Country Living with Francis Farragher

It’s probably something of an old chestnut, and as a newspaper journalist it’s also probably a case that I shouldn’t be making, but after last week’s ongoing rants from Donal Trump about ‘will I or won’t I’ take over Greenland, there is a serious case to be made at times for limiting the amount of news intake that we absorb on a daily basis.

Okay, we all do need to be reasonably well-informed about what’s going on in the world, but now, as well as the traditional print, TV, and radio outlets, there is an instant link to every war and conflict around the world through our smart phones: to make matters worse, many of us have alerts switched on, to catch up with the latest bomb that has dropped or train that has crashed in some part of the world.

I even see it infiltrating into the local watering holes where debates can at times get heated enough on the Ukraine war; the atrocities of the Middle-East; the possibility of world obliteration; and even about the merits or demerits of Micheál, Simon, and Mary Lou. So, instead of such little social outlets being a source of refuge from the tidings of the world, they can turn into little feuding sites, trying to figure out how we can change the path of the universe. And then we have the conspiracy theorists, but we’ll park that one for the moment.

A while back, I read an article in the American magazine, Psychology Today, written by a Polly Campbell, which struck a little chord with me in terms of the need to impose some personal limitations on the amount of news we listen to, watch and read every day.

The main thrust of what she had to say was that people who tended to be obsessed by news – and often bad news – we’re more likely to suffer stress, anxiety and poor health. She pointed out that once you get hooked on a dramatic headline or a TV video clip of a forest fire or even a street murder, it’s very difficult to switch off. Polly Campbell pointed out that the problems really arose when you keep seeing or reading different versions of the same (bad) news story.

One of her solutions is to curate your news, or in simple language, to firstly pick and choose where you get your news from; and secondly, to put limits on the volume of news material that you subject yourself to every day. Her key advise line is: “I want an understanding [of the news] without being paralysed by the information.”

Pictured: Lock it away . . . at least some of the time!