“The stress-reducing habit of only carrying opinions for which you have strong supporting facts.” — See the book Factfulness »

Factfulness is a relaxing habit for critical thinking. It helps you maintain a fact-based worldview. It teaches you how to recognise and avoid the most common ways information gets misinterpreted.

First: Realize that we don’t see the world as it is.
part is to accept that humans don’t see reality just as it is. There’s to much information for us to process it all. That’s why we all have an attention filter in our heads. But this attention filter is hard wired to make use care more about dramatic information, which easily leads to a stressful over-dramatic impression of the world.
Factfulness is the skill to recognise the common types of stories that tend to get all the attention because they trigger our dramatic instincts.

Second: Recognise what types of stories trigger our dramatic instincts
Next, you need to learn to recognise the common types of stories that trigger your dramatic instincts. this will help you control your intake of drama. Most people need to think twice to control their intake of sugar and fat. And it seems to be the same with drama. Here is the list of dramatic instincts and below this list we have listed the concrete rules of thumbs that help you avoid overdramatic interpretations.

Third: Use simple rules of thumb to resist over-dramatic stories
As soon as you start recognising the ten most common types of dramatic stories that trigger your dramatic instincts, it’s much easier to control your feelings of drama, and avoid having them triggered. You can quickly question the relevance of common dramatic interpretations with some few simple questions.