The News and Your Mood – or From FOMO to JOMO

Mood management doesn’t seem to have a lot of coverage in the literature on emotional intelligence. Moods are to emotions as weather is to climate. Emotions tend be to shorter lived, just try being surprised for several hours! Moods are usually longer lasting and form the background of our awareness. Moods are the result of assessments we make about the state of the world and the kind of future those assessments portend. We take incomplete data about the future, make a prediction, and then proceed to allow that prediction to guide our actions. We are rarely aware that this dynamic is unfolding because it’s mostly unconscious.

Here’re a couple of examples from my own life that illustrate moods: I’ve worked for organizations where I felt valued, where the work aligned with and grew my abilities, where I has a sense of purpose, autonomy, and mastery. That led to my mood being one of curiosity (I wonder what is possible here?) and ambition (I think I can make something good out of this). We usually consider those to be positively generative moods.

I’ve also worked in organizations where I didn’t feel valued, where I was micromanaged and ordered to work within narrow parameters and follow mostly pointless rules. That led me to assess my work as irrelevant and meaningless. In these settings my mood was a combination of resentment (this is stupid, I can see better ways of doing this), coupled with resignation (why bother?). It’s possible to dwell in multiple moods, for example you may have a positive mood at home where life is good and a negative mood at work if you are unhappy with your circumstances – or vice versa.

Our assessments about the state of our world play a crucial role in constructing our moods. Our moods open or close the possibilities that we see and feel we can work towards. Experiencing profound uncertainty provides us with the perfect time to examine the assessments we’re making about the future because those assessments are going to affect the actions we take, or whether we even act at all. Becoming aware of and learning to ground the assessments underlying our moods and being able to make different assessments and thereby shift our moods is a crucial competency when the world around us is throwing up pattens of chaos everywhere we look. Even if the future looks grim, taking an appreciative stance and making assessments grounded in what’s working, what can be built upon, and what successful risk mitigation looks like, will lead to a more satisfying and positively generative mood than one that is so concerned with how bad things are that we become paralyzed by fear. We operate best when our moods connect us to our inner resources.

 Much of the news is focused on the ephemeral rather than the enduring which contributes to our amnesic society.

We probably all know people whose moods are driven by the news headlines. Such people tend to dwell in moods that aren’t conducive to fulfilling and resourceful states of being. “News” is the plural of new. News used to report on what’s new in the world. Today however, many news outlets focus on the frothy foam atop the waves of current events rather than examining the deep currents that give rise to those waves. Much of the news is focused on the ephemeral rather than the enduring which contributes to our amnesic society. Yet, like many people I know, I find myself riveted to the news by the same force of fascination that makes it so difficult to look away from a terrible accident – what if I miss something when I look away? The thought of not following the news evokes a powerful fear – fear of missing out – FOMO.

The first time I did a media fast I was gripped by overpowering FOMO. It was at the first of several four-day intensives in my year-long professional coaching certification program. As a requirement for acceptance into the program I had to review a list of 60 books and choose ten that I had not read. I had read about 40 of the books on the list so I was able to find the required number. I was thrilled when I picked up the bag with the books and felt the weight of them. Then came a shock.

“Ken, you are not going to read those books. Instead, you are going to spend the next six months with no TV (not a problem, I got rid of my TV in 1990 and never bought another one), no newspapers, no magazines, no books, no comics (could I survive without For Better or For Worse?!), no online reading, and no radio. You can listen to whatever music you have at home. The only reading you are allowed is whatever you need to read for work.”

Egad! This struck me as cruel and unusual punishment. A kind of dread took hold of me, and I felt sure that I would soon become an uninformed idiot incapable of conversing about current events or much else for that matter. I protested to no avail. The assignment was firm. I couldn’t recall a single day of my life since I had learned how to read when I didn’t read something. I glumly carried the books home, looked longingly at their spines, and put them on the shelf.

However, the assignment proved to be a revelation! Within a few days I started to feel my mood shifting and after a couple of weeks I was nearly giddy with a newfound lightness of being. I was happier, less reactive, and had more mental energy and focus than I recalled experiencing for some time. FOMO had given way to JOMO – joy of missing out!

It took me a while to realize that my addiction to news had, over the years, been slowly contributing to a mood of roiling anger and resentment that was mostly out of my conscious awareness but that often spilled over into my daily life. While I was up on the news, I also felt powerless to do much about any of the things that were making headlines. I was angry at all the stupid decisions, celebrity gossip, and sensationalism that make up the bulk of the stories that most media outlets feature.

Many of us are familiar with the “If it bleeds, it leads” mentality that drives advertising revenue, and thus, biases what gets reported towards what drives profitability not what informs nor what provokes deep reflection and productive conversation on the part of the citizenry about how we can create healthier communities and live in harmony with each other all the other species we share this planet with.

But wait a minute! Being a news junkie isn’t a bad thing, is it? I mean, news junkies are people who are curious, informed, thoughtful, reflective, and inquiring; how could that be a bad thing? While on my media fast I noticed that my need to stay informed about current events did indeed bear some of the hallmarks of addiction. I spent hours each day immersed in reading the latest developments in politics, science, ecology, technology, and of local, national, and international news. When I found a juicy story, I’d get a dopamine hit and if I wasn’t informed, I felt restless and uneasy. Then, when I went cold turkey, I definitely suffered from withdrawal. Much to my chagrin, I realized that a news addict is still an addict. Since addiction has burned, scarred, and withered branches on both sides of my family tree this was a startling realization. I never thought of my interest in news as something that could limit me in so many ways until I set it aside for a while.

Divorcing myself from the strum und drang of the media for six months opened a portal in my mind that alerted me to the heavy mental and emotional price that those of us who are obsessive news junkies pay.

 “It is difficult to get the news from poetry yet, people die every day for lack of what is found there.” ~William Carlos Williams

Being assigned that first media fast proved to be a great gift to me. Over the intervening years, I have done media fasts whenever I have noticed that the anger and powerlessness I feel about the state of the world is affecting my ability to enjoy my life or if it derails me from focusing on how I can best create the conditions for wellbeing all around me. The difference these days is that rather than a total media fast, I still read books and periodicals on subjects that interest me while eschewing the daily barrage of headlines and clickbait. Poetry usually replaces headlines when I’m on these fasts, which brings to mind William Carlos Williams, who was a poet by avocation and a doctor by vocation, and who knew something about healing and the human soul. WCW said: “It is difficult to get the news from poetry yet, people die every day for lack of what is found there.”

Recently, I traveled to Italy for 18 days and I made a conscious decision to not keep up with the headlines about the wars raging in Ukraine, Israel, and Gaza, the ongoing drama of the political circus, and the ever-deepening meta-crisis. For me, it is precisely at moments like this, when everything seems to assume an outsized urgency and my need to know what is happening burns like a fire in my mind, that I find it most helpful to turn off the news and allow myself to be fully in my life, to deeply engage the questions that I feel are worth asking.

Questions that the news rarely explores. Questions like:

• What’s important now?
• What information and knowledge might I be missing and how can I acquire it?
• Whose views might I be overlooking either consciously or unconsciously?
• What do I value differently than people I disagree with and can I understand why they value what they do before I judge them?
• How can I shift my perspective to see differently and hopefully, more comprehensively?
• How can I increase the wellbeing, intelligence, diversity, variety, connectedness, and coherence of the systems I’m nested within?

Questions that lead to a deepening of understanding – which is different mode of being than what flows from following after questions that lead to a broadening of knowledge. The Tao Te Ching offers wise counsel on the matter:

“Trying to understand is like straining through muddy water. Have the patience to wait! Be still and allow the mud to settle.” ~Lao Tzu

So often these days the state of the world confuses me, upsets me, depresses me, and flummoxes me. I want to be effective in the world, to leave it just a little better for my having passed this way. In times like these, when great turmoil is the order of the day, I find that absorbing too much news causes me to feel helpless and ineffectual – and that is a mood that I definitely do not want to cultivate!

So, for now, I am ignoring the screaming headlines of death and destruction, of climate chaos, and of endless suffering, and instead I am practicing being present to my friends, my family, and my life. I am speaking less and listening more. I’m reading more poetry and more history, walking more in nature, and taking in less and less news. I’m thinking about what it takes to create the conditions for wellbeing at every level of fractal in which human behavior has a role to play.

May all beings be freed from suffering and harm – especially the news-inflicted kind.