If this is helpful to anyone else, I’d like to share this recommendation:
Every day,
1) I have a period in the morning when I engage news very intentionally. I listen to a daily news podcast, and then I read a daily news email.
And
2) Then I’m done for the whole day. These two sources in the morning provide excellent journalistic coverage, and they give me a broad sense of what’s going on.
Part of the day, I engage news intentionally. The other part of the day, I don’t engage it at all, also intentionally. Both are very deliberate.
I don’t run away from what’s happening. The rest of the day, as needed, I engage around these needs relationally in actual community. We can spend huge portions of our day being interrupted by news alerts or doomscrolling on social media. And then, maybe we see more headlines, and maybe we see whole feeds of fears, but now, this has zapped us of energy. Now we are even more exhausted and on edge for our own mental health, and we may struggle to provide care and take substantial action.
This is not about putting our heads in the sand. It is about being strategic. It is about preserving our energy as best we can for what is most important to us, whether that helps us function well in the day, or take action on important values.
It’s okay to engage news reports. It’s okay to step away from the news reports. This is what is saving me right now: I recommend doing both, but not letting those efforts co-mingle.
— Renee Roederer
Smuggling Grace 