Reading the news is the new smoking
experimental-history.comReading the news is the new smokingI quit. I feel great. You can too.✦ Read ad free and get the full MichaelFilter · $5.50Part of the MichaelFilter
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Unlock the full reading · $5.50 →The author argues that compulsive news consumption is the new smoking: harmful to the reader and those around them, fueling outrage, anxiety, and distorted perceptions of reality. After cutting news out in 2020, he felt calmer, more present, and noticed that the supposedly world-changing stories rarely actually changed anything. He backs this with research showing news skews toward villainy and inflates fears of rare threats.
Teaching:
• Frame the mat as a daily filter: what you put in your nervous system before practice (doomscrolling vs. breath) determines what you have available for attention
• Use opening invocation as a pattern interrupt against the morning news reflex; protect the first hour for proprioception over headlines
• Offer students a simple experiment: one week of no news before practice, journal what shifts in breath quality and reactivity in challenging postures
• Connect Pratyahara directly to media diet, sense withdrawal is not mystical, it is just choosing what gets your attention bandwidth
Writing seeds:
• Essay: Pratyahara as media diet, why the yamas already told us to quit the news
• Shala Daily post: the first hour belongs to the body, a protocol for trading the morning scroll for Surya Namaskar
• Piece for ashtanga.tech: outrage as a nervous system load, how sympathetic dominance from news shows up in tight hips and shallow ujjayi
• Essay: practice as a base rate corrector, how showing up to the same room daily teaches you what is actually common versus what is amplified
Idea map:
• Reinforces systems literacy: news is a high-variance, low-signal input that distorts your internal model of reality
• Embodiment as antidote to abstraction, the mat returns you to first-person data instead of mediated outrage
• Attention as the scarce resource Michael keeps pointing at, both Mysore practice and news-quitting are attention reclamation projects
• Practice as method: a repeatable daily protocol beats reactive consumption for actually changing how you live
Source: https://www.experimental-history.com/p/reading-the-news-is-the-new-smoking
Teaching:
• Frame the mat as a daily filter: what you put in your nervous system before practice (doomscrolling vs. breath) determines what you have available for attention
• Use opening invocation as a pattern interrupt against the morning news reflex; protect the first hour for proprioception over headlines
• Offer students a simple experiment: one week of no news before practice, journal what shifts in breath quality and reactivity in challenging postures
• Connect Pratyahara directly to media diet, sense withdrawal is not mystical, it is just choosing what gets your attention bandwidth
Writing seeds:
• Essay: Pratyahara as media diet, why the yamas already told us to quit the news
• Shala Daily post: the first hour belongs to the body, a protocol for trading the morning scroll for Surya Namaskar
• Piece for ashtanga.tech: outrage as a nervous system load, how sympathetic dominance from news shows up in tight hips and shallow ujjayi
• Essay: practice as a base rate corrector, how showing up to the same room daily teaches you what is actually common versus what is amplified
Idea map:
• Reinforces systems literacy: news is a high-variance, low-signal input that distorts your internal model of reality
• Embodiment as antidote to abstraction, the mat returns you to first-person data instead of mediated outrage
• Attention as the scarce resource Michael keeps pointing at, both Mysore practice and news-quitting are attention reclamation projects
• Practice as method: a repeatable daily protocol beats reactive consumption for actually changing how you live
Source: https://www.experimental-history.com/p/reading-the-news-is-the-new-smoking
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