The decision

Here's the rule I'm suggesting.

I take in the news once a day, at a time I've chosen, from a source that has an end. Then I close it.

It has seven parts.

Choose the time. Pick one slot in the day for the news and keep it. I'd avoid the first hour after waking and the last hour before bed, for the reasons in chapter 11. Early evening suits many people, as does the middle of the morning. Twenty to thirty minutes is enough.

Choose the source, and make it one that ends. A radio or television bulletin, a newspaper, a daily newsletter, or a news programme of fixed length all work. A website front page can work if you read down it once and stop. Social media feeds and live pages don't qualify, because they have no end and they're arranged by what alarms.

Then close it. When the bulletin finishes or you reach the bottom of the page, you've finished for the day. Whatever happens in the next twenty-three hours, you'll hear about tomorrow. If it's really enormous, someone will tell you, as chapter 10 argued.

Change the cues. Turn off news notifications on your phone, all of them. Move news apps off your home screen, or delete them and use the website during your appointment. Close the tab at work. Charge the phone outside the bedroom, and buy an alarm clock if the phone is your alarm. If the radio in the car gives you the headlines every half hour, switch to music or something recorded. Each of these removes a cue, and without the cue most looks won't happen.

Keep the news you can act on. Weather warnings, travel disruption, school closures, government emergency alerts and notices from your council are useful information and don't count as checking. Let those through. They're few, and most of them can be set up as specific alerts and kept separate from the news app.

For a major event, allow a second appointment. If something very large happens, follow the World Health Organization's pandemic advice and look once or twice a day at set times. Read a considered summary, and avoid replaying the footage. The urge to follow hour by hour will be strong, and chapter 8 is the reason to resist it.

Once a week, read at length. Replace some of the time you've saved with the slower reading described in chapter 14, on the few subjects you've chosen to follow properly.

Plans of the "when this happens, then I'll do that" kind make a decision much more likely to survive the pull of a phone. Peter Gollwitzer and Paschal Sheeran pooled 94 tests of such plans and found that they made people a good deal more likely to follow through. Here are three, which you can adapt.

When I pick up my phone in a spare moment and think of the news, then I'll put it down and look at whatever's in front of me for ten seconds.

When someone says "have you seen what's happened?", then I'll say "no, tell me", and I won't look it up afterwards.

When a big story breaks and I want to follow it live, then I'll wait for my appointment and read one full account.

You'll also need something for the gaps. The looks at the kettle, on the platform and in the queue were filling small empty moments, and those moments will still come. You don't have to fill them. A minute spent looking out of a train window does you no harm. If you'd like something in your hand, keep a book or a long article saved on your phone, so that what you reach for is something you chose. If the phone in general is the difficulty, and the news is only one of the things you check, there's a separate book in this series about that.

There's one more thing, which comes from chapter 9. Pick one cause, find one organisation, and set up one regular gift or commitment. Then the wish to do something about the state of the world has somewhere to go.

Here's what to expect, in my own estimate. For the first week your thumb will go to where the app was many times a day, and you'll feel a small itch each time, which passes in seconds. You'll have a recurring sense that something might be happening. Something will be, and you'll read about it at six. By the second or third week most people report feeling calmer in a way they hadn't expected, and they realise the background dread had been there so long they'd stopped noticing it. You'll slip, probably during a big story. When you notice you've been on a live page for forty minutes, close it, and keep your appointment the next day.