If your purpose is to be happy then you must regulate how you consume news.  

News is a problem because these days news is more about conflict, and less about informing and teaching people about current events.

I have a few tips:

1. Stay away from 24-hour news channels. Sometimes there is no news, so reporters spend lots of time speculating about what might be happening. The practice of “what if”-ing creates a sense of anxiety and stress.
2. Do not watch TV news, read your news instead. Television news provides 10-second video snippets of important news stories with short descriptions of the action, and then they cut to commercials. The news is delivered without context. News without proper context is confusing and disturbing. In your mind you have to fill in the context gaps yourself, this takes mental effort and creates distortions that lead to concern and fear.   
3. Obtain your news from ideologically diverse news sources. Seek to get many views about the current event, not just one. Oddly, news today is more about making judgments about who or what is good or bad. Ideological news sources are prone to scapegoating and making intolerant judgments.  
4. Limit the amount of time you spend reading news. Put simply, news can be a major waste of time. The stories and articles are not typically relevant to your life. Often you cannot act on the problems in question. Likely, there are other more important tasks and projects you should be doing instead of reading the news. News reduces your personal productivity.    
5. Seek out news sources that seek to inform, not sell products. News that exists to sell advertising space or get viewer eyeballs is often sensationalized. Stay away from sensational news. One news source that I like is WikiNews at Wikipedia.org. Wikipedia news writers intend to provide unbiased, non-commercial and non-sensational news information.
6. Stop seeking news habitually for the thrill or rush of the experience. I myself used to be a news junky. I would read news for the thrill of it. I needed my fix. Seek to defeat this addiction and get your thrills elsewhere.   

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 18th, 2007 at 2:16 pm and is filed under Happiness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.