Last year I made a radical shift (for me) regarding how I spend my time. I cut out all forms of news media, ditched Facebook and Twitter, and focused on cultivating a low-information diet with selective ignorance.

So what does this mean exactly?

Well, before Trump was elected, I’ll admit I was addicted to the news. I was an avid follower of the presidential race and felt that staying completely informed was a cultural imperative.

I would regularly start my morning by opening up a host of Washington Post and New York Times articles and then saving any I didn’t get to for perusal throughout the day. I’d read during my free time, as a break from homework, and during any class that allowed laptops. What was happening in the political, international, and cultural arenas seemed much more important than the tedium of my classes.

I also had several news apps on my phone that would ping me with a push notification when any new developments occurred. When combined with the notifications from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat, the result was a near constant bombardment of information. I’m sure I spent hours each day between my various forms of media.

After the election, I (like many of my peers) felt so distraught that I decided to take a hiatus from the news. I couldn’t bear to read the hot takes, think pieces, and analyses of the implications for our country. I figured that I would take a few weeks off and then reintroduce the news to my life more selectively.

Instead, my time off from the news was a period of bliss. I realized not only that I felt less anxious without my daily news consumption, but that I also didn’t feel any of the fear of missing out I was worried I’d experience if I stopped consuming. I noticed that I was measurably happier when I avoided the news.

This seemed counter-intuitive at first, especially considering how important I had felt it was to stay up-to-date on not just politics, but international events, local stories, cultural developments, and more before the election. Why was the change to no news so drastically mood-altering?

When I dug into the why behind what I was feeling, I realized there were a few factors at play that made my news consumption such a burden on my mental well-being:

Almost none of the news is relevant to me, my family, or my life. Is it really necessary for me to know about the doctor who branded his initials onto his patients’ organs, the body found in a Mississippi river, or Trump’s difficulty drinking a glass of water? No. Yet all three of these stories were granted some of my attention when they showed up as push notifications on my old news apps. All three were reported on by multiple national media outlets. But none of the three had any relevance to my life or the decisions I made the day I read about them. Instead, all they served to do was embed a small amount of negative energy into my morning and distract me from spending time on something important. The news is a commercial enterprise designed primarily to keep us reading in order to maximize profit. It’s no surprise that clickbait-style articles are becoming increasingly popular. Sensationalist headlines get more clicks, which means a larger audience for the news outlet’s advertisers. But, for me, it meant constant exposure to headlines that are intentionally designed to be scarier and more dramatic than the content within their respective articles. This, again, caused me to experience a flicker of anxiety and then get distracted reading the article in order to assure myself that it wasn’t as bad as the headline suggested. Social media (especially Facebook) generally make us feel worse about ourselves and our lives. We know this. There have been studies done that shows the longer individuals spend on Facebook, the unhappier they feel. Yet we spend close to an hour each day browsing through our news feeds. An average teen will spend over 5 years of his or her life on social media. Why? For me, it was the fear of missing out. I thought that if I didn’t check Facebook frequently I would miss out on the wealth of information that can be found there about my friends, the world, and my culture. All of my Facebook time, however, was spent passively browsing, meaning I scrolling lazily through the feed until I noticed something interesting that could distract me. I was never searching for anything specific on Facebook — and had no real reason to be on it — but I would still be negatively affected by the slew of articles, videos (looking at you, NowThis), and angry statuses that passed through my line of vision.

The truth is that the amount of information we’re all bombarded with daily verges on ridiculous.

Think about it. If you’re even partially interested in keeping up with current events, you probably have at least one favorite news source that you frequent. If you’re more involved, you might have a daily diet of The Washington Post, New York Times, BBC, and a few blogs.

Then, you might sprinkle in the most popular social media: Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter. Maybe you have Tumblr and Reddit accounts too.

It quickly becomes overwhelming. When combined, the amount of information we consume can eat up multiple hours each day and leave us wondering why we always feel rushed and out of time.

In short, I was consuming vast amounts of negative information unrelated to me, becoming distracted by anxiety-inducing headlines, and wasting time reading the news and on social media. Sometimes, after reading my slot of saved-for-later articles, I’d spent so much time getting angry or sad about the world’s events that I had run out of time and/or energy for activities that directly impact my life like studying or working on my photography.

My point is that by selectively eliminating most of my news consumption I’ve become a happier, more productive, less anxious person. I deleted all of the news apps from my phone, limited Facebook to a once-per-week check, and stopped beginning my mornings with an onslaught of negativity in the name of “staying informed.”

I’m not advocating for ignorance, but rather a more conscious, intentional selection of how we spend our time. There’s a lot of great content out there that can help us understand each other and our society better, but it takes some effort to sort through the noise on the surface. The alternative — consuming without intention in a high-information diet — leads to constant anger about things that almost none of us have the power to control.

I’ve found that letting go of that anger and refocusing the energy I spent retaining it on more important things — like my relationships, hobbies, and work — has been one of the most important, positive changes I’ve ever made. If you feel like news and social media have too much of a grip on your life, try shutting it all off for a week. You’ll be surprised by how much extra time you’ll have to devote to what actually matters.