What it costs the people around you

A news habit seems like the most private of vices. It's you and a screen, and it's hard to see how it could affect anyone else. But other people are affected, in three ways.

The first is that moods are shared. When you come to breakfast with the tightness in your chest, the people at the table get a quieter, tenser version of you. They don't know why. Jo has noticed that you go quiet, and has probably wondered whether it's something she's done. A household takes its emotional weather from the people in it. If one of them is carrying a low, steady dread about events in other countries, everyone else lives with it too.

The second is that you pass the jolt on. "Have you seen what's happened?" is how a good deal of bad news travels. You read something alarming and you tell the nearest person, because alarm wants company. Now they're carrying it too. They can't do anything about it either. If you do this several times a day, you become a news feed for your household, delivering the headlines to people who hadn't chosen to look. Some families end up passing the same dread back and forth all evening. I'd suggest asking yourself, before you share a headline, whether the other person needs to know it or whether you just need to say it.

The third concerns children. If there are children in the house, they hear more than you think. The radio bulletin in the car, the television in the corner and the conversation over their heads about how terrible everything is all reach them. They haven't got an adult's sense of distance and proportion. A child who hears about a war doesn't know that it's two thousand miles away, or what two thousand miles means. A child who overhears daily that the world is dangerous and getting worse has no means of checking that, and may simply believe it. I haven't looked into the research on children and news exposure, so take this as a parent's common sense. Children are better off hearing about frightening events from you, calmly, in terms they can manage, than picking them up from rolling coverage.

The news also takes the place of other things in a household. An hour a day of checking is an hour in which you aren't talking to the people you live with about their day or yours. At dinner you're quiet, and afterwards you spend the evening on the phone. The minister's difficulties have had more of your attention this week than your partner's have. I don't think anyone would choose that ordering if it were put to them directly.