Watch the news just once a day.

"Why? The news thrives on negativity, that's why it always starts with murders, disasters, catastrophes, because human curiosity will always stay glued to the TV to find out what else bad happened. News is basically the same throughout the day, but only changes day by day. All you hear and see affects you, how you feel, how your stress level rises or subsides. That's why exposing yourself to only once daily instead of 4-5x to something that affects you so much is healthy for you." - Angie Neik on Quora

Yes. Just not too long ago I decided to cultivate a daily habit of catching up with the world news*, figure it good to be updated with what's going on in the bigger world. Set up a few RSS feeds from carefully selected news sources and made an effort to read them daily. Within days I found myself reluctant to open my RSS reader**, and that the number of updates fill me with more dread than interest. This is not so when I was exclusively following tech news, Unread is almost always the first app I open everyday. Conflicts from China to Russia to Middle East to Europe to Africa and strangely, less from the U.S. (Hmm I wonder why.) cap the headlines. Only 10% or so posts are credited to achievements, wonders and discoveries. Why is this so?

Anyway, I'm back to tech-news-only. The world news is, at the moment, too distressful for my daily intake.


*What you'll find if you Googled for "news". Not genre-specific "tech" news, "entertainment" news or "fashion" news etc. .

**My favourite for the past 6 months or so, and still is: 'Unread' by Supertop, originally created by Jared Sinclair. Beautiful beautiful reader. And what a nice interface. The best on the AppStore I dare say.