How to Save Your Sanity

Your Permission Slip to Stop Carrying the Burdens of the World on Your Back

Less than 24 hours after he'd broken up with me, my college boyfriend's name popped up in my Facebook "news" feed: "Daniel Huntington [name changed to protect the guilty] is now single."

Salt, meet Wound.

My mind flashed forward to an imaginary day in the future when I'd see his name again, this time with the words in a relationship next to Someone Who Was Not Me.

Without another thought, I deleted my Facebook account and, with the exception of the month I spent using it in an attempt to organize my 10-year class reunion as the graduating class president (seriously, if everybody was already on Facebook, why did we even need a reunion anyway?!), I've never looked back.

Suddenly, though, I had an open chunk of time I'd previously spent scrolling through my hall mates' photo albums with titles like "Nights We'll Never Forget" featuring 23 people chugging beer out of the same bong at Sigma Chi.

I know, I thought. I'll use that time to read the news. In my mind, I'd become informed. A real adult reading The New York Times. I'd be smarter. Cooler. More worldly. Better, even. I convinced myself it would make me a good person.

Except...it didn't end up making me feel good. At all. In fact, I felt pretty much the opposite of good. Overwhelmed. Depressed. Somehow more ignorant staring into the overwhelm of everything I didn't know. Overall, I felt hopeless.

Again, I had a decision to make, this time more conscious: I could go on subjecting myself to the debilitating (and purposefully engineered) negative news cycle, or I could choose to be an uninformed idiot.

To protect my own well-being, I chose the latter.

And, once again, with few exceptions (namely in the Year-that-Must-Not-Be-Named), I've not deviated from this decision.

Of course, I often feel bad for choosing to live a life of mostly ignorant bliss.

Guilt, shame, embarrassment all pop up like Whac-A-Mole heads from time to time. I wrestle with the thought that "not knowing what's going on" makes me a bad environmentalist/feminist/citizen/person. It's as slippery a match as a kiddie-pool-filled Jello fight. No one's winning any awards, and it's pointless.

Over the years this is something I've coached many of my clients on: managing their relationship with the news and social media to protect their own mental and emotional well-being.

If, like some of my clients, you can't get on board with the idea of letting go entirely, here are some ways they've found to wear a figurative raincoat:

1. Timebox it. Give yourself 10 minutes, max. When the timer’s up, so is your doomscrolling.

2. Choose your battles. Pick 1–3 issues that actually matter to you—and let the rest go like the spinach you swore you were actually going to eat this time that lies swimming in a pool of spoilage in your vegetable crisper.

3. Curate your sources. Ditch the outrage factories. Subscribe to one or two quality news sources that deliver facts without frying your nervous system (this does not include TV).

4. Do something. Don’t just stew—write a letter, donate, volunteer, vote. Action is the antidote to anxiety.

5. Call it when you're spiraling. Feeling helpless = your cue to log off, walk it off, or scream into a pillow. You're not weak. You're human.

6. See also the sections "What To Do" and "What Not To Do" in the article I mention below. (Keep reading.)

If, on the other hand, you're more like me but still find yourself struggling with the guilt of feeling like a bad person for your decision, I offer you a sentiment I recently stumbled upon on Pinterest (yes, technically social media, but I love it, it always leaves me feeling GOOD, and I have a 30-minute daily time limit set on my phone):

Anthropologist Robin Dunbar—who sounds like a guy who could fix your Wi-Fi or explain ancient tribal dynamics with equal flair—is the brain behind Dunbar’s Number. That number? Roughly 150. That’s the number of people our big, brilliant monkey brains evolved to track and care about. Think: your hunting crew, your berry-gathering buddies, the guy who makes the good fire. We’re wired for local concern, not global despair.

So when you flood that 150-person-capacity brain with a 24/7 ticker of wildfires in Australia, political chaos in D.C., floods in Pakistan, and your neighbor’s angry Facebook post about the tourists stopping in the middle of the road to take pictures of the elk, you fry your circuits. It’s like downloading a terabyte of stress on dial-up.

Our nervous systems simply weren’t built to process the burdens of eight billion humans. It’s the evolutionary equivalent of expecting a Fitbit to fly a rocket to Mars.

Which is why I nodded so hard I gave myself whiplash when I read Mark Manson’s blog post “Why You Should Quit the News.” He puts it brilliantly—go read it. Then come back and tell me your blood pressure didn’t drop just a little.

And if you're nodding along to this like a Dolly Parton booblehead (not a typo) on a gravel road, then good news (the metaphorical kind): This exact brand of boundary-setting, F-budgeting, and emotional triage is core curriculum in Your Middle Finger Makeover. We’ll be reading one of Manson’s books together and using it as a springboard for the kind of radical self-preservation that actually gets sh*t done.

Because you can’t make big, bada$$ moves in your life if your energy is constantly hijacked by things you can’t control. This is the work—learning to care strategically, not universally. Learning to aim your efforts like a weapon, not a sprinkler. Learning to give fewer effs—and make them count.

Already feel your middle finger twitching in agreement? Email me and ask to join the waitlist for Your Middle Finger Makeover. There are already three rebels on it, and everyone on the list gets a 10% discount code for the full program.

Deadline to get on the list is this Friday at 5 PM MST—after that, you’ll be like a Black Friday shopper showing up at 7 a.m. to find the shelves picked clean and Karen walking off with the last iPhone6000.

With Fierce Love,

Chazz