Consider our story. Following the 2016 Presidential Election, Nate noticed that tracking the news became a near addiction: “I woke up each morning with an irresistible urge to view the latest headlines. During short two-minute breaks in my day, I would reach for my phone to scan through breaking news updates. Even though the news left me feeling anxious, I couldn’t get enough of it.” Eric’s relationship to the news took on a similarly habitual form: “I generally don’t watch a lot of TV and yet for the few months leading up to President Trump’s inauguration and immediately following it, I became a news junkie. What’s more, I thought and talked about the most mundane details of the day’s news incessantly.” Both of us noticed that the latest tweet or controversy not only took over our conversations with friends, family, and co-workers. It also started taking over our minds, becoming the ever-present theme of our mental chatter. We didn’t notice the gravity of the situation until we went on our annual silent meditation retreat in late March. During our time away, we shut off our devices and practiced open awareness meditation in the hills of Southern California. During this time, a political firestorm erupted in Washington DC over the repeal of the Affordable Care Act. And yet the contrast between our pre-retreat news-addictive behavior with the more centered experience of just sitting and being was striking. On retreat, we both felt a profound feeling of peace and freedom that resulted from being insulated from the political chatter. Our minds were able to focus on the sound of the breeze, the clouds, and the trees – to experience raw presence without the filters of TV news and social media. When we broke silence at the end of the retreat, we enthusiastically shared the unexpected benefit of having taken a news holiday. What was particularly fascinating (and somewhat humorous) was that we hadn’t fully appreciated the severity of our pre-retreat news addiction. This experience left us asking a question that many of us are confronting in this age: how can we remain active and engaged in politics and society while staying mindful of the present moment and steering clear of news addiction? There are two obvious but undesirable approaches to answering this question. The first is cultural isolation. We could try to turn all of life into a silent retreat, hiding away from the latest news to maintain peace of mind. In our busy and engaged modern world, this strategy of escapism and non-doing does not lead to a lasting state of happiness. The other extreme would be to let the base desires fueling this news addiction run free – to itch each scratch of novelty-seeking behavior by giving ourselves unfettered access to cable news, political blogs, Facebook, and Twitter, day and night. This strategy also leads to a dead end because the mind state that accompanies news addiction tends to drown out the experience of being here now. So what’s the mindful way forward? The middle way. But what’s the middle way in this situation? Here, it’s helpful to turn to Ralph Waldo Emerson for timeless wisdom: “It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.” Avoid dropping out or mindlessly following the crowd, says Emerson. Stay informed, stay active in world affairs but do so using skillful means – watching these addictive desires closely and creating new habits that merge mindfulness with the political turmoil of the day. Since our late March silent retreat, we have used our own lives as a laboratory for testing out such skillful means, and we’ve identified a few powerful approaches for finding the middle way of news.

Three Ways to Unhook From the News and Stay Informed