I am convinced that reading the news is worse than not reading anything at all. There is no proof that it makes us wiser, better decision makers, better informed, better citizens; nothing — if anything, entirely the opposite.

If you are anything like me, you’ve already stopped consuming news without even making a conscious decision about it. Maybe you felt the optimism being sucked out of you with every news bit and just stayed away or maybe without even noticing it, you found something better to do with your time and started replacing it. Or maybe you’ve never been a news person.

Whatever the reason — I bet you don’t miss it at all and you’ve probably realised you don’t really need it.

“The fortunate among us have recognized the hazards of living with an overabundance of food and have started to shift our diets. But most of us do not yet understand that news is to the mind what sugar is to the body.” -Rolf Dobelli

I wanted to write about this topic for some time now. Largely, because I got frustrated with that guy who thinks he is very cultured just because he reads the newspaper and knows what is going on in the world. And with that girl who knows everything about every celebrity and is very surprised to hear I don’t know about the leaked photos of Jenniffer Lawrence. But mostly, because I’ve benefited from it.

Since I unplugged from the news I feel more in control of my attention (I decide what thoughts I want wandering in my head), I have better reading habits (I seek and enjoy long, slow, thought-provoking reads), I have more time to gain meaningful insights elsewhere, and I’m definitely more optimistic.

So I decided to do some research about it and was blown away to find more than enough reasons to back up my gut instinct. I expected to find arguments on it being irrelevant, misleading, manipulative and time-costly — but toxic for our body? alters our brain structure? creativity killer? increases cognitive errors and inhibits thinking? Now those are significant statements.

And it’s not only the news media, these attention-grabbing techniques are almost everywhere, from government propaganda to corporate marketing. We see it all the time on facebook and twitter, each post screaming to get our attention, not so much asking but really tempting us for a click.

“Information is no longer a scarce commodity. But attention is. Why give it away so easily?” - Rolf Dobelli

In an era of paid-by-the-piece articles, of revenue-generating clicks, where luring headlines are more important than the actual content and where everybody can be a “journalist”, we should be careful about what we consume and we should specially be aware of the negative effects it has on ourselves and our society.

Today we know that the adult brain remains neuroplastic, this means it has the amazing ability to adapt and quite literally change its structure and functions as a result of experiences, environments and behaviours. So it is concerning that we are spending so much time on a daily basis, skimming through pictures, videos, headlines and text for relevant keywords; scrolling, clicking, linking. With so much information, our brain has to form shortcuts to deal with the overload and the distractions, because on top of that, we consume news while multitasking. We read the newspaper while having breakfast, we listen to the news while driving and thinking about our day ahead, we watch news bits on tv while scanning through the channels, we scroll through our twitter timeline during work.

We are quite......

Will come back soon!

我确信阅读新闻比阅读任何读物都糟糕。现在并没有任何证据证明阅读新闻可以使我们更加明智、可以使我们更好地做出决定、思维更加活跃甚至变成更好的公民。什么都不能——即使可以，也完全是相反的结果。