Dan Sinker –

Focus feels impossible right now. There is so much happening—so much awful news breaking at an unrelenting pace, so many warning signs and red flags being hoisted—that it feels like you can’t look away. At least, it feels like that to me. Which means that you’re looking at a cascade of horrors instead of the things you’re actually supposed to be doing.

This is something far beyond simple doomscrolling, this is full-on doom living. And it’s completely untenable. And yet most of the time it feels impossible to shake.

Friday, when the Democrats caved on the spending bill, I was fully locked into the doom. I had a list of things that I needed to be doing but I couldn’t do any of them. I had to keep refreshing the feed, keep reloading the page, keep checking for… something. Honestly, it was awful. It felt like I was trapped by my own brain.

And then I broke out of it.

I told myself I had to stop and do one thing.

Good advice.