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Find ABC News Daily's five-part series on the ABC Listen app. Des, are you finding it hard to focus at the moment? I'm... You know, I read the news every night and I find it a lot sometimes. But the difficult thing is that I feel... Like I need to keep paying attention because there is so much going on that's so important, but I have to say it's leaving me exhausted partway through some days and I need to just lie down under the desk and have a nap.
I need footage of this. Do you actually lie under the desk? No, I do. I do literally, just like 10 minutes. I just need to lie there. And do your feet stick out like Wicked Witch of the West? Yes, they do. Yeah, I don't paint my face green or anything like that. Yes, I do look like I've melted on the floor. That's like a metaphor for the ages, isn't it? I mean, it's like, I feel like so many people I know.
are wrestling with this exact question you care about a lot of things you care about what's happening in the world you want to be across it but you also want to remain sane I mean think about these headlines I did just a really quick search before recording this how to keep up the news without getting overwhelmed why the news feels overwhelming and how to cope four ways to cope if you're overwhelmed by current events media overload is hurting our mental health
Here are ways to manage headline stress in a world full of triggering news. I'm Julia Baird in Sydney on Gaimagal Land. And I'm Jeremy Fernandez in Sydney on Gaimagal Land. And this is Not Stupid, where we chat about the news that's grabbing our attention. And look, it's a bit of a different episode this week because we've been in Adelaide for our first live show.
week, we're talking about how we focus. Jules. So it's so easy to blame Donald Trump on the lack of focus. And there's really good reason for that. I mean, he's one of the world's greatest, if not the greatest. attention thieves. But It's broader than him as well. Like I think that we've been aware for some years that attention, our attention is probably the greatest currency there is in the world. We've got, you know, Silicon Valley developing all these devices and ways and algorithms.
to keep our attention, to kind of take it from us, to monetise it. And there's a host from MSNBC in the US, Chris Hayes, who... has described attention as the world's most endangered resource. He wrote a book called The Siren's Call. And he's kind of saying like our entire lives now are dealing with the wail of sirens going down the street. And when you think about what a siren is intended to make you do, sit up, pay attention, be...
kind of nervous, a bit anxious. It's almost like an evolutionary response, right? Exactly. But it's in social media, it's in our phones, screens, beeps, posts, likes. It just reminds me of being inside a pinball machine half the time and that sense of... well, hang on a minute, who's actually, you know, pressing the button and getting those flippers going? And how do we respond to all the different things? You know, Trump says Ukraine.
started the war, new deal between Ukraine and the US, Trump wants to buy Greenland, turn Gaza into the Riviera, withdraw from human rights. I mean, every single day we're getting this kind of mind-boggling.
announcements so the question is like how do we pay attention to this without getting like distracted or depressed or unfocused because we've been struggling with this for our kids for a number of years right and now I just feel like so many adults as well are kind of saying how can I place my attention where I want to place it
What do you do, Jules? Because you work in news as well. And I know that, you know, we talk a lot about the feeling of impotence that comes with the scale of things that are going on in the world right now. How do you manage? Staying plugged in but also tapping out every once in a while. Yeah, I do tap out quite a bit, especially weekends. I need to be, I know I need to be more rigorous around.
the beginning of the day I'd like to be more concrete about a habit of like where I don't get to it for a while that's why I really quite like swimming first thing because you don't your mind isn't like invaded, like you can kind of flush through all the thoughts the night before. Sunday is a day where I get off, try to get off everything.
I'm like trying to think of it as a kind of Sabbath, as a period where I'm just not on tech, I'm not responsive to things. And you know this year I've been trying to think about art and creativity, so I'll try to dabble in some of that. I just give my brain a break on those days.
So the Scientific American just published a piece on exactly this phenomenon, Jules. It's called Why the News Feels Overwhelming and How to Cope. So they say that it's not just the volume of headlines we're being hit with at the moment, but also the intellectual and emotional...
emotional difficulty of understanding what's happening that makes current news overwhelming. So the key, psychologists say, is the emotional weight of those headlines content, especially for people who find what's happening... anywhere in the world, particularly in the US, to be genuinely frightening.
So there is some basis in neuroscience for this. It says that for someone worried about the administration's policies creating tangible harm, each new headline can create a spark of fear, and fear is a remarkably powerful emotion. motion. So Arash Javabakt, who's a psychiatrist and neuroscientist at Wayne University says, threaten fear, take priority. So when you're afraid, all you think about is what it is that you're afraid of.
So think of the effects that fear has on the brain in two categories, cognitive and emotional. Cognitively, fear hijacks our ability to think well, think straight, and it makes us more likely to rely on other people's reasoning. than to think about our own opinions and values independently of our emotions. So experts say that fear can also interfere with attention, leaving people vulnerable to what psychologists call cognitive...
distortion. So it's a term that's used in discussing conditions such as depression and anxiety, which our brains can fixate on predicting the worst or ignoring the small positives. Basically, these things cascade in our minds. and roll and roll and roll into something that suddenly feels quite unmanageable. So this term is often used in discussing conditions such as depression and anxiety, in which our brains can fixate on predicting the worst or ignoring the small positives.
Ultimately, cognitive distortions are convenient mental shortcuts that our brains can slip into. And habits include jumping to conclusions and engaging in very black and white thinking. And they bypass what we've also evolved to do, which is our critical thinking skills. Right, exactly. That, I think, is really...
the essence of kind of what I'm concerned about, what a lot of people are concerned about right now. How can we think when all this is going on? When we're paying attention to everything, can we really understand anything?
in particular. And I do think, I know we talk about Trump a lot, but this is a deliberate strategy that is being employed right now. When Donald Trump uses his shock and awe strategy of kind of like announcement after announcement, one after the other, they do what they call... flooding the zone so journalists all over the place and his opponents including the democrats aren't quite sure what to do and he had this former
advisor Steve Bannon who described this in 2019 as targeting a dumb and lazy media with muzzle velocity he says all we have to do is flood the zone every day we hit them with three things that was in 2019 right so It's more than three now, I'm completely sure. I can't keep track of it. They bite on one and we'll get all of our stuff done. Bang, bang, bang. These guys will never be able to recover, but we've got to start with muzzle velocity.
They call this tactic that Trump uses during debates a gish gallop. So you have so many lies and untruths and half-truths that you can't address them all. Now, Jess, this is exactly what happened to us when we were trying to cover those presidential debates, remember? It did, exactly, because we were keeping two columns and there were so many and trying to fact-check them live.
on air was a near impossible task for any media organisation that was reporting on those presidential debates. It was really hard to keep up with and what you walk away is a general impression of not really being sure of what it was he was saying, but coming away with a feeling. Yeah. I mean, some people liken this to, before the digital era, a Soviet practice when it was...
huge amounts of disinformation that was meant to make people really kind of question reality. But this can bring a kind of paralysis in people. Our brains struggle to kind of see a way through the chaos. Ezra Klein wrote about this idea of muzzle velocity in the New York Times and he said that focus is the fundamental substance of democracy and particularly the substance of opposition.
People largely learn of what the government is doing through the media, whether that's mainstream or social. Now, if you overwhelm the media, if you give it too many places it needs to look all at once, if you keep it moving from one thing to the next, no coherent opposition can emerge. And as you were saying, Jez, it's hard to even think coherently. And I was really, there was another piece by Marsha Gessen, who's a...
Russian-American author wrote a really interesting piece and I really liked the way they put it, saying this is just autocratic fare, flooding. the ether with bad ideas. Hannah Arendt used the word preposterous to describe the ideas that underpin 20th century totalitarian regimes because bad ideas can do a lot of the work of building autocracy by forcing us to engage with them.
They make our conversations, our media and our society dumber. By conjuring the unimaginable, they plunge us into an anxious state in which thinking is difficult and that kind of anxiety is key to totalitarian control. Now, I don't think it's within the remit of either of Jez to say whether it's an autocratic regime in the US because Donald Trump was elected democratically.
But I think the idea that we've spoken about on this pod, like, for example, oh, we're trying to reach a peace deal in Europe. Oh, wait, but it was Zelensky's fault and he's a dictator, is a classic case of, wait a minute, we're suddenly debating something that actually is a preposterous idea.
And then all the while, there's the impact on us trying to deal with this deluge of information. And on top of this, that feeling of anxiousness can actually drive people to follow current events even more closely because anxiety stimulates. our need to search for information.
So Dr. Javabak says that because fear has already reduced our cognitive abilities, we're also more likely then to instantly take on someone else's view of the world without examining it for ourselves, especially if we consider them to be... a leader and they don't necessarily need to be an actual leader. And this is what this question of trust comes down to, Jules, right? Because we see people thinking about leaders as being their immediate circle, their...
People on their Facebook group, people that they know and trust, regardless of how well-informed they are or whether they're acting in good faith. Exactly. So, I mean, that's where this leaves us. It's like, as a... like a human being that wants to not be freaked out by things.
Wants to be informed and wants to be able to, you know, love their families and prepare dinner and go about their jobs without having a sense of like imminent panic or doom. And when we speak about these things, Jess, I think it's important to point out again that we're not saying this is in any sense partisan. Because...
The surveys and the discussions about people, about distrust and about people's anxieties and about a sense that, you know, the governments are working for them. Things are going off the rails. Things are going off the rails. Actually apply right across the political spectrum. Climate change. conflicts in the Middle East, what's happening in Gaza, all of those things, there's a lot of anxiety and concern about and a lot of confusion about how you bear witness and how you...
you know, keep people accountable and stay on top of it without kind of really just entering a very dark place, I think. And so I think let's talk about some actual techniques because some of these...
Experts say, look, we've got to remember, like, you know, that we're not the first cohort in humanity to face existential threats. And I was interested in Ryan Holiday, who's a, he's this author, he's got a... kind of a massive following he writes a lot about the stoics and he's got newsletters and books that he writes on stoicism and he sent out this newsletter recently that I thought was great it was
how I'm preparing for the next four years. And he said, look, history is full of turbulence and that philosopher Epictetus said that our chief task in life was to focus on what we can control. So he's bringing in...
His own practices are going to be reading old books, like don't always have to be... distracted by every ping and every blurt we get, remind himself what his job is, raise his kids well, keep a journal, use his platform to focus on what he thinks is important, treat people well, prioritise stillness. contribute to his community, not always feel the need to have an opinion.
I think that's actually an important one. And try to be philosophical, not cynical. He says a lot of people are going to spend the next four years fixated on trends, fads, momentary crises, and unfocused on what is still going to matter in 5, 10, 50 years, character, discipline. patience and really eager to not let a lot of the violent rhetoric and the nasty rhetoric around impact him and make him turn the same, speak in violent ways and be aggressive.
be nasty or, as he says, don't let arseholes turn you into an arsehole. Don't let cruelty harden you or stupidity make you bitter. He reckons Marcus Aurelius is right to say the best revenge is to not actually be like that. So the point I think and what he's getting at with his own practices is to work out what it is that makes you strong. What is it do you need to stay strong? Because in times of profound chaos, strength is required.
And, you know, you and I have been through some of the techniques that there's, again, there's a bunch around. There's one that's Scientific American. There's a heap from the Mayo Clinic. There's a lot of... Medical and scientific institutes trying to examine exactly this point, Jez. So let's just talk about what you reckon.
If these make sense. Look, I think the thing is that not all these techniques necessarily work for everyone, right? I mean, I hate it when someone tells me to breathe, just step back and breathe. Me too. Oh my gosh. I can't stand it. Right now I'm having trouble.
It's like keeping my temper on. And now I really can't breathe. And now I really can't breathe and you're making it worse. But the reality is that there is some benefit in that in certain contexts. So this is one that comes up over and over again. to literally and figuratively take a breath. Now, when we talk about figuratively taking a breath, I like this piece in Forbes magazine talking about...
People going slow with their reactions. So wait 48 hours before reacting to new policies, new developments if you can. Because urgency is also overrated. I remember when I was working at Newsweek in the States and we were doing this poll of like, what does everyone think of Obama? And calling around people in different countries to gauge what the view was. And I remember these French university students going, what do you mean? He's just begun.
get back to me in three years and I'll tell you what kind of job he's done I've never really forgotten that because we're so constantly pulling like daily It feels like hourly kind of responses to things. But we don't actually really often know what exactly is going on. And that's classic right now in terms of things, you know.
changing in the in the news cycle all the time I mean I like the idea of look people talk about limit limiting news consumption I think that's a I understand that I think it's a challenge for people that want to stay on top of it and I guess you just can then be more mindful so maybe I'll find my reputable sources.
and I will go to them. Yeah, make it high-quality consumption, right? Yeah. So, you know, Jules, a few years ago when the ABC News Channel was first starting and we were reporting on some really big... I remember I was on air for the Martin Place siege in Sydney, the terrorist attack at the Butterclan Theatre in Paris. It was massive stuff. And I remember saying on air, look, if you need to tune out of the news, that's okay.
we'll have updates throughout the day. And I remember I was actually written about in a tabloid as being a bit of a snowflake for telling people to tune out of the news. Now, I am a newsreader. I'm invested in the news. And I think it's really, really important that we're all informed and connected. and we're involved and feel a sense of a stake in the world.
But I do also think, and this is not something you'll often hear a newsreader say, I think it's important to tap out of the news every once in a while and watching it on rolling coverage like my parents do 24 hours a day is... I don't know if that's necessarily something everyone needs. to stay informed. I admire those who do, but I also think, you know, for your own capacity to be able to look after yourself and deal with the scale of the news and where democracy requires...
layers your attention, I think it's also important to take a break, take a rest, get some perspective, connect with real people and then tap back into the news. Yeah, I 100% agree with that. And I think it's important that people know. that the reason sometimes you need to disconnect is because what's happening is so important, right? On that note, Jane Fonda spoke at the SAG Awards, Jules, recently, and she spoke about not just the need to focus, but why we need to focus.
She recalled that she made her first movie at the tail end of McCarthyism in the US, which was a time in US history when censorship and fear of communism and persecution of the LGBTQI plus community in Hollywood was absolutely rampant. And she's spoken before about how she saw so many careers destroyed. And there was this one really compelling quote from that speech. She said, have any of you watched a documentary of the great social movements and asked yourself?
Would I have been brave enough to walk across the bridge? We don't have to wonder anymore because we are in our documentary moment. This is it. This is big time serious. So let's be brave. We must not isolate. We must stay in community. We must protect the vulnerable. We must find ways to project an inspiring vision of the future, one that's beckoning.
and welcoming. And I thought that was really powerful because it was really not about politics. I'm sure a lot of people interpreted it that way, but it was about humanity. And I really liked that idea that the tonic for all of this is actually... in community and staying connected to each other and facing the future together and creating a future that we want to step into rather than being so fearful of it all the time.
Yeah, it's a really interesting point, isn't it? Always remembering the best of who we are because that's what people find. And our potential and capacity as a society. Yeah, exactly. and not giving up hope. My favourite way of thinking about it is it's based on this essay called The Star Thrower and it was written in the 1960s, a time obviously of great kind of tumult and protest.
There's a writer, Lauren Isley, who's a natural science writer who wrote this thing on the star thrower. And it's been told in so many different iterations since. It's kind of taken on a life of its own. The one that is my favourite version that I've been thinking about a lot, it's got a young girl who's standing on a beach and it's littered with thousands of starfish, right? The tide has brought them up and they're stranded and they're dying.
And she bends down and she starts throwing them back into the sea one by one. There's this man out on his morning walk and he stops and questions her and says, you know, there's so many of them. You're never going to make a difference. And she bends down. Picks up another starfish, throws it back into the ocean and says, well, I made a difference to that one. I love that. Yeah, me too. So we just need to find the star throwers.
Here's to a year of star throwers, Jess. Oh, I like that. Here's to the year of star throwers. Now, you can reach us anytime at notstupid at abc.net.au. Tell us, are you a star thrower? Do you know someone who is? Let us know. Have a beautiful week, Jess. Nice to catch up. You take care. I've paid attention the whole way throughout. That's an achievement. Lots of love. See you, darling. Bye. Bye.