Kevin Newman: Confessions of a news junkie

After 40 years in broadcast journalism, the absence of that adrenaline rush leaves a hole

By: Kevin Newman

These are challenging days for news addicts.

I spent decades deep in that habit as a journalist and television anchor — breaking news at dinner, a team my age and younger running on deadline, the daily negotiation between what mattered and what merely happened. History moved. I watched it, weighed it, tried to explain it clearly enough that the person making dinner might understand why it changed their life.

That was the job. It was also, I eventually discovered, the thing my nervous system had quietly organized itself around.

The adrenaline that had been my operating system for 40 years had structured my days — the spike before air, the hyperclarity of a breaking story, the controlled crash afterward. My cardiovascular system had learned to treat urgency as its natural state. Then, abruptly, the signal stopped. The body doesn’t know what to do with that. Mine got restless, then anxious, then started manufacturing emergencies that weren’t there — because that was the only gear it knew.

It takes months for stress to actually leave. Not the idea of stress. The physical residue of it — held in muscle, in sleep architecture, in the way your jaw sits at rest. I didn’t know how tightly wound I’d been until I started, slowly and strangely, to unwind. Some mornings I woke up not knowing what I was braced for. That feeling — the absence of dread — was so unfamiliar it felt like a symptom.

And the naps I now have the time for don’t help. The nightmares are urgent, specific, unresolved — my brain apparently still filing stories nobody assigned, still scanning for the threat that justified 40 years of vigilance. I am broadcasting to one. My subconscious, it turns out, is still trying to find the fix.

Part of why the withdrawal is so hard is because a newsroom is a tribe. Adrenaline junkies, collectively habituated, managing the same chemical cycle on the same schedule. You didn’t need to explain the crash after a big story — everyone was crashing. You didn’t need to justify the restlessness on a slow news day — everyone felt it. The gallows humour, the hypervigilance, the compulsive need to know what was happening right now — these weren’t personality quirks. They were occupational adaptations, shared and therefore normalized. Your social world, more often than not, was built from the same cohort. People who understood the rhythm because they lived inside it too.

Retirement ends that. The calls stop. The credential that got you into rooms — and more importantly, into the conversation — quietly expires.

But you keep bringing the cycle to people who love you — and who reasonably experience your restlessness as a problem to be solved, your vigilance as anxiety to be managed, your need for urgency as something you should probably talk to someone about. They’re not wrong.

If you were lucky, you built a social world outside the job. A consistent one, with roots that didn’t depend on a press credential or a shared deadline. That world becomes the net. For many of us, though, the honest accounting is harder. The job was the world. And when it ended, the world got very quiet.

That’s where doomscrolling finds you.

Most mornings I find myself scrolling — news feeds, alerts, the ambient catastrophe that passes for information now. I tell myself it’s habit. Professional reflex. Staying current. But I know what it actually is. It’s the same system, looking for the same hit. The world obliges. It is not short of material right now.

Doomscrolling is a poor substitute for journalism. The cortisol arrives but nothing gets explained, nothing gets resolved, and nobody is served. You just absorb the frequency of alarm without the discipline that once made alarm useful. And you do it alone, in silence, without the tribe that once made the alarm feel purposeful.

I’m seven years out now. Purpose, it turns out, doesn’t retire with you — it just stops being delivered on a schedule. You have to go find it, which is a different skill than the one that made you good at the job.

I’m still working on it.

That may be the most honest thing I can tell you about this transition. The sense of urgency for a news junkie doesn’t retire. You just have to realize you’re no longer directing it — it’s directing you.

Kevin Newman is a retired television anchor and journalist

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