“Our morning newspaper, that we read with our breakfast, has the history of the sorrows of the whole world for a day.”

The New York physician George Beard wrote that in 1881, in a book called American Nervousness. He meant it as a warning: the morning paper, he argued, robs anyone who feels for others “of more or less nervous strength.”

He was not the only one who noticed. In March 1830, Goethe was eighty and deep in the second part of Faust. He left his two Paris newspapers unopened for about two weeks and asked his friends to tell him the news instead. His work, he said, was coming along quite nicely. In 1854, Thoreau wrote from his cabin at Walden Pond: “If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident … we never need read of another. One is enough.”

“I must hold it for the greatest calamity of our time … that one moment is consumed by the next. Have we not already newspapers for every hour of the day!”Goethe, Maxims and Reflections, translated by T. Bailey Saunders, 1906

A poet, a philosopher and a doctor, all three early cases of news anxiety. Their news might have been just as distressing and disturbing as ours, but they had a few pages of small print, no photographs yet, read once a day or even once a week. When they folded the paper and got up, the news stayed on the table.

It’s nothing compared to what we are living through. The paper is now a phone: an endless flow of uninvited, uncontrolled images, updates and opinions, amplified by social media feeds that exploit our emotional triggers for engagement. Whatever upsets us or makes us angry gets more clicks and shares, so that is what we see more of.

We are the first generations to live like this. We never decided to. We slid into it, one more app, one more preset alert, one more scroll at a time, with no precedent, no one to warn us and no blueprint to protect us. But we are beginning to feel strongly what this does to us, and what we are losing or have already lost. Across much of the world, the young have started to pull back: time spent on social media has been falling since 2022, most of all among teens and twenty-somethings, though not yet in North America.

The solution is obvious and seems doable. Let’s all just put the phone down and walk away. Problem solved. As obvious as it might seem, it is far from easy. Other forces are in power, and they take control before we have decided anything. Some sit outside us: apps built to keep us scrolling and coming back. Others sit inside us, and they are much older than any phone.

But here is the good news: we now know much of what keeps us reaching for the phone, and we can work on each part of it.

The news is not going to get quieter, so this may be the right time to step back, look at what it does to us, and decide how much of our life we are willing to give it.

Goethe kept up with the world through his friends, and he finished Faust the following summer. What we are up against is much stronger than what he faced, but we can learn how it works and regain some power over it, one part at a time.

In 1830, Victor Hugo was so far behind on a novel he had promised his publisher that he was given a final deadline: February 1831. The story goes that he locked away his clothes so he could not go out, and wrote. The book was The Hunchback of Notre-Dame.

So, that’s one strategy to get things done. But the question is: why is it so hard to simply do what we need to do? Why do we put ourselves through weeks of dread, a small jolt every time the task comes to mind, instead of spending the few minutes it takes?

There is no single answer. Several forces work on us at once: how our lives have changed, how we escape what feels bad, and how our brain holds on to unfinished things. Take the first: we often have no visible proof that our tasks are over.

Before machines took over much of the housework, washing alone could take a whole day: water heated by the bucket, every sheet scrubbed, wrung and hung by hand. It was hard, physical work, but its progress was visible. The pile of laundry in the morning was a line of clean sheets by evening. The task was over, and an evening hour in front of the fireplace came with a sense of accomplishment and room for recovery.

And then there is the task itself. An unpleasant task means facing uncertainty, disappointing someone or finding out something we would rather not know. If we put it off, we feel relief right away, while the benefit of doing it lies further ahead. Under strain, that relief becomes especially tempting.

Even when we stop, the unfinished things stay with us. Why should an email we have not answered occupy part of an evening when we are nowhere near our desk?

One of the first clues came from the psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik, and it began with her teacher, Kurt Lewin, in a restaurant in Berlin in the 1920s. The story is that Lewin noticed something about the waiter. As long as a table had not paid, the waiter knew exactly what everyone had ordered. Once the bill was paid, the details were gone.

Zeigarnik wanted to know whether we all work that way. She gave people small tasks, let them finish some and stopped them in the middle of others. Later, they remembered more of the unfinished ones.

Researchers have argued since then about how reliably this effect appears. But in 2011, two psychologists, E. J. Masicampo and Roy Baumeister, found something useful: making a concrete plan reduced the thoughts about unfinished goals that interrupted people while they did something else. They did not have to finish the work first. They had to decide what they would do, when and where.

That is what a plan can do. It gives the task a place, the way washday once had its Monday, so it takes less room in our heads. That room is what we need back: for thinking, for the people around us, for the late dinner, the unplanned trip, the night that runs on too long, all the things that become memories.

Hugo met his deadline, and the book is still read almost two hundred years later. Most of us are not writing a novel, and none of us should have to lock away our clothes to get through a to-do list. What helps is a place for each task, a way through the hard ones, and a little less blame.