"I need to know what's going on"

The main justification for checking is that it keeps you informed. It's what informed people do. If you stopped, you'd fall behind and lose your grip on events.

So look at what a day of checking put into your head. Take the Monday in chapter 1. By bedtime you'd looked about twenty-five times. You knew there'd been a missile strike, which you knew at ten past seven. You knew the minister was under pressure, which you also knew at ten past seven. The twenty-three looks in between delivered rewordings. The pressure was mounting, then growing, and then colleagues were said to be rallying round. The live page delivered several dozen entries to the effect that details were still emerging. Your understanding of why the strike happened, what the minister is accused of, or what the economists' warning rests on, was about the same at bedtime as at breakfast.

That's because of what an update is. When an event is only hours old, very little is known about it, and much of what's reported early turns out to be incomplete or wrong. Casualty figures change, motives are guessed at and corrected, and the first account of who did what is often revised by the following day. The hourly headline is the least checked and least digested form of news there is. It tells you that something is happening. Explanation comes later and at greater length.

There's a test for whether you're being informed, and I'd encourage you to try it on Friday. Without looking anything up, write down what you remember of Monday's news. For each item, write what's happened since and why it matters. Most people who check constantly find this surprisingly hard. The week's headlines have run together, and what's left is a general sense that things are bad, with little you could call knowledge.

Compare Neil, with his weekly paper and his pot of coffee. By Saturday the week's events have been sorted by people whose job it is. The stories that turned out not to matter have dropped away, and the ones that did matter have been explained, with background, by someone who's had a few days to find out what happened. Neil spends perhaps two hours a week on the news and gets an account with a beginning, a middle and some context. You spend an hour a day or more and get headlines.

I don't want to overstate this. You do pick up something from headlines, and you'd recognise more names and events than somebody who saw no news at all. Recognising the names of things is a thin kind of knowledge, though. You could give a good account of how the minister story made you feel on Monday, but a much poorer one of what the minister had actually done.

There's research that fits with this. Homero Gil de Zúñiga and colleagues followed a panel of American adults over time and measured what they knew about politics. People who relied on news reaching them through their social feeds, without seeking it out, knew less than others, and they fell further behind as time went on. The researchers concluded that news improves political knowledge best when it's actively sought. Their study was about people who don't look for news at all, which isn't your problem. But the conclusion applies to you as well. You learn when you sit down intending to find something out. You learn much less when headlines are simply passing in front of you, whether that's twice a day or twenty-five times.

So I'm not suggesting you should know less. Once a day, and on purpose, you'd learn as much as you do now, and probably more, because you'd be reading to understand something.