Elections, emergencies and other hard cases

If the news is about you. If your family is in the war zone, your town is the one flooding, or your job depends on the vote, then following events closely is a reasonable thing to do. It's still worth choosing how. Get your information from the most direct and practical sources available to you, such as official alerts, the relevant embassy or agency, and the people on the ground whom you know. Rolling coverage will give you more distress and less information than those. Set times for looking, even if there are six of them a day, so that there are also times when you aren't looking. Be alert to the cycle in chapter 8, because people close to an event are the most vulnerable to it.

If there's a local emergency. Follow the official sources, which are the police, the council, the Met Office, the Environment Agency and the NHS. Turn on government emergency alerts on your phone. These tell you what to do. National coverage of your local emergency mostly tells the rest of the country how bad it looks.

If it's an election. Elections reward understanding, and they're also when coverage is most feverish and least informative. The daily poll movements, gaffes and rows tell you almost nothing that will help you vote. What helps is an hour with the manifestos or a good summary of them, a look at your local candidates, and perhaps one long piece on each of the issues you care about. You can do that in an evening or two. On election night, by all means stay up if you enjoy it. If you do that, you're doing it for fun, and that's fine.

If the news is your job. Journalists, press officers, traders, politicians' staff and others need to follow events through the working day. Treat it as work. Do it at work, with the tools your job provides, and stop when work stops. People in these jobs often have the worst habits out of hours. The rule applies to your own time.

If politics is your hobby. Some people follow politics the way others follow football, for the drama and the characters, and they enjoy it. If that's you, and it really is a pleasure and not a compulsion, then carry on and count it as leisure. The test is how you feel afterwards. A hobby leaves you feeling better, and if an hour of political coverage usually leaves you angry and low, I'd question whether it's a hobby.

If someone you live with has the news on all day. You can't impose your rule on another adult. You can explain what you're doing and why, and ask for some news-free times and places, such as meals and the bedroom. You can wear headphones. Often the other person hasn't thought about it and is half relieved to be asked.

If the news is company. Many people who live alone keep rolling news or talk radio on through the day, for the voices. The wish for company is reasonable, and the trouble is only that this particular company talks about nothing but disasters. Music stations, drama, comedy, sport, podcasts and audiobooks all put human voices in the room without the dread. If the house is very quiet most days, that's worth attending to as well, and a phone call will do more for it than the news does.

If you get your news from social media. Then you're getting it in the form most heavily selected for alarm and outrage, with the least checking and with everybody's reactions attached. I'd suggest separating the two. Use social media, if you use it, for people you know and interests you've chosen, and mute or unfollow news accounts and the people who mainly repost bad news. Get your news from the source you've chosen for your appointment.

If you're worried about your health, and the news is about illness. Health scares are among the hardest stories to leave alone. For any health story, the practical question is whether there's something you should do, and the NHS website or your GP will answer that better than a headline. If you find yourself checking for symptoms or reading about a disease for hours, the habit is more than a news habit, and the advice in the preface about seeing a GP applies.

If you need to talk to children about the news. Tell them yourself, briefly and calmly, in words that suit their age. Answer their questions honestly and don't add detail they haven't asked for. Tell them where it's happening in terms they understand, and that the adults around them are keeping them safe. Keep rolling coverage off when they're in the room.

If you feel guilty for stepping back. Some people feel that being calm while others are suffering is itself a kind of wrong. I'd answer that your anxiety never helped anyone in the news. It costs you and the people around you a good deal and the sufferers get nothing from it. Go back to chapter 9 and put the feeling into one regular, practical commitment.

If the anxiety doesn't lift. If you've kept the rule for a month and you're still anxious most days, the news wasn't the main cause. See your GP or refer yourself to NHS talking therapies, as the preface said.