I didn't stop informing myself. I stopped allowing a 24-hour information cycle to decide what deserved my attention.
Some of my earliest memories of news involve a bathroom, several blankets, a cup of coffee, and a small transistor radio.
I grew up in communist Yugoslavia. My father was a committed communist for much of his life, but over time he became increasingly disillusioned with the system around him.
I remember him getting up around four in the morning, making coffee and taking his transistor radio into the bathroom. He would listen quietly to foreign broadcasts, including Voice of America. Sometimes he covered himself and the radio with blankets to keep the sound down.
If he realized I had seen him, I was warned to say nothing.
As a child, I did not understand geopolitics, censorship, or propaganda.
I understood something much simpler.
My father was searching for another source of information.
The broadcasts from the West seemed to describe another world: prosperity, opportunity, abundance, and freedom. Meanwhile, the official picture of life available to me did not always resemble what I could see outside our building.
During the economic difficulties of the 1980s, I remember standing in queues for hours. My mother would replace me. Later my father might replace her.
We waited for ordinary things.
Coffee. Cooking oil. Sugar. Salt.
I was a child. I wanted to play, not study economics.
But I learned an important lesson long before I had language for it:
What we are told about reality and what we experience can be two different things.
That lesson followed me into war.
When the Screen and the Battlefield Did Not Match
When war came in 1991, news was no longer something that happened safely somewhere else.
I was inside the events being reported.
There were occasions when television reports described heavy fighting, destruction, or clashes in areas I knew personally, including places where I was serving.
Yet what I could physically observe did not always correspond with the dramatic picture being broadcast.
Sometimes little had happened around us. Occasionally there had been relative inactivity for days.
That does not prove journalists were deliberately misleading anyone.
War reporting is extraordinarily difficult. Journalists can operate with restricted access, incomplete information, military briefings, competing claims, reporting delays, and enormous pressure. I could see my part of the battlefield; I could not see everything occurring across an operational area.
But the experience reinforced something that later became central to my professional work in investigations:
Information should be tested, not merely received.
There is the event.
There is what someone says happened.
And then there is the evidence.
Those three things are not automatically identical.
From Gatekeepers to Algorithms
Three decades later, it appears that we have reversed the nature of our information problem.
My father struggled to obtain information from outside the system.
Today, many of us struggle to escape information.
The smartphone has placed newspapers, television, radio, social media, financial markets, wars, natural disasters, crime, politics, and the opinions of millions of strangers into one device that sleeps beside our beds.
Competition for attention has replaced the scarcity of information.
And attention has commercial value.
A 2023 study published in Nature Human Behaviour examined more than 105,000 headline variations, generating approximately 5.7 million clicks from over 370 million impressions.
Its finding was striking: for an average-length headline, each additional negative word increased the click-through rate by approximately 2.3 per cent.
That does not mean journalists sit in newsrooms conspiring to make society miserable.
It demonstrates something more useful.
Negative language can attract attention. And attention can be monetized.
Fear attracts us.
Conflict attracts us.
Outrage attracts us.
Uncertainty attracts us.
The old political system had gatekeepers.
The digital economy has algorithms.
Neither should automatically be given custody of our judgement.
Six Crises Before Breakfast
Consider an ordinary modern morning.
An executive wakes at 5.30.
Before getting out of bed, the phone is checked.
War.
Interest rates.
Market uncertainty.
Political confrontation.
Crime.
Natural disaster.
Then LinkedIn.
WhatsApp.
Email.
By 6 a.m., that person may have encountered half a dozen crises without speaking to their spouse, children, employees, or colleagues.
Then they arrive at work.
The question worth asking is
Did all that information remain inside the phone?
It would be simplistic to claim that negative news automatically creates negative people. Human behaviour is far more complicated.
But executives routinely manage capital, employees, cyber risk, reputation, and time.
Why shouldn’t attention also be treated as a finite resource requiring management?
Whatever repeatedly receives our attention competes with something else for it.
The Business of Selling the Cure
There is another economy operating alongside the attention economy.
Once people become exhausted, anxious, or overwhelmed, somebody inevitably appears offering relief.
Coaches.
Retreats.
Meditation programs.
Breathing techniques.
Courses.
Digital detoxes.
There is nothing inherently wrong with any of these. Qualified practitioners can provide valuable services.
The problem begins when fear itself becomes the sales funnel.
I have spent much of my professional life investigating deception, interviewing people, and examining how human beings are persuaded.
One question has proved useful across many environments:
Who benefits from my emotional reaction?
Scammers create urgency because it can reduce reflection.
Manipulative sales techniques create scarcity because scarcity encourages quick decisions.
Online personalities can amplify anxiety and then sell certainty.
The question is not whether somebody offers meditation, coaching, or a retreat.
The questions are whether they possess appropriate expertise, whether their claims withstand scrutiny, and whether distress is being amplified to sell the remedy.
Then I Walked Away from the Noise
In 2026, I walked 321 kilometres on the Camino Primitivo from Oviedo to Santiago de Compostela.
For a period, my information environment changed dramatically.
My world became smaller.
Where will I sleep?
Where is the next water?
What is the weather doing?
How far is the next town?
What condition are my feet in?
Can I make another ten kilometres?
My feet became badly damaged. There were severe blisters, bleeding, and infection. A doctor advised me to stop.
I had genuine problems immediately in front of me.
Yet something unexpected happened.
Mentally, life became simpler.
I felt less restless. I experienced less stress. I slept more peacefully.
I cannot claim that reducing news consumption caused those changes. Camino was not a controlled experiment, and many factors could explain what I experienced.
But it forced me to examine my relationship with information.
My daily objective had become brutally straightforward:
Move from Point A to Point B.
I called it survival mode at the time.
Today, I would call it purpose mode.
Walk.
Eat.
Recover.
Sleep.
Walk again.
Meanwhile, the world continued without my constant observation.
Wars continued.
Markets moved.
Governments argued.
Politicians spoke.
Crime occurred.
Social media continued fighting with itself.
And somehow, without me checking every 15 minutes, the planet kept turning.
Thailand Tested It Again
Months later, I spent 21 days training in Thailand.
Different country. Different challenge. Different purpose.
But my attention narrowed again.
Wake up.
Train.
Recover.
Eat.
Train again.
Sleep.
Repeat.
And once again, the outside world continued doing what it has always done.
Floods happened.
Earthquakes happened.
Wars continued.
Markets moved.
Political disputes continued.
Good things happened too, although those events rarely seemed to compete as aggressively for my attention.
Nothing about the world had fundamentally changed.
What changed was what I allowed to occupy my mind.
That distinction matters.
This Is Not an Argument for Ignorance
There is an obvious counterargument.
What happens if everybody stops following the news?
A functioning society needs serious journalism.
Citizens need reliable information. Executives need to understand economic and geopolitical risk. Investors need market information. Communities need emergency warnings. Investigative journalism exposes corruption and scrutinizes institutions that might otherwise escape accountability.
The answer to information overload is not ignorance.
It is information discipline.
The Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report 2026, covering 48 markets and based on almost 100,000 interviews with online news consumers, reports that 42 percent of respondents say they sometimes or often avoid the news. When the Institute began measuring the behaviour in 2017, the figure was 29 percent.
Earlier Reuters Institute research has found multiple reasons for selective avoidance, including repetitiveness, feeling worn out by the volume of news, negative effects on mood, and a sense that little can be done with the information.
Those findings do not prove that news is bad for us.
They tell us something more nuanced:
A significant proportion of people are actively trying to manage their exposure to it.
Five Questions Before I Give Something My Attention
My professional life in investigations taught me to slow information down.
Before accepting an alarming claim, I increasingly ask:
What happened?
What is the evidence?
Who is providing this information?
Who benefits from my reaction?
Do I need to know the answer now?
That final question may be the most neglected.
Not everything important is time sensitive.
And not everything presented as urgent is important.
For business leaders, that distinction matters.
An executive who cannot manage what enters their attention risks allowing external actors—media companies, algorithms, influencers, and complete strangers—to determine part of their daily agenda.
We would never describe that as sophisticated risk management in any other part of a business.
Why should our minds be different?
The Battle for Attention
My father once hid under blankets with a transistor radio because he wanted information the system around him did not readily provide.
Decades later, I carry more information in my pocket than he could have imagined.
Yet my problem is almost the opposite of his.
He fought to obtain information in.
I increasingly fight to keep unnecessary information out.
That does not mean disconnecting from reality.
It means choosing when to consume news.
Choosing credible sources.
Reading beyond headlines.
Comparing claims.
Separating evidence from commentary.
I learned to turn off notifications that serve no useful purpose.
I also learned to put the phone down occasionally, which allowed me to notice the life happening right in front of me.
The Camino taught me to reach the next destination.
Thailand taught me to complete the next training session.
My investigative career taught me to question information before accepting it.
Together they taught me something else.
We cannot control whether another war begins.
We cannot stop the next earthquake by watching it continuously.
We cannot prevent tomorrow’s scandal by refreshing our phones tonight.
But we can decide what deserves our attention.
My father once fought for access to information.
Today, the fight is for control over attention.
And the person who controls my attention should be me.
References:
- Robertson, C. E., Pröllochs, N., Schwarzenegger, K., Pärnamets, P., Van Bavel, J. J. & Feuerriegel, S. (2023), “Negativity drives online news consumption,” Nature Human Behaviour, 7, 812–822.
- Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (2026), Digital News Report 2026, University of Oxford.
- Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (2022), Digital News Report 2022, University of Oxford.