You get to choose what to pay attention to
On rethinking our relationship with the news
Starting off with a glimpse of beauty, something I noticed this week.
First question:
Do you feel a vague but constant clench somewhere down in your belly?
I’m gonna bet the answer is Yes. A lot of the world right now is held in a grip of fear, our nervous systems on high alert. The scale and degree of unknowns has become almost too much to bear. What was already a heavy load of geopolitical, economic and social consternation has grown weightier and thornier in recent weeks.
In Canada, that consternation is existential. The future of the nation is suddenly in question due to increasing tensions with the U.S. America has long been the older, more famous sister for whom Canadians often get mistaken. (“No, we’re not twins actually. And I’m a better hockey player.”) Redefining that sibling-style relationship, in light of unbidden hostility from the U.S administration and a punishing trade war, is emotionally complicated and deeply destabilizing.
“I am angry, I’m scared and I’m trying to plan.”
No matter what part of the world you live in, that quote, from a recent news report, pretty much sums it up. Canada may be in the eye of the storm at the minute, but the sentiment is near-universal. Everyone has been carrying around a gunny sack of anxiety bowling balls on our backs (in our minds, actually) for a while now: rising costs, pandemic repercussions, shifting global alliances, slashed budgets, surging mental health crises…and thrumming constantly underneath it all, the existential angst of wondering if the planet itself can survive.
Stress and uncertainty has been a crippling weight.
Now on top of that comes a wildly unpredictable world leader with an avowed appetite for retribution and seemingly little concern for who or what might get broken along the way. We’ve gone from carrying a sack of bowling balls to holding a rabid tiger with untrimmed claws. No wonder we can hardly sleep or think about anything else.
Next question:
How many times in a day (or an hour?) do you find yourself reading about or discussing Donald Trump?
His latest move… how it might affect you… what tariffs might mean for your job…hashing out the flooded zone of overwhelming change. The pace of news is relentless and we Just. Can’t. Stop. talking about it.
Isn’t it an extra victory for the aggressor if he gets to live rent-free in your mind most waking hours? (And a few of your sleeping hours, I’d wager.) Time spent with friends is supposed to be a solace from hardship, and yet lately it too gets hijacked by discussions of the news. I am aware of how much it grates on me, the inevitable veering of almost every conversation, back to Trump and tariffs and tyranny. How much of my one wild and precious life must I spend analyzing the caprice of a belligerent antagonist, agonizing over unknowable futures?
Since your racing mind is already flooded with anxiety-inducing questions, one more won’t hurt:
How many weeks do you figure you have left to live on this earth?
It’s a tough one to think about, but in the spirit of learning to sit with uncertainty, I’d argue it’s crucial. As UK author
made clear in his 2021 bestseller Four Thousand Weeks, our time on this earth is precious precisely because it is finite. 4000 is the number of weeks the average person can hope for, should they be lucky enough to live into their 80s. Burkeman’s book—much like its 2025 follow up Meditations for Mortals—is an brilliant up-ending of our obsession with getting things in order and under control. (We’re never going to, is what it comes down to. There just isn’t time—four thousand weeks is not long enough to get the world shipshape.)I recently had the great pleasure of interviewing Oliver Burkeman for an episode of my forthcoming podcast. Curious about his strategies for navigating uncertainty, I asked him how he is handling all the unknowns of the world at the moment.
Oliver Burkeman wants you to put down the rabid tiger and see what else you can find.
I remain mindful about the way we are consuming information about the state of the world, and I have made fairly conscious efforts to pull back from this situation that I have come to think of as “living inside the news”.
That’s when your family and your house and your job and your neighbourhood are somehow not real, just somewhere you maybe visit a little bit, but basically where you live is in the news. And I do think that that makes things worse. There isn't a whole lot of use in me trying to work up my emotions as much as I can about the state of the world, right?
Viewing our life as an hourglass containing a finite amount of sand is a potent wake-up call to examine how much of our precious time we are spending—are choosing to spend—in the clutch of fear because of our increasing tendency to, as Burkeman put it in a 2019 column for the Guardian, “marinate in the news.” Our habit of gluttonously guzzling news has caused what he sees as a shift of our psychological centre of gravity, so the news is somehow realer than the concrete world of our work, family and friends. Our actual lives almost relegated to the status of a sideshow compared to the high drama of the headlines.
Sound familiar? You’re not alone. And make no mistake, news outlets want this to happen. In the age of non-stop news cycles and an overwhelm of media options, stories and reports are expertly crafted to capture and retain your attention—targeting your fear. (For a well-researched walk through our growing news addiction, read
’s smart newsletter Beyond the Screen —a great follow.)Remember daydreaming? Remember boredom? Purposeless wanderings of the mind have been hijacked by our relationship with the news, the immediacy of real life eclipsed. In the dentist’s waiting room, on a subway platform, on the pool deck during Junior’s swimming lesson—we leap at our phones, feeling we need to stay on top of the news.
Final question: Do we though?
No one wants to hold an angry tiger—so why not put it down? Let me be clear, this is NOT a call for putting our heads in the sand, hands thrown up in helpless surrender. Journalism matters, now more than ever. “Democracy dies in darkness” as the Washington Post used to argue before it lost much of its journalistic credibility. I’d be remiss not to acknowledge sincere appreciation for my former colleagues in journalism, tirelessly trudging through muck and ruin to hold power to account; trying their best to shine a spotlight through the darkening shitstorm to identify the truth.
Staying on top of the news feels extra important during these turbulent times, so it requires extra self-awareness to recognize the difference between educating ourselves and granting the news permission to dictate our emotions.
In 2018 I spent eleven months off work going through cancer treatment. Cancer is of course a physically harrowing ordeal, but psychological recovery—especially when cancer has been recurrent—can be even harder. For me, the best emotional and spiritual salve was to focus on glimpses of beauty. I worked hard to train my mind to find joy, to slow down to experience the lasting comfort of nature, to seek out and celebrate moments of kindness and humanity. In the final weeks of my medical leave, just before returning to my job as a radio host, I remember discussing with friends my apprehension about re-entering the heavy and relentless pace of daily news. So much of the news is heartbreak; we must report on horror, fear and pain. Other professions can turn off the news when it gets too overwhelming, but not journalists—bad news is the work.
A friend gave me a piece of advice then that feels as wise today as ever. “You will have to carry the news,” she said, “but you can carry it lightly.”
What “carrying it lightly” looks like might differ for each of us. But if you’re screaming at me right now, something along the lines of “How can you say that when democracy is at stake and we may be about to go to war and rights are being stolen in broad daylight?!?”—I can say for sure that’s not carrying it lightly.
Recognizing how unhelpful anxious thoughts are is a skill, one I had to learn the hard way. It’s too easy for the worry train to build up steam, and news guzzling just stokes the engines. How can we switch the track? It starts by asking another important question: What are we paying attention to? It’s always a choice, we just have to recognize our ability to exercise it. Or as Mister Rogers famously put it:
“When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, "Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.”
Whether it’s glimpses of beauty, acts of resistance, comedy, meditation teachers—whatever form your helpers take, look for them. And since Joan Baez was right when she said that “action is the antidote to despair”, it also works to be a helper. Stewing in the news doesn’t do anyone any favours; finding like-minded citizens or groups taking action toward solutions is a guaranteed coping strategy. You don’t have to get the whole world under control (not possible, not enough weeks). Just being part of any contribution is enough to ease the stress of uncertain times. Oliver Burkeman told me he thinks so too:
Actually doing things is the whole game.
When I hear people saying ‘You know, I was in a deep situation of despair about the planet, but then I started volunteering at my local park’, there's a part of me that wants to say, Well, it's not going to help volunteering at a local park. But there is a kind of mysterious level at which that is the answer. There is something about participating in and doing the right things.
It’s another way of realizing the agency we always have in what we pay attention to. Canadians are putting their attention toward shifting shopping habits away from American products. What else could you put your attention toward besides the relentless cycle of news?
For some encouragement on redirecting your attention in helpful ways, let me shout out another excellent newsletter: Emmy Laybourne Fights Her Phone is a wonderful journey on which to tag along. As novelist and screenwriter
deprograms her own unhealthy phone use habits, she learns a lot of brain science and other fascinating evidence to heighten self-awareness around our relationship with that ubiquitous little machine in our pockets. What is doing for children’s screen time, Emmy is doing for grownups. That’s some powerful social change, right there.We know it from firsthand experience, and the research bears it out: the quality and strength of our communities, our human relationships, is key to our sanity. It’s the single biggest contributor to our happiness and our resilience as we go through hard things.
So take a news break. Spend time with people who fill your cup and see how long you can go without talking about the latest headline. Better yet, link arms with people working to make things better, whatever form that might take for you. Find the helpers—they’re there if you pay attention.
The feeling of those little claws on my fingers! That can have my full attention.
What are you paying attention to other than the news?
I’d love to hear about what’s working.
I think I’ll open up the Substack Notes feature (still learning my way around this place…) so feel free to leave a comment or share a Note about what helpers you have found to ease your passage through this troubling period in history.
I am going to share this with my anxious friends. We talk about it all the time. A year ago, pre Trump, I joined the local chapter of Seniors for Climate Action Now, because of my own anxiety about the state of the earth. I can attest to how much it helps to be with like-minded people doing the little we can.
Love this, Gill! Isn't Oliver Burkeman the best for times like this?