I had to start avoiding the news around April 2019, when various Brexit deadlines were about to hit and I realised that the situation was stressing me out so much that it was making me physically ill. I then managed to avoid it completely for close to six months. Since then, it's been something of a revolving door, where I'll go for months in calm avoidance, something will make me crack (leading to days glued to Twitter and the Guardian's politics live feed), I'll end up having constant panic attacks or just feel really seethingly angry, and then I avoid the news for months on end again.

I used to feel a lot of guilt about this, because both my parents are journalists, several of my sisters and people in my stepfamily work in politics, and I used to be a journalist myself, so it's basically been drilled into me from birth that being deeply familiar with the day-to-day politics of one's country is a necessary part of being a socially responsible human being. But I just can't do it at the speed that it happens on Twitter/live feeds, with news unfolding at breakneck speed and wild speculation abounding before all the facts are known or analysed in depth, and news and opinion mixed and blurred together.