Why I Stopped Reading the News Every Day

For years, the first thing I did each morning was reach across the bed, unlock my phone, and start scrolling through headlines before my feet touched the floor. By the time I had brushed my teeth in the small bathroom off my Sydney apartment, I would already know about a bus strike in Bogotá, a tremor off Vanuatu, and whichever minister had said something regrettable before sunrise. The cycle felt responsible. It felt informed. It also felt, eventually, exhausting in a manner I could not quite articulate until I stepped away from it.

The breaking point came quietly. I was sitting on a bench near the harbour one weekend, watching a ferry ease past the Opera House, and I caught myself reaching for the phone in my pocket even though nothing had buzzed. There was no alert. There was only the muscle memory of a habit that had been running, without my permission, for the better part of a decade. That small moment of noticing my own hand was the beginning of something I had not planned.

The news cycle that never closes

Australian newsrooms move the way the city moves. The flagship bulletins on the ABC run through the morning, then Seven, Nine, and Ten compete through the arvo, and by the time the late news rolls around, the same story has been re-cut four or five times with a slightly different emphasis. Because most outlets are clustered around Sydney and Melbourne, stories from Perth or Hobart often arrive second, shaped already by which reporter happened to be closest. The result, for someone who watches closely, is a sense of permanent motion. The story is never done. Even the things you think you have finished with keep being re-served.

I had not realised how much of my day was being eaten by that motion until I logged it. A week of honest tracking, using the Screen Time tool on my phone, showed that news apps were pulling me in roughly thirty to forty times a day. Each visit was short, thirty seconds or a minute at most, but the cumulative effect was a kind of low-grade attention fracture. I could not finish a paragraph of a book without glancing at the screen. I could not walk the long way around the neighbourhood without wondering what had happened in the past ninety seconds.

The hardest part was the morning. Australian breakfast television is loud, fast, and engineered to hold you just past your tolerance. Even if I only had the radio on in the background, the tone of the broadcast, the way every item is delivered as if it were a five-alarm emergency, set the temperature for my entire day. I had begun to mistake urgency for importance, and I had not noticed the swap.

The moment the cost became visible

What finally made the change feel necessary was not a single news event. It was the accumulation. After the bushfire season a couple of summers back, I found that I could not look at a headline about fire risk without my chest tightening. After a year of hearing about housing prices climbing in every suburb from Newtown to Footscray, I began to dread the news before I had read it. The information was not the problem. The volume was. The repetition was. The way each item was framed as both crisis and cliff-hanger was.

There is also a particular habit among Australian newsrooms of running poll-driven stories through the late morning and into the lunch bulletin. A new Essential poll, a fresh Resolve survey, a marginal-seat projection that may or may not survive contact with the actual electorate. These pieces have a short half-life, and yet they are presented with the same gravity as a treaty change or a budget night. The mismatch between tone and consequence began to bother me. I wanted the news that mattered, not the news that happened to fill the hour.

I also noticed, slowly, that my memory was degrading. I could recite the name of a backbencher I would never meet but could not remember what a friend had told me the day before. I could recall the colour of a politician's tie but not the name of the barista who had served me that morning. The news was borrowing against the things I actually cared about, and the interest was being charged against my attention.

What I do with the hours instead

The hours came back, slowly, and I had to learn what to do with them. At the suggestion of a piece I had been meaning to read for months, I sat down one Sunday and worked through the notes on stop multitasking right now. The argument was simple, and I felt slightly embarrassed that I needed to be told. Multitasking was not a skill I had developed. It was a habit I had allowed to develop around me.

In practice, the swap has been unglamorous. I read books again, properly, in long sessions rather than in the gaps between headlines. I cook breakfast properly, real brekkie with the radio off, and sit at the table instead of eating over the sink. I go for walks along the coastal path near Coogee without the phone in my hand. When I take a photo, I take it, and then I put the camera away. The pleasure of these small activities had been buried under the constant need to know what was happening somewhere else, and they have come back like a familiar smell returning to a house.

I also read more deliberately. Instead of three or four news apps, I read one weekly print magazine cover to cover, and I listen to one long-form podcast during the week, usually something from the Radio National catalogue, which is still, in my view, the most underrated editorial offering in the country. I have stopped trying to be current. I have started trying to be thoughtful.

How I stay informed without the rush

This is the question everyone asks, and the honest answer is: I stay informed better, just less often. I check the headlines twice a day, once in the late morning and once in the evening, using a single source. I read the major Australian outlets on Saturday morning with a long coffee, and I read a thoughtful international magazine on Sunday. That is the whole diet. Everything else is a bonus, and I treat it that way.

Conversation has done more than I expected. People who know I am off the daily cycle tend to bring me the one or two things they think I really should know. That curation is a gift. A friend will mention a court ruling over a beer at the pub. Another will mention a local council decision at a backyard barbecue. The signal-to-noise ratio is dramatically better because someone I trust has already done the filtering for me.

I also keep a small notebook. When a story comes up repeatedly in those conversations, I write it down and read a longer piece about it the next day. By the time I get to it, the panic has usually passed, and the longer piece is more useful than the first alert would have been. I have not missed anything that mattered. I have missed a great deal that did not.

What shifted in the months since

The shift has been quieter than I expected. I sleep better. I read more books in a month than I used to read in a year. My conversations are longer and I remember them afterward. I have started keeping a small garden on the balcony of my apartment in the inner west, which sounds like a cliché until you try it and realise how much attention a single tomato plant will demand of you if you let it.

The bigger shift is in how I relate to information itself. I no longer treat the news as a moral obligation. I treat it as one input among many, and I have learned that most of what I thought was essential has a half-life of about forty-eight hours. If I miss it, the world does not change. If I do not miss it, I usually cannot remember it by the end of the week anyway. The people who produce the news have a strong interest in me believing the opposite, and I have decided to politely decline the offer.

If any of this sounds like it might be useful, you can read more of my notes and small experiments on mischa-andriessen.com. I do not promise answers. I do promise fewer alerts.