Where do you draw the line between "staying informed" and avoiding all the stress in the news?

I listen to my body, which includes my mind. I start feeling bad physically or mentally, I disconnect and do something else.

Read news

Get involved

Have a really good revolution

Stop ignoring your whole body telling you to resist

To do something about it

I wish there was a way to stay informed without the rage-bait delivery methods

Have an AI summarize it for you?
I’d be happy with a few less legitimately rage-inducing events too.
- More than few of these rage-inducing events are people saying they or someone else is going to do something that never ends up happening and tens of millions of people got angry literally over nothing. A quite significant portion of today's "news" are pure speculation.
Unfortunately we are in clown-world and the actual fucking news is rage-inducing, even with impeccable journalism.
- I don’t feel rage when I watch the news, even when I see stories I don’t like.

Slow news.

Seriously, you don't need to know all of this shit every day. I do a weekly catch up on Saturday and indont think I've ever missed anything important. If anything some times gives news to clear up.

There is no line for me.

I'm incredibly fragile and seeing people ~~I care about~~ be hurt by all this hurts me incredibly much.

I'm now avoiding the news and doing my best to instead be a positive influence, help where I am able, offer support, donate what I can, etc.

I refuse to let evil fucking idiots steal my joy.

Godspeed in your efforts! I am of the mindset that there is no benefit, whatsoever, to seeing an incredibly great majority of news. It's just so depressing most of the time.

Been talking to folks more and making more friends, which has been great. Seems like many people are of a similar mindset.
You're a good person. Please take care of yourself today I want you around later when it's not crazy outside, okay?
I'm glad you keep your joy but if we lose your activity it's a huge detriment to everyone.

I stick to few sources that generally cover major without the doom and gloom. Generally YouTube channels are pretty good imo.

TLDR News (UK, EU and Global) is a great series of channels for that.
Caspian report on YouTube for some geopolitics/strategic outlook.
Real life lore for couple of deep dives on non-current issues.
Money and Macro for macro economic news.
Just have a think for climate science and energy transition news.
"Good news" is just nice feelgood news.

Traditional media for closely following elections when they come out such as exit polls.

For the Gaza issue I did break the cycle and check on Al Jazeera which is the best for middle East news.

Shamelessly reposting this here, because it seems relevant:

Negative news has a greater impact on people than positive: https://assets.csom.umn.edu/assets/71516.pdf

Media sites know this, and use it to drive engagement:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-023-01538-4

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/social-media-facebook-twitter-politics-b1870628.html

And so, negative headlines are getting worse: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0276367

But negative news is addictive and psychologically damaging: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/why-we-worry/202009/the-psychological-impact-negative-news

So it's important to try and stay positive:

https://www.goodgoodgood.co/articles/benefits-of-good-news

If you want a break from the constant negativity, here are some sites that report specifically on positive news:

And here's 35 more: https://news.feedspot.com/good_news_websites/

Some communities on Lemmy you might be interested in:

Remember, realistic optimism is important and, unlike what some might have you believe, is not the same as blissful ignorance or 'burying your head in the sand': https://www.learning-mind.com/realistic-optimism-blind-positivity/

https://www.centreforoptimism.com/realisticoptimism

And doesn't mean you must stay uninformed on current affairs: https://www.goodgoodgood.co/articles/how-to-stop-doom-scrolling

https://goodable.co/blog/tips-for-balancing-positive-and-negative-news/

This video helped me A LOT: https://youtu.be/yxAd8Owl-7A

Reduce the amount of news and media you consume. It isn't healthy. Check in with your own mental health on a regular basis and use that as a barometer. When you start feeling overly stressed and frustrated, it's time to take a break.

It's ok to be angry or upset but if you can't do anything about it, it's not worth it. You should remain informed and also know that if you're feeling frozen or at a loss, the plan is working. It's meant to keep you down, drown you, and cause you to desensitize or lose hope. Don't fall for it. Rise up in ways that you can.

https://youtu.be/By1Z1nk31iE

I actually had this issue months ago, I kept seeing everything on Instagram regarding a particular major problem. Seeing the deaths of innocents and the governments cheering it on just made me angry, moody, anxious and an immense hate towards humanity in general.

I was also jobless in these months (glad got work now) and that made it worse.

Eventually I heavily restricted myself;

Only 30 mins of scroll in Instagram, checking the news and such.
No talks about politics for at least a month.
Read more books to dive in.
Play fun games (Mario Wonder, Captain Toad Tracker, Mario kart and Catherine Full Body).

Got a job now but I still keep most of the things I restricted myself. Despite everything, I’m in a much better mindset than before.

Here’s the thing I’ve discovered over the past two months. You can block every keyword you can think of involving politics and you will still be subject to them in memes that don’t happen to mention the keywords, comments where the blocking isn’t effective, and friends and spouses mentioning them, if not more. Politics pop up in every context. Video game YouTube, programming subjects on hacker news, pretty much every single subject at this point in time is inundated with politics.

For a long time I was the most informed person in my social circle. I can’t deal with it anymore. I blocked every mention I could think of and yet I still think I’m just as informed as everyone else in my circle, at least to a certain extent.

You can’t avoid it. So block everything and you’ll still be informed.

I use an RSS reader to grab headlines from several sources. I read the headlines once in the morning and once in the evening. My goal is to know what is going on. As much as possible I try not to get too emotionally engaged during this process. I try to be informed without being outraged or depressed.

Only issue with that is headlines don't always tell the truth or the whole story

Getting news via RSS feeds helps. I also cut out what is obvious just bad and getting worse for instance Gaza and Westbank via EI news. I know its getting worse but I cannot take hearing about every death.

Also, I think realizing most doesn't affect you individually is helpful.

Why is news via RSS better than news via Reddit? Or news via TikTok?

I'm asking why this technology solution is better for maintaining a healthy mental state.

And can you give more specific examples on how to achieve it?
- Because you don’t keep doomscrolling. You subscribe to your most important sources and ignore all of the noise of short form posts. If something is truly important enough that I really must read it today, then at least one of them will have written about it. The filtering out of what you don’t care about has already been done. That means I have a reading list where everything is a 100% must read for me and I keep it manageable
- I find it better because I can choose exactly which feeds, websites, and creators I see all in one feed. Therefore there is little chance of seeing something I have deemed undesirable. I also like it because I can follow people I like on youtube without having to sign in! :) Prior to making my own lemmy instance I would follow specific coms and reddit subs too. Now I don't do that because I just ban rude people or coms.
  
  Also, I rarely go to new sites. Accessing them via RSS allows me to only read content without ads or trash articles not related to the feed I want.
  
  Finally, it brings all content together. Humans are lazy. It's hard to go to a ton of different sites to form an opinion. It's much easier to put it all in one place! :)
Any recommendations for an rss reader on iOS?
- I think Inoreader is a good standalone app if you don’t want to host anything

Few things that are in the news are actually newsworthy, it just appears to me to be a lot of noise and only a small part of it will actually happen. Especially in politics given the lard in the oval Office, most of the things he does is just trying to grab attention, stil dangerous but a filter is needed.

Basically my desire to be informed is in opposition to the need to remain sane.

I'm from Germany. I subscribe to a decent weekly newspaper ("die Zeit") and follow German news sites. I try to stay away from news on social media, but that's hardly possible.

On Lemmy, I've mainly blocked keywords and names relating to US politics because the ridiculous bullshit from the White House is unbearable. Despite this, my feed is still full of the stupid drivel from Trump & Co. This is not news, but at best political soap opera entertainment far removed from reality.

Because this stupid stuff potentially affects me too, of course, I have subscribed to a decent monthly newspaper with an international focus ("Le Monde diplomatique"). I can't stand US politics in particular any other way.

at best political soap opera entertainment far removed from reality.

Unfortunately for those of us living through the bullshit, it's all too real.
- Not a good proportion of the things Trump claims - most of them are either misrepresented or outright lies. But yes, of course, his disastrous decisions and policies still affect citizens and thus become reality.
  
  We here in Germany also have such a MAGA-style Nazi bullshit party. Fortunately, they didn't do as well as many feared in the last election. But unfortunately they still got a frightening 20% of the vote. If these people somehow manage to seize power, we'll be in exactly the same situation.

I log out when I start feeling helpless and high anxiety and then I go find things that I can control to feel less helpless/anxious.

I have a stance where I prefer to be minimally informed than misinformed. I will intake what little information I want before I am overstimulated from the poor state of journalism. I'm sorry but I have to be one of those headline readers and if it's very, very intriguing enough to want to read it, I will. But I really can't be bothered to read a lot of what's out there. I read the comments and reactions which arguably, has proven to be far more knowledgeable than the article in question.

Oh shit. Drawing a line is a really good idea.

I vaccilate between "Eh, world and my life were always a mess, we could do with a do-over" and "holy shit holy shit holy shit is that a nuke in the distance?". Multiple times daily. Shit's exhausting.

So far, I've stayed in the know on every god damned thing, even going deep enough in some cases to explore the damage caused. It's stressful, but somebody has to do it and I'm someone less impacted than the targets of this insanity (although I've dated a transfem for years and am trained in education policy, so obviously the news gets to me on a personal level).

One lesson about stress: you've got three ways to cope: (1) you address the source of the stress (or at least feel like you're doing something, like protesting). (2) You ignore it with distractions, which is perfectly fine if it's out of your control, (3) you reframe it, such as "this will pass" or "there's still good in the world", etc.. All three will reduce stress.

We all do all three, and whichever one you find yourself doing is fine. For example, I feel good by trying to share my knowledge and convince my students to give a shit; I still play video games to relax; and I have told myself plenty of times that, while it's bad (very, very bad), that as long as we survive we can build back our institutions (and believe me, the DoE is both important and deeply flawed-- as someone who survived a failed k-12 education and got a PhD in spite of it, education reform has always been my dream).

You didn't mention compartmentalization. 🤔
- Well, those three things are what a psych teacher told me in community college like, way before I sought out my degree. Not that that should be a ding against her, she taught at pretty competitive 4 years, too.
  
  That said, yours could just be a different framework (e.g. PTSD literature). I personally don't think that works very well, as it represses the emotion (much like ignoring it would do). You could also argue physical exercise and deep breaths work, too, but again, that's another framework and one that's generally taught along with aggression literature.

I avoid getting political news from social media, including Lemmy. I don’t subscribe to any political communities. Once in a while I’ll scroll through all active posts to find new communities. But when I do that I know I’m going to run into political stuff and skip over it.

While most of the political posts on both Reddit and Lemmy lean the same way politically as I do, they can often be sensationalized so I have a general distrust of those stories. If something does happen to grab my attention I try to look it up from a reputable news source.

I use Apple News to track current events. I even pay out money for their “News+”. It aggregates many news sources. I can block sources I don’t want to see, and more importantly I can add a list of favorites news sources for quick viewing and to encourage those sources to take priority in my feed. As for my sources I try to pick the most boring and bland news organizations available. Think PBS, NPR, Reuters, etc.

Nothings perfect but this has been working for me for over a year now. I feel reasonably well informed without a lot of the drama.

Apple News isn’t perfect. I still get pushed a lot of celebrity gossip news no matter how many times I click “suggest less”.

i simply stay uninformed. all the important news will come through memes and bypass all keyword filters i set anyway

we weren't made to receive bad news from around the globe 24/7 beamed directly into our pockets. i prefer to be happy

I follow a single news source which doesn't just focus on US politics. They only write about it when there's actually something to write about. Other than that, I take active steps to block it everywhere else. On Lemmy I stay out of political communities and I have set content filters to cover everything from Trump to measles and I keep adding new ones every day. In today's world the only way to consume anything even remotely resembling an "optimal" amount of news is by avoiding them. People who have never tried this get the feeling of FOMO and think that they're going to then be ignorant then but the truth is that you simply cannot insulate yourself from world news unless you go live alone in a forest. When something major happens you will hear about it. Anyone consuming an unfiltered Lemmy feed because they feel the responsibility to "stay informed" are just masochists doing self-harm.

Could I ask which news source it is?
- Yle which is Finland's equivalent of the BBC. I obviously use the Finnish version of the site, though which covers a lot more than the English version.

You can read a list of news article titles and not go deep.

Lemmy is my line. Have one account just for politics, and another with everything but - that way I can control my exposure.

I read weekly newspapers. I used to read Morgenbladet, now I read NZZ am Sonntag, and there are many others to choose from, but getting away from trying to find something engaging each day solves a lot of problems.

I have subscribed to about a dozen daily news e-mails. I skim through them for half an hour every morning with my first coffee. Once time is up, delete the rest & move on w my day. Only exception is I do make a point to make sure I've read at least 1 liberal & 1 conservative viewpoint.

I stop reading when my brain starts hurting.

Tried to filter out as much stuff that I find annoying as possible and block things as well. It doesn't get everything unfortunately but it gets close. I think the only thing that could make it better would be some kind of image scanning filter that would remove things from the feed if it detected them in a posted image or a website preview.

Before November, I did it by mainly looking at AP News. During November I was kind of a mess. After November, no news at all. My lemmy feed is comic strips, Linux, photography, and asklemmy, a few other things that are not political. If major shit happens I hear from my partner or friends, but they all know I'm not that interested. My YouTube feed is Buddhist stuff, standup comedy, and hobby rabbit holes. I even filtered out the lefty late night shows (daily show etc). I know the basics of what's going on, but don't feel any need to get daily updates on it and I'm feeling pretty sane compared to a few months ago! We donate to Palestinian charities, HRC, etc., are active in other ways, but this daily media crap is not healthy.

I've tried and failed. No matter what, it keeps seeping in. Filters, only following certain communities and people, avoiding some platforms, it doesn't matter. I'm considering getting a dumb phone and running off to the woods.

I have all major news sources and US politics tags blocked on Mastodon. I also continually block subs focused on US news here on Lemmy.

Frankly, I don’t trust news media or any kind. The purpose of those publications is to make sure they’re distributed as widely as possible to sell ads. So I don’t look at them unless I have to.

I do, however, follow some local chatter for my city, as the relevant news is there.

Personally I feel I manage to still stay informed, since anything of real importance will break through my block list anyway.

The purpose of those publications is to make sure they’re distributed as widely as possible to sell ads

Agree: For-profit journalism has screwed-up incentives. Not-for-profit journalism does tend to be different.

Personally I feel I manage to still stay informed, since anything of real importance will break through my block list anyway.

So you're relying on those around you to keep you informed, despite blocking news on social media and not reading news yourself? Bold choice.
- I suppose I still don’t trust the not-for-profit outlets either. Non-profit status, at least in the US, is a matter of taxes rather than one of morals.
  
  And, yes, I do end up relying on people around me to hear about things for the first time, but I can and do look into things further from there.
  
  There are pros and cons for this, of course, but I feel a lot calmer without the constant stream of doom in my life.

I stay uninformed but in the rare times I want to be up to date, financial news sources are pretty good, they cover world news briefly and their kind of clickbait is easy to ignore - they don't do rage bait but try to make you invest in something.

I ignore news that don't concern me, my family, city or country. The rest is labeled under "societal spectacle", drama that I cant change unless i have to stop working and dedicate a whole life to fix that problem. Its ok to admit "bugger this" and just turning off the news, if only a while.

Its good to stay informed but I can hardly point at a piece of "news" that absolutly changed my life, career, relationships etc...

It feels like you have to build a skill that sorts news into "I cant do shit about this, (because of valid reasons)" and "wait what are they gutting from my social services that I paid for most of my life through taxes?".

For me I disassociate. I know the people around me by and large love and/or care for me and if shit hit the fan I'm fine.

The news is just entertainment. I love watching the news. I love politics. Sometimes it's surreal and scary but in no ways do I feel worried. I worry for those around me because they may not be able to protect themselves due to age or capacity but then that's why I'm there if required.

I use grund news to keep up to date. I use Lemmy to get enraged.

you really have to be a pessimist

Really close to the stress. Checking out is giving up and it's a super weak move. Oh no you feel bad? People are losing their livelihoods. Their citizenships, their jobs. Buck up yo. We got shit to do.

I draw the line at whiskey/beer. I need both in order to watch the evening news. I won't engage with socials until properly lubricated by both.

"This is fine." (meme)

lol, what is your favorite whiskey for such an evening?
- Generally start with crown royal and 7-up over ice until my 12-ounce 7-up is empty then switch to coors banquet (stupid stubby bottles) until it's time to turn in - which is now.

It's not always the same over time. Currently, I read Lemmy and occasionally tagesschau.de (recently less, want to more again).

Web and text means I can scroll and read what I want, without dwelling to much on it (like video news, intro then video then expert interview or worse). I can skim, or read comment interpretation or summarization. I can comment and discuss.

I have this account for general, and a different on programming.dev. When I open that one I see no or few politics (that kind at least). Etc.

Of important things you will get informed want it or not.

It's better to just pursue news on things you like and enjoy to avoid depression.

If news stress you out I would recommend to actually avoid them. It's what I do and I am still oversaturated with news, so there's no risk on being missinformed.

I've finally made the choice and filtered trump posts, it took a while to figure out how Eternity does it.

I still watch Late Show and Jimmy Kimmel.

Staying away from opinionated news outlets. News from outlets like Reuters or AP usually just deliver the news straight up.

This. I'd like to add that I avoid reading about things that "could" happen

Sort what you know is predictable bs. For example, you know the bad actors are going to always say or do outrageous things for distraction. I use the uBlock Origin browser plugin with filters for “Trump” “Elon” “Maga” and most news sites have about 2 or 3 articles worth reading. Entries even get blanked on Lemmy. Instead of seeing “TRUMP, ELON, MAGA DO THIS!!!” You now see “Secretary of Defense halts Cybersecurity from offensive attacks on Russia” from a decent source. This narrows most news to either things that may affect you directly or helps you build a better informed opinion. Also, if you are in the US, take every opinion from the house of reps and the senate and throw it in the trash. Until they quit acting like children and begin negotiating like adults, they have absolutely nothing good to say. That’s a good chunk of the “news” right there. So when you see stuff like “REP INTRODUCES BILL TO …” just stop reading. If you care to look further look for the bill number and actually read it. Most of the time it’s really stupid crap tactics just to rile up the public. They have been doing that for well over a century. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

tl;dr: sort the troll news.

I prioritize staying informed over well-being. But I also don't trust everything I see. Which is the real reason (or one of them) why I mainly watch local news. I wouldn't be like "I don't want to see who among us is in danger of being nuked, nuclear bombs are so unsightly to watch". It is best to prepare for longer-term benefit.

Alcohol

I would recommend taking only a certain amount of time per day on news AND social media, like maybe half an hour after work.

There isn't a line, you are either informed or not.

If you care more about the illusion of mental health more than your life or reality then bury your head in the sand.

At this point I'm struggling to find how staying informed even helps. The news is a constant deluge of horrible shit I can't do anything about. I voted, I've already braced myself financially for what's coming as best as I can but I suspect it won't be enough, no one in power is doing a fucking thing to help.
- I think the point of the billionaire owned news spamming a bunch of horrible shit is to make you feel like participating in reality isn't worth it.
  
  Meanwhile the people who will fight back have to participate in reality

I mostly read headlines but not articles. This is so that I can send emails to a family member who voted for this shit again. I throw in a one-liner that sarcastically alludes to the terrible story and a link with the headline in the subject. I'm super pissed that my mother voted for this asshole (again), so if the story is about dismantling the education dept, my comment would be: "Your grandkids go to a private school, so they're fine. Sucks to be a poor kid!"

Honestly, if I wasn't screaming at her (via email, not literally), I'd probably have to avoid altogether. But I believe it's necessary that she read about every possible terrible thing she invoked with her vote. Or, maybe more realistically, I'm just that mad at her even if she'll never change. Our relationship is likely over.