The Saturday before last, after a day-long car chase and shootout of the suspected Boston Marathon bombers had concluded, I woke up with a Twitter/news hangover.

On Friday, I had checked the online news when I woke up around 6 a.m. and then rarely taken my finger off the refresh button for the rest of the day. I was the lab rat who pushes a lever and sometimes gets a dose of cocaine. With the variable response, I drove myself into a frenzy of re-clicking.

First came the information that the elder brother was a boxer and wore white shoes with long flat tips that looked like alligator snouts. Then came the news that he liked Borat but thought the jokes went too far. Then came the news that the younger brother was a stoner, and so on and so on. Click by click by click, I gathered up another data point for a narrative being made up on the fly. It induced a physical combination of anxiety and intermittent, transient relief—similar, I understand, to the symptoms experienced by porn bingers, compulsive skin pickers, and gamblers. And I wasn’t alone. The Pew Research Center found that 63 percent of Americans said they followed the bombing news “very closely,” which made it the biggest, most personal news story since 9/11.

By late afternoon I was spent. The small, tight muscle under my right shoulder blade was sore from “refreshing,” and my boyfriend asked me what, exactly, I thought I was doing. I couldn’t answer. So we watched His Girl Friday on Turner Classic Movies with Rosalind Russell playing a reporter who is trying to give up the excitement of the newsroom (and Cary Grant) for a saner life with an insurance executive but (of course) can’t. His Girl Friday manages to induce suspense in its viewers despite our better judgment, and that formula—the predictable outcome but unpredictable means of getting there—is exactly what was going on in Boston. The news was suspenseful, even tough, but we knew they were going to track the second suspect down. Gabriel García Márquez said that journalism is not a profession, but a gland. When they got that dumb kid out of the boat, in a place called Watertown, I could finally drag my glands off to bed.

I woke up the next morning with an information hangover, a sore back, and a gross feeling that I needed to bathe. So, in 2012 fashion, I posted this observation on Facebook, where a large number of friends (or maybe co-enablers) said they’d had the same experience. One said that not checking the news would have been like “trying not to pee,” which nicely summed up the weird anxious physical element of it. She added, “I think the immediacy of Twitter and the scanners gave me almost the feeling that it was happening in front of MY house. It felt imperative that I keep an eye on the situation. It felt like MY situation.”

Then I got fewer responses, the physical need to check dissipated, and I resolved to not participate during the next big news event.

Famous. Last. Words. (And, may I ask, why are YOU reading this?)

In the aftermath, I’ve had two observations that make me resolve to not participate all the more.

First, Friday’s news frenzy was fundamentally false. We were directing our attention to an event that not only was not the most important or grisly of the last 12 years, but also was not even the most important event of the day. Give a click or two for the 15 people in West, Texas who died from the fertilizer plant explosion and the 200 who were injured with burns. Boston wasn’t even the biggest mystery: The Texas town was obliterated by a mysterious spark that hit a mysteriously present 540,000 pounds of ammonium nitrate. And it turns out that such a fertilizer plant could be near any one of our homes; these plants seem not to be very well tracked, regulated, or zoned. By watching the Boston Manhunt, though, we made it more important than the fertilizer explosion. I don’t want my glands, or my rat self, doing that.

The second reason I will not play is that, in an indirect but significant way, I and 63 percent of Americans played into the violence last Friday. We became what the military calls “message force multipliers.” With my constant clicks, I became a relay system for information shrapnel, shrinking the part of myself that was capable of conscious, reasoned thought. I allowed two rather dumb terrorists to hijack my limbic nervous system.

We still understand terrorists and the media in 1960s terms: Terrorists want their 15 minutes of fame. The medium is the message. Well, here’s a new formula: In the Twitterverse, we humans are the medium—the flesh of our bodies, that muscle under my shoulder blade, transmits the news. The message is that thinking is pointless, only reaction is possible. When terrorists attack us now, they get their two days of fame, but they turn all of us into violence relayers in 215-millisecond bursts. (Two hundred milliseconds is how long it takes to react and click. See here.) Flesh not brain. To me, that’s the end of civilization.

And I don’t want that. I’d like my civilization back, if you don’t mind. I want to stop being a rat. Also, I lost an entire Friday. If I had spent it playing with Lego blocks, say, I might have built a little plastic cathedral (or at least a plastic house), a monument to deliberative striving. Instead, I’d bombed myself right back to the Stone Age.

So. Come the next crisis, I resolve to stay human. Turn off the machines. Take a walk. Leave the phone. Read a long book. Play with blocks. Tune out the “facts as they unfold.” Try to think long thoughts, not short ones. Or take up skin picking.

Wish me luck.