Guard your inputs because attention includes, it doesn’t exclude

You keep telling yourself you can handle the feed. Then you look up and realize thirty minutes vanished into someone else’s outrage. Your jaw is tight, your to‑do list looks bigger, and you’re strangely tired. Attention isn’t neutral. It’s an inclusion device. What you absorb becomes easier to think about, and easier to feel, so you do more of it.

Run a one‑week reset. Write down the five inputs you consume the most—shows, accounts, group chats, newsletters—and rate how you feel thirty minutes after each. Then cut the high‑arousal, low‑agency stuff, the content that spikes emotion without giving you any useful action. Replace it with briefings, skilled explainers, or a book chapter. Add a buffer—take a five‑minute walk after consuming, like rinsing the pan so it doesn’t stick.

A friend paused two accounts and turned off four breaking‑news alerts. He added a ten‑minute morning briefing and a Saturday long read. “I didn’t become uninformed,” he said, “I just stopped marinating in panic.” The small change spilled into his evenings. He slept better and started sketching again at his kitchen table, pencil tapping over the soft radio.

From a behavioral lens, salience and availability bias make recent, vivid inputs feel more likely and important than they are. Continuous exposure to high‑arousal content narrows attention, elevates cortisol, and erodes executive function. A brief hygiene protocol widens your attentional aperture, lowers background stress, and restores your ability to choose where to point your mind. You’re not hiding from reality, you’re creating the conditions to meet it usefully.

Track the five inputs you engage with most and note how you feel afterward, then mute the ones that spike you without offering any helpful actions. Add two sources that inform or uplift at a calmer pace, and put them in time windows with a short walk or breath break afterward. Keep a quick journal of mood, focus, and sleep across the week to see patterns. You’ll likely feel steadier within days. Start tonight by muting one feed and queuing a better one for the morning.