I Had to Put Down My Phone
Headline after headline about the trade war between Canada and the U.S. has filled my feed for weeks lately. And I'll admit it: I fell into the trap. I found myself checking in every couple of hours, throughout the day, often without really deciding to. It left me on edge, a bit angry, and strangely powerless.
I only really understood how bad it had gotten because of a habit I've kept for a while now. Every day, I spend a few minutes writing down what I did that day and how I felt. Nothing fancy — just a few honest lines. Looking back over a couple of weeks, the pattern was impossible to miss. On the days I'd spent the most time reading headlines, I felt worse. Not “the news was bad, so I felt bad” — that part's obvious. It was that the amount of news mattered as much as the news itself. The more I consumed, the heavier I felt, almost regardless of what the actual headline said that day.
I'm not suggesting you ignore the news entirely. Checking once a day, maybe at a set time, is plenty to stay informed. It was the constant, unscheduled checking that was doing the damage — not the information itself.
I share this because I suspect I'm not the only one. If you've found yourself doing something similar lately, I want you to know it's a completely normal reaction. And I want to talk about why it matters for more than just your mood. It matters for your money, too.
Why this affects more than how you feel
This connects to something researchers who study investor behaviour have found: people tend to make changes — pulling money out, shifting investments, adjusting withdrawals — based on whatever is loudest in their attention that day, rather than on their actual plan. It's not that we're careless. It's that our attention gets hijacked, and our decisions follow our attention, whether we mean them to or not. The same research shows that investors who make the most frequent changes tend to come out worse off than those who make the fewest — not because they're less capable, but because reacting to what's in front of you is a different thing entirely from following a plan.
There's a cruel irony in this. The more unsettling the news, the stronger the pull to do something about it. Check the accounts. Consider pulling back. Anything to make us feel less powerless. Part of what kept us checking, I think, was a quiet hope that the next headline would finally tell me how this ends — that one more update would give me the clarity I was actually after. It never did. It never does. No one, including me, can tell you how any of this resolves. But a decision about your withdrawals or your investments, made from that place — from spikes of worry rather than from a plan — is rarely a good one. What you're usually looking for isn't a change to your plan. It's a sense of control. And there are better, less costly ways to get that back.
Three things that have actually helped me
The first is noticing. Even a few minutes most days, jotting down what you did and how you felt, is enough. You'll start to see your own patterns — which days pull you toward the news, and which days you barely think about it. Once you can see the pattern, it loses some of its grip. It stops being a mood that happens to you and starts being something you can recognize and respond to, the same way you'd notice you're hungry before you get irritable, and eat something before it becomes a problem.
The second is finding something small you can make visible progress on — a project, a task, anything you can point to and say “that's further along than it was yesterday.” Mine was a tree in my backyard that had been bothering me for a while. It wasn’t a big tree, but big enough that I wouldn’t be able to take it down in an afternoon. It took a few weeks, a couple of branches at a time, whenever I had a spare hour, and the weather cooperated. Here's the thing: every single time I cut even two branches, I felt genuinely good. The tree was still standing. The job wasn't done. But I could see the progress, and that was enough. Feeling powerless comes from a gap between how much you're absorbing and how little you feel you can affect. Closing that gap, even with something as small as two tree branches, does something real for how you feel. It doesn't have to be your finances, and it doesn't have to be productive in any grand sense. It just has to be visible, and it has to be yours.
The third is simpler still: connecting with someone you care about, or getting moving — a swim, a walk, doesn't matter what. The days I do either are reliably the days the pull toward the news is weaker. I don't fully understand why it works. I just know it does, consistently enough that I trust it now.
What this means for your plan
If you're a client of mine, none of this is a suggestion that your plan needs to change because of what's in the headlines. It almost certainly doesn't. Your withdrawal plan already assumes there will be periods like this one — markets and headlines that unsettle you. It wasn't built on the hope that things would stay calm; it was built with room for exactly this kind of disruption, so a stretch of bad news doesn't have to mean pulling more from your investment than planned, or pushing back something you were counting on. The instinct to check in more often when the news is loud is understandable. But your plan doing its job quietly, without your daily attention, is a feature, not a problem.
That said, you don't need a reason tied to your finances to reach out. If this news cycle has you feeling unsettled and you just want to talk it through with someone who isn't inside your head, get in touch. Sometimes the most useful thing isn't a plan adjustment at all — it's help separating what's worth your attention from what isn't.
You may be surprised what a few honest lines a day tell you about your own patterns — the way it surprised me. Whatever it shows you, that's a good and welcome reason to reach out.
The comments contained herein are a general discussion of certain issues intended as general information only and should not be relied upon as tax or legal advice. Please obtain independent professional advice, in the context of your particular circumstances. This newsletter was written, designed and produced by Vincent Lam, CFP®, Financial Planner with Intentional Retirement Planning and Investia Financial Services Inc., and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Investia Financial Services Inc.
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