You Need a Mental Break From COVID-19.

Why it’s okay to turn off your news feed and read a novel instead.

Amy Colleen
4 min readApr 15, 2020

You can’t keep up with all the updates on the novel coronavirus.

No, seriously, you can’t. No one can. You can try, of course. You can log in every morning to Twitter and Facebook and the AP online, and let NPR play while you brush your teeth, and get news headlines flashed across the top banner on your phone all day, but you can’t keep up with everything. It’s simply not possible. There is too much information — some of it conflicting—all day, every day, from every imaginable source, telling you what to fear today and how to prepare and how to prevent and what to wear and what to sanitize and why the economy is going down the tubes and what the latest tone-deaf celebrity has had to say about our current situation.

It’s too much for any one sane person.

Not that you’re necessarily a sane person these days. You have to wonder sometimes. This quarantine is starting to mess with all our heads. Can we agree that we owe it to ourselves to take a break now and then?

During the Great Depression of the 1930’s, movie audiences whiled their troubles away at cheap black-and-white flicks featuring baby tap dancer Shirley Temple: frivolity at its finest. No one fixed the…

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Amy Colleen
Amy Colleen

Written by Amy Colleen

I read a lot of books & sometimes I’m funny. I aspire to be a novelist, practice at humor & human interest writing, and am very fond of the Oxford comma.

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