Ten minutes, twice a day

One · What happened

Plenty of people are already trying to cut back

The American Psychiatric Association asked adults in mid-April what was making them anxious, and 2,201 of them answered a Morning Consult poll with almost identical numbers for 2 very different things. Current events and paying your bills tied for the top spot, both at 62%, and asking about the economy alone pushes the anxious share to 71%, somewhat or a lot. Just under half, 48%, say they are more anxious than they were a year earlier. That’s up from 43% in 2025, and worry about the impact of new technology jumped from 44% to 53% over the same stretch.

2 months later the Reuters Institute at Oxford published its yearly read on how the world consumes news, built from respondents across 48 countries, and it landed on a related number. 42% of people worldwide say they sometimes or often actively avoid the news. That number held flat against last year but it is up from 29% back in 2017, when Reuters first asked the question. In the United States the figure runs higher still. 45% say they are actively trying to take in less of it.

Reuters splits the avoiders into 2 groups. Some people avoid the news because they were never that interested in it to begin with, and the report doesn’t spend much time on them. The group that actually grew is the other one, people who still care about what is happening and have cut back anyway because paying close attention was wearing them down. The report calls that selective avoidance. Nobody in that group lost interest. Something they still care about started hurting them, and rationing it, mostly alone and without much help, was the only lever they had.

Two · What it is doing

The plan makes it a few hours into the day

Say the plan is an early window and a late one, 10 minutes apiece, and nothing touches the news in between. It survives the drive in most days. It survives opening a laptop. Then a coworker turns a monitor around and says did you see this, or somebody drops a link into a family group chat with 3 exclamation points on it. The plan was never built to answer for other people, and a closed phone doesn’t do anything about the people standing around you.

The badge count works on you at the same time. Notifications keep climbing on their own while the phone sits face down on the desk, and checking one just to make it stop feels like a different decision from opening the news, and it ends up in the same place. By the time the evening window arrives it is often the fourth or fifth check of the day, and nobody decided on that. It just happened, a little at a time, between meetings.

Then there’s bed, and the numbers on that are specific. The American Academy of Sleep Medicine surveyed just over 2,000 adults last year and found that half of them use a screen in bed every single night, and only 14% say they never do it at all. 38% say reading the news that way is making their sleep worse, and the share runs highest, close to 4 in 10, among people in their 30s and early 40s. That’s roughly the same age group the April poll found most anxious. The window a person meant to close for the night is the one that stays open longest, mostly because there is nothing else to do in a bed and the screen is already in your hand.

Three · Where the ground is

The old warning about too much of this

Solomon wrote about this a long time before anybody ran a poll. Near the start of Ecclesiastes, chapter 1, he writes that “in much wisdom is much vexation, and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow.” Solomon wrote a good chunk of the wisdom literature in the Bible, so this is not a man warning anybody off learning things. He means something narrower and a good deal less comfortable, that piling up more knowledge does not reliably buy you more peace, and past a certain point it can cost you some. That is an odd thing for a king who could have any piece of information in the kingdom brought to him to put in writing, and he put it in writing anyway.

The assumption behind the 42% and the 45% is that more information means more control, and once a person has enough of it the fear will finally sit down. Almost nobody actually tests that assumption before acting on it. They just keep reading, on the theory that the next article, the one after the one that upset them, is the one that will finally settle things, and it never is, because the feeling of having had enough news was never on offer at any volume.

A boundary on attention was never a modern idea

God rests on the seventh day of creation in Genesis 2, before anything was broken and before anybody needed protecting from anything. The rest got built into the shape of the week first. When Jesus deals with the subject later, in Mark’s gospel, people had turned that same boundary into a burden of its own, something to track and manage, and he corrects that too. “The Sabbath was made for man,” he says, “not man for the Sabbath.” A limit on what you take in was part of the week before the fall. I don’t see how to read that as a punishment for being weak.

Psalm 46:10 says to be still and know that God is God, and it says it in the middle of a psalm about nations in an uproar and mountains falling into the sea, an odd place for a command to stop moving if that command needed a quiet room first. No quiet room was coming, and the psalm doesn’t pretend one was. The stillness gets commanded anyway, in the middle of the uproar.

Four · Today

Five things, and none of them are “stay informed”

A rule like this hardly ever fails from weak character, though people blame themselves anyway. It fails because the plan was built for a day with no coworkers or group chats in it, and no bed to lie in afterward.

1. 01

   Turn off push notifications from every news and social app, right now.

   It’s a 2-minute setting change and it removes the part of the problem that was never your choice to begin with. Those counts keep climbing on their own while the phone sits face down.

2. 02

   Tell somebody your 2 windows.

   A real person who will notice and ask if you slipped, and a note in your own phone doesn’t count. A rule nobody else knows about gets moved, quietly, and usually pretty fast.

3. 03

   Take the news apps off your home screen.

   Leave them installed if you want. Just make opening one require actually typing a few letters to go find it again. A reflexive tap in an idle moment won’t open anything anymore, and that small bit of friction does most of the work.

4. 04

   Decide now what you will do when the urge hits.

   A short walk, a specific psalm you go read, a text to your spouse. The urge to check does not go away on command, but it will attach itself to almost anything you hand it, including something better than a headline.

5. 05

   After your last window tonight, ask what it told you that actually changed anything you did today.

   If the honest answer is nothing, that is information too, about how much of this you actually needed in the first place.