Your Mind Is Not an Open Sewer!
Why your mental diet might be the reason you feel so fried
My friends, I have a confession. A shameful secret. Something that causes me genuine guilt and occasional social embarrassment. That makes me feel like I’m a complete uncaring shit. A terrible citizen. A failed grown-up. A bad girl (and not in the fun way). But I’m going to tell you anyway, because I like you.
I don’t read the news everyday anymore.
There. I’ve said it. You can judge me, I won’t blame you. You probably think I hate puppies and want to murder dolphins. That I’m the kind of person who drives through puddles deliberately to soak passers-by. I get it.
In my defence, it’s not like I live in an underground bunker with a sieve on my head, fingers plunged in my ears shouting “LALALALALALALALALA can’t hear you!” at the wall. But there are days (sometimes many in a row) when I don’t read the news. Or watch it. Or listen to it. And, as a result, I am at times shamefully under-informed about quite a lot of very important shit that is happening in the world.
I occasionally find myself faking it in current affairs conversations. Like Joey Tribbiani when he’s only read the V volume of the Encyclopaedia. I’ll nod and look suitably outraged at the right moments (“North Korea, eh? Crazy…”, “Oof, those Russians…”), but I don’t, in all honesty, know every detail of what everyone’s talking about all of the time.
I wasn’t always like this. I actually used to be a full-blown news junkie. I worked in PR for media organisations - news was my drug. My job depended on knowing what was going on at all times, and I loved it. I even worked at places that actually make the news (hello, Financial Times friends!) - and sitting in a morning news conference at a major newspaper is, let me tell you, pretty fucking cool.
So what changed?
The Day My Brain Broke
It all started with Brexit. Living in my cosy, privileged, media-elite London bubble, I truly didn’t think there was a snowball’s chance in hell Britain would vote for something so clearly insane. And then I woke up one morning in 2016 to discover that I did not, in fact, live in the version of reality I thought I did. An experience I think many of us have had in the last few years.
That was when I stopped listening to the news first thing in the morning. There are only so many times you can enjoy being punched in the face before you start to think “maybe no major anxiety before coffee”.
It’s also around this time I suffered my first work burnout. Probably because of the whole “trying to care about everything constantly” thing. Since then, I’ve carried around a low-level background shame about not being “properly” informed. As if I’m turning my back on the world. Like I don’t care enough that horrible things are constantly being done to humans and animals everywhere.
But of course I do. I care desperately and want to try and do some good in the world while I’m on this planet. The problem is if I stay across every detail of every awful story all the time, I don’t think I’d be able to function. And if I can’t function, I’m not much use to anyone.
My dad is a good example of where this road leads. He’s retired, consumes news all day every day, and is therefore constantly depressed and afraid. Afraid for the world, and especially afraid for me. He barely leaves the house and encourages me never to take risks. The world, as far as his nervous system is concerned, is one long emergency. And while that might technically be correct, I’m not convinced it’s a healthy way for us to live.
Which brings me to the point of this rather extended wang-on.
What you let into your head all day is not neutral. It’s not just “information”. You are not just “consuming content”. You are training your expectations of life and yourself.
If you spend your days bathing in things that tell you the world is on fire and you are failing to keep up, you quietly start to assume that things won’t work, that you’ll probably fail, and that there’s not much point trying.
In other words: whether you realise it or not, you are on a mental diet. And most of us are eating absolute shit.
We talk endlessly about diet. Food, supplements, protein, fibre, sleep, steps. The many ways in which we are apparently one deficiency away from certain death. But most of us are completely unguarded about what we let into our minds.
We basically treat our brains like open sewer pipes and then act surprised when we feel like shit.
A quick “harmless” scroll on Instagram is the equivalent of letting an assault team of supermodels into your house to shame you. A news bulletin is doing its job - but is unlikely to make you feel good about the world. A coffee with that friend who offloads everything that’s wrong in their life and then leaves without asking a single question is not going to put a spring in your step.
Part of the problem is we’re living in the first moment in history where it is possible to be informed about almost everything, all the time. Every war. Every crisis. Every injustice. Every awful man with a podcast.
Somewhere along the line, “being informed” stopped meaning “having a basic grasp of the world” and started meaning “maintaining a constant low-level state of alarm”. Our brains did not evolve for this. They evolved to worry about the other 150 people in the village and whether there was a lion nearby.
So we’re stuck in a strange double bind. We judge people who don’t pay attention, and we quietly drown if we try to pay attention to everything.
Which leaves us with the million-dollar question….
How do you stay informed about what’s going on in the world without letting it quietly destroy your ability to function?
For a long time, my answer was a vague, hand-wavy “be a bit careful with the news” strategy.
Eventually I realised that wasn’t enough. I needed an actual way of deciding what went into my head, when, and on what terms.
