, and consumed. By mid-morning, it would land in the trash, and later, when recycling made its way to L.A., into the blue bin. It occupied a small portion of our day, but it was enough: my dad remained informed and my mom had her ’70s version of 10 minutes of mindless scrolling.
How differently the news is delivered and consumed today, with its 24/7 news cycle. What used to occupy an hour at most in the morning of news stories that happened the previous day, we’re now privy to news events happening in every corner of the earth within minutes of their occurrence. If we’re not careful, we can become swallowed by this tsunami of information to the point where mental health is negatively affected.
Is My Head in the Sand?
This topic recently came up in our Zoom gathering for my Reclaiming Joy course. The theme of screens in general is prominent in the course as I’m a firm believer that it’s impossible to have true joy while spending hours a day on screens. During the call, the conversation turned specifically to news consumption, and the struggle that many people feel to toe the line between staying informed and protecting one’s mental space. To this end, a member asked:
“How do you handle people who might judge you for having your head in the sand?”
I responded:
“For me to do what I do and be who I am in the world, I can’t expose myself to the 24/7 negative news cycle that is designed to light up our amygdala and send us into panic. For me to stay clear in the vessel of who I am, just like I know there are certain things I can’t eat because they’ll muddy the channel, I have to be clear about what I’m willing to ingest and not ingest so that I can serve in the ways that I’m called to serve.
“It doesn’t benefit me or the people that I’m here to serve, including my loved ones and my work community, if I’m bogged down in panic and terror, which is what the news is designed to do. My basic rule of thumb with the news is that if it inspires you to take action and to help concretely in some way, by all means stay abreast of what’s happening in the world. But if it is paralyzing, and if it clogs your channels and leads to fear and panic, I don’t know what the benefit of that is.
“To answer your question of how to handle people who might judgmental of how to relate to the news, that’s really not your problem. At this point in my life I don’t care a whole lot about what random people think. And it’s not that I’m completely uninformed because I live with people who stay very connected to the news so I hear about the main events from them.
“But I think they take in too much news as none of us are meant to take in this much information this many hours of the day. It’s completely unnatural for us to be getting news 10 seconds after it happens for something that occurred on the other side of the world when there’s nothing we can do about it. The level of powerlessness that that creates in us isn’t serving the greater whole. It’s not life-affirming or energizing.”
Staying Informed versus Compulsively Checking
Catherine Price, author of the excellent book How to Break Up with Your Phone, emphasizes this point in this blog post called “How to Survive the 2025 News Cycle”:
“Our brains are limited in their ability to absorb and process new information. If we try to absorb too much, we end up overwhelmed, stressed, exhausted, and, eventually, burned out. (Sound familiar?) And when the news cycle heats up, as it is doing right now, our mental overwhelm gets even worse.”
I want to be clear about the difference between staying informed and compulsively checking the news, especially if it’s “doomscrolling” throughout the day: the former is healthy and essential in a democratic society while the latter actually erodes our capacity to remain engaged. If “staying informed” leads to paralysis, nothing good has come from the engagement.
Everyone must find their own balance around ingesting news. I usually receive my news by osmosis. Others choose to titrate their news consumption through weekly summaries or subscribing to reputable local news sources.
Occasionally I’ll take a deep dive into a particular issue to try to understand its complexity, as I recently did when my son sent me an in-depth article published in The Atlantic on the war in Sudan. It took me about an hour to read it, then another hour to re-read certain parts and discuss it with him so I could gain a better understanding of the situation there and how it connects to the rest of the world. When we’re doomscrolling or skimming we bypass complexity.
“I Can’t Save the Whole World”
The conversation during the Zoom call above was followed by another member sharing:
“I get overwhelmed by feeling that what I can do is never enough…”
I responded:
“You brought of the question of ‘enough’, which is a core component of this course. We are designed to feel that we’re enough, but the culture is predicated on a scarcity mindset. On this topic it shows up as, ‘No matter what I do and no matter how I help it’s just going to a drop in the bucket, it will never be enough so what’s the point?’ Then we’re back to powerlessness and paralysis.
“I think it comes back to – and I know this is a triggering word for some people – some sense of our purpose, why we are here and the recognition that when we’re showing up in our full selves, which also means our joyful selves because joyfulness is our true nature, whether it’s for a child, a pet, a parent, a tree, or a garden – or in a bigger societal way like donating money – that we are trusting that it is enough because we trust, ‘This is how I’m here to serve.’
“There is the recognition that we’re always up against the bulwark of a culture that we are never enough, that no what you do or how much you give or how many protests you attend or how many letters you sign or whatever ways you’re showing up it’s never enough. That message is debilitating and paralyzing, and simply not true.
“The flip side is that every single thing we do to help, everything we do from love, is enough. Everything makes a difference. Every act of love, of care, of service, of money, of all the ways we show up and give, makes a difference. I think we need to get the word enough out of the conversation. You can’t measure it.
“Is it enough? No, because look at our world. There’s so much pain and brokenness no matter what we do. But does it make a difference? Are we putting a marble in the positive jar? Yes. It’s trusting that there are positive reverberating effects.”
You Are Enough
It’s like the quote I came across a couple of months ago:
“Helping one person might not change the world, but it could change the world for one person.”
And, according to the mysterious magic of the Butterfly Effect that says the flapping of a butterfly’s wings on one side of the world could later cause a tornado on the other side of the world, helping one person could actually have a wider and deeper effect than we think.
So, yes, it is enough.
You are enough.
Everything we do from love is enough.