Depressing but attention-grabbing headline to bait you to read this.

2 minutes and 30 seconds to read (it’s all the rage at the ‘mo’ to put this, so I believe)

Back in ‘the day’ when life was slower, calmer and less hectic, we were ‘pivoting’ less, ‘reaching out’ was only for the Four Tops, things were less ‘Impactful’ and ‘reverting’ was a mere twinkle in ‘Looping Back’s’ eye, I used to quite like getting the odd notification.

It was as much a chance to use one of the ten or so notification sounds on my ‘groovy new phone’. (That had 'an internet' in it)...

When the old 'brick' pinged with an update I loved it. It was new and exciting.

'It was 1995, I was connected, I was inside the matrix'.

Now?

I just think,

‘Meh, I’ll look later’.

I recently decided to do an experiment and subscribe to notifications from a popular newspaper’s website. A website that has more than 218 million unique visitors per month and, as I found out, sends a mother-load of notifications.

It was almost a constant stream of death, bad news and despair.

These above have not been manufactured by me to look bleak either – they are simply random screenshots taken when a few gathered up on my screen.

It went on all week relentlessly and presented nothing wholesome but a continuous stream of clickbait.

After a couple of days, I got agitated and they started to stress me out.

Non-stop bad news and some of it nasty enough that I couldn’t bring myself to include it here. I get it, there is a lot of bad and spooky news around these days, but what is it doing to our mental health? (and where is the good news)

It is the opposite of Facebook where you seldom read a post that says something like,

‘Rubbish bloody day, shouldn’t have spent so much money at the weekend, the cat’s not well, I think I’ve got my Eczema back, and I’m seriously thinking… I’m gonna bin my other half’.

Where’s the fun in that after all?

This is more like it!

‘Amazing day, Iron Man (PB) before breakfast = done, kids up without a fuss and in school with everything they need = done, presentation for pitch = done, quinoa and foraged wild garlic smoothie = done, got the kids on time and went for a family jog = done, composed a symphony, samphire and line caught salmon with essential cracked black pepper frog oil = done’.

Hmmmmm. In the words of my old mate Roger Mellie (The Man on the Telly)

‘Bollox’

 I know it is the news and I get why it sensationalises stuff but come on? Really?

When things are bad with anxiety, and panic, one becomes so sensitised. Certainly, in my case, these would have set off a catastrophic set of thoughts that would spiral down to that hideous repeat thinking and eventually panic—bloody nightmare.

Mind you when I was bad, I’d freak if the wind changed direction or even just experienced a temperature change!

Of course, we can select and deselect the information we choose but in this case, the sheer volume of people seeing and reading such negativity and horror is very high and in my view has probably and will cause anxiety.e

A school teacher in the US did a one day count of her student’s notifications as an experiment. There were 800. We can get onto youth-targeted, rapid-fire notifications later.

I’m not a researcher, a mental health expert or philosopher, but I do know when our consumption of negativity tips over it will produce waves of anxiety, loneliness and self-doubt. This is not good.

I don't have a solution but do edit my feed very hard, ask my kids to turn them off one day a week. And for the dog’s nerves sake, especially when on vibrate, as the buzzing turns him into Buckeroo)

Just make a change.

We don’t need to know everything immediately.

Be careful also not to ‘train’ colleagues and clients that you will always respond immediately.

Despite what the notifications say, the world will not end if we take a break from world news for a few hours a day.

Turn them off for a bit. You’ll be glad you did.

Take a breather, people…

Big love and good mental health!