Have you ever felt like you’re drowning in headlines? Every alert buzzing, every banner shouting, all of it certain that this is the thing you finally need to know. You tell yourself you’ll just check once. Forty minutes later you surface, vaguely worse, and you couldn’t say what you actually learned.
I used to think that feeling was a personal failing, a lack of discipline I’d fix once life calmed down. It isn’t. It’s biology. And once you understand the machinery, the whole thing stops feeling like a character flaw and starts looking like what it really is. A brilliant old brain running software it was never written for.
A brain built for 150 people
The British anthropologist Robin Dunbar noticed that the size of certain brain structures in primates tracks the size of the groups they live in. Run the numbers for humans and you get a now-famous figure. We’re wired to keep tabs on roughly 150 people. That was the whole world for most of our history, a village where everyone you knew, you actually knew.
In a village of 150, news was survival. Who’s angry with whom, who can be trusted, which way the neighbouring tribe is moving. Every rumour had a fair chance of mattering to your life by next week. So evolution did the sensible thing and rewarded the people who paid attention. We are their descendants. We inherited the hunger.
The trouble is that the village is now the entire planet, and the hunger didn’t get the memo. Your brain still treats a stranger’s misfortune on the far side of the world as though it were happening three huts away. It can’t tell that almost none of it will ever touch your life. It just knows that something new has arrived, and that it should pay attention.
News and pastries have a lot in common
Here’s the part I find genuinely funny, in a slightly bleak way. Your brain rewards new information the same way it rewards sugar.
Eat something sweet and you get a small hit of dopamine, your body’s way of saying “good, find more of that.” A perfect strategy in a world where calories were scarce and the next sweet thing might be weeks away. A slightly dangerous one in a world with a bakery on every corner.
Learning something new triggers the same reward. “Successful hunt, go get more.” And just as your tongue can’t really tell an apple from a doughnut shaped like one, your brain can’t tell the difference between information you can use and information that’s merely new. A celebrity divorce lands with the same little chime as a warning that would once have saved your life.
The slot machine in your pocket
It gets sneakier. The reward is biggest not when you get something good, but when you might. Pull a lever, sometimes win, and the maybe itself becomes the thrill, the principle that makes slot machines and lottery tickets so hard to put down. Psychologists call it intermittent reinforcement, and reality supplies it for free. Most refreshes give you nothing. Every so often, a jolt. That unpredictability is exactly what keeps your thumb pulling down to refresh the feed.
The news industry didn’t invent any of this. It discovered it, and built a very profitable machine on top of it. Which is why everything feels like an emergency, even, and especially, when it isn’t.
The sentry and the commander
Inside your head there’s a kind of argument going on. The amygdala is the ancient sentry. Fast, jumpy, easily alarmed, brilliant at spotting a threat and hopeless at judging how big it really is. The prefrontal cortex is the commander. Slower, wiser, capable of stepping back and saying “let’s think about this for a second.”
A steady drip of alarming headlines keeps the sentry shouting. And when the sentry shouts loudly enough, the commander goes quiet. Stress hormones rise, and the careful, reflective part of you steps aside. You’re left reacting instead of thinking, which, if you happen to run a business that sells human attention, is precisely where they’d like you to be.
The part that isn’t funny
For a long time we treated all of this as harmless. It isn’t, quite. Chronic stress, the low constant kind rather than the sharp useful jolt of a real emergency, is one of the better-documented risks to physical health we have. Large studies link sustained high stress to a markedly higher risk of heart disease. Your body was never built to run its threat response all day, every day, over dangers it can do nothing about and that will never reach it.
And here’s the thing that finally changed my mind. Of all the modern mismatches between our old brains and our new world (sugar, alcohol, the slot machine, the endless feed), the news is the one with the cleanest off switch. You can’t easily opt out of a world full of bakeries. You can opt out of the doomscroll tomorrow morning, and almost nothing of value will be lost.
You’re not weak. You’re mismatched.
None of this means you’re undisciplined, and none of it means you don’t care about the world. It means you’re a social animal carrying a magnificent Stone-Age brain into an environment it was never designed for, and that brain is doing exactly what it evolved to do. The problem was never you. The problem is the mismatch.
The good news is that mismatches can be managed. You already feed your body better than your instincts alone would. You’ve made some kind of peace with the bakery. You can do the same with information. Choose what’s real, what’s relevant, what actually helps you understand the world you live in, and let the rest go buzzing past.
Ten years ago I stopped following the news. I expected to feel cut off. Instead it felt like someone had turned the volume down on a noise I’d stopped noticing was there. My concentration came back. So did a fair amount of my faith in the future.
Your brain is old. The world is new. You’re allowed to give the sentry a rest.