News is bad for your health. It leads to fear and aggression, and hinders your creativity and ability to think deeply. The solution? Stop consuming it altogether.

Is that possible? Without a radical and most likely uncomfortable change to your lifestyle, probably not. But we can be more careful in how we expose ourselves to the pernicious effects of what has come to be called ’News’.

When we were children, my parents would not let my sisters and me read newspapers. I always supposed that this was protect us from the shocking content. I read later that Emile Coué, among others, also reckoned that juvenile sensibilities should be protected because as he said it would harm their developing minds.

Coué was writing in the late nineteenth century, and he cannot have envisaged what lay in wait for us. The ideas that information can be toxic, though, was relevant. Like anything we ingest, news and information affects us.

If an item of news is important and relevant to you, you’ll get to hear of it. There is no need to include it as part of our regular diet. As Dobelli’s article shows, it can seriously your clarity of thought and your wellbeing.

See also:

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-rolf-dobelli