I need to get really personal for a moment and talk about something that’s been weighing heavily on my mind for a long time. And that is… well, that pretty much everything weighs heavily on my mind. I’m extremely introverted and on top that, I am also highly sensitive, and that combination does not allow me to switch off my thoughts. Ever. Yes, high sensitivity is a real thing (often called HSP, High Sensitive Person), and although it’s quite normal, I hate it because it’s really HSP that steers my life. Being an extreme introvert and a very highly sensitive person is a lethal combination and the older I get, the more I move to the extreme end of the scale. I could write a number of posts to go deeper in the different aspects of a life as an introvert/HSP, but at the moment I will concentrate on the thing that triggered this post in the first place, and that is news fatigue.

I like to think myself as an informed person. I read a lot of news, I want stay current and I make sure that my news sources are reliable and as neutral as possible. And it’s important that I have several sources, so I can have different perspectives for the same story. I frequently check the newsfeed because if something happens, I want to know it when it happens. Some people check Facebook a hundred times a day, I check Feedly. And it’s too much. I just can’t deal with it any more. All the bad things happening around the world, I can’t let go of them. Trump, terrorism, global warming, refugees, famine, war, discrimination, violence, crime, injustice… you get the idea. Those are the things that I go on thinking about all day, and now it’s so bad that I’m also losing sleep. I hate the nights. I wake up in the middle of the night and instantly my brain is in high gear, I can feel a shot of adrenaline in my veins and it’s hard to go back to sleep. I am a troubleshooter, I want to find solutions to problems. The problems that come up in my own life I can deal with, those I can fix. But the problems I see in the news, those I can’t fix and I can’t let them go either. Letting go is just simply not in my DNA. Have I mentioned that I suffer from high blood pressure and need medication for it? It’s perfectly understandable, because my stress hormone levels are elevated on a permanent basis. I’m not expecting to live to be 100, I will worry myself to death long before that.

So, to cut the long story short. I will stop reading news. I will become an uninformed but hopefully a happier person. I can’t see any other way at the moment, because clearly if I can’t let go of the things that I read about, then the only solution is to not read about those things. To that end, I’ve removed most of the news sources I had in Feedly. I don’t want to become an ignorant Trump-voter though so there are some things that I still need to know, for example what goes on in Swedish politics. Maybe I’ll check the one-minute news summary on DN.

What I don’t know won’t hurt me. I still remember fondly the week in Svalbard when we were on a boat without Internet or any other connection to the outside world. Bliss!

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Information about high sensitivity: The Highly Sensitive Person & Sensory processing sensitivity on Wikipedia. If you’re someone who knows me, then you will find that this explains a lot of things about me and my behaviour!

Information about news fatigue: Compassion fatigue on Wikipedia

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And you know what the craziest thing is? It’s that I’m wondering if I have any right to switch off news when there are people out there who are actually living through those news – their lives are a nightmare, and all I’m doing is read about it. So I’ve been going back and forth with this for a very long time, not being able to justify making my life easier by something as simple as not reading news. You have no idea how selfish and how guilty I feel for doing this. But I have to, maybe the guilt is something I can learn to live with, when the news are just slowly suffocating me to death.