If you want to wake up early in the morning every day, then go to bed early. Early to bed, early to rise. If you’re going to lose weight, then eat less food. What you put in, is what you get out.

If you want less anxiety about the “breaking news” and less empty calories from cable channels and the news tickers, then don’t watch the news! The critical story will always find you, so don’t worry about missing out.

There’s a difference between being informed vs. being current. A typhoon on the other side of the world is significant because of climate change and appreciating how our species is interconnected, but you don’t need to know about it as it’s happening. Your lizard brain probably thinks there’s a typhoon in your backyard and gets stressed out by the images of rough sees and displaced people. Cable news is appealing directly to your lizard brain. CNN pioneered breaking news, and then post 9/11 it became the standard operating procedure for all cable news channels.

Being too current creates blind spots. People get sucked into how bad the political environment is and start to see everything through that lens from the economy, world hunger, illitracy, child mortality, pollution. Politics aside, we are improving as a species on all these fronts, and it’s good to step back and appreciate that.

“Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise. – Benjamin Franklin