News is to the mind what sugar is to the body.
Rolf Dobelli
The meaning of the quote
On April 12, 2013, after 4 years without reading the news, Rolf Dobelli told The Guardian’s readers to stop reading it too. His essay became one of the most-read newspaper articles of the year.
Dobelli’s whole argument fits inside this quote. Sugar is easy to swallow and tastes good, yet it never fills you up, so you keep reaching for more while the damage builds out of sight. News works the same way, he argues. A headline takes seconds to read, and another one is always waiting underneath it.
In the essay, he asked readers to think about the roughly 10,000 news stories they had read in the past 12 months and name one that helped them make a better decision about their life, career or business.
Try it. It’s harder than it sounds.
Most news covers events you can’t change, like a flood on another continent or a politician’s latest insult. Reading about them can still change how you feel.
On April 15, 2013, 3 days after the essay ran, 2 bombs went off near the finish line of the Boston Marathon. Researchers later surveyed 4,675 adults across the US, and as WHYY reported, people who took in 6 or more hours of bombing coverage a day showed more signs of acute stress than people who had been at or near the race.
Most of those viewers were nowhere near Boston, and many watched the same explosion footage replayed again and again.
Dobelli still reads. He has named magazines like The New Yorker, Science and Nature as exceptions, and in the book Stop Reading the News he argues that books and well-researched long articles leave you satisfied in a way headlines can’t.
Action steps
Dobelli quit news completely, but you can test his idea with a smaller cut first. These 4 steps take about a week.
- Count your checks for 1 day. Make a mark on paper every time you open a news app or news site. Seeing the number written down makes the habit hard to ignore.
- Delete the apps and switch off alerts. Take news apps off your phone and turn off breaking-news notifications. When the urge to check hits, wait 10 minutes and let the craving fade before you decide.
- Swap headlines for one long read. Spend the time you freed up on a book or one in-depth article a week. You’ll still learn what’s going on, with the background that headlines skip.
- Let big news find you. Dobelli argues that anything that matters will reach you through friends, family or colleagues. At the end of the week, check whether you missed anything that changed your plans.
Give it a week and notice how your mind feels with fewer headlines in it.
About the author
Rolf Dobelli opens the story of his own habit in the book Stop Reading the News the way someone might speak at a support group.
“Hello, my name is Rolf, and I’m a news-aholic.”
He was hooked by 17 and stayed that way for most of his adult life.
He was born in 1966 in Lucerne, Switzerland, and studied business and philosophy at the University of St. Gallen, where he earned an MBA and a PhD.
After management jobs at Swissair, he co-founded getAbstract in 1999, a company that boils business books down into short summaries.
Alongside the company, Dobelli hosted a weekly TV show about business books and, from 2003, published novels about success and the role luck plays in it.
In 2011 he left getAbstract to write full time. His book The Art of Thinking Clearly came out in German that year, hit No. 1 on Der Spiegel’s bestseller list and became the bestselling non-fiction book in Germany and Switzerland in 2012. Its 99 short chapters each cover one thinking error, and one of them explains why you should stay away from the news.
The English edition brought him to The Guardian in April 2013. In 2020, 7 years after that essay, he published Stop Reading the News, where you can find this quote along with the rest of his case for living without headlines.
Resources
- Stop Reading the News (Book)
- The Art of Thinking Clearly (Book)
- News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier (Article)
- Avoid News: Towards a Healthy News Diet (Article)
- The 10-minute pause kills your cravings (Article)
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