The Mental Fight: How Boxing Taught Me to Spot Media Manipulation

How professional boxers use anger to win fights.
And why your news feed uses the same tactics against you.
Here’s what the ring taught me about staying focused.

About boxing, managing anger, AI and news feeds

I’ve been boxing 3-4 times a week for several years now. Made great progress in physical fitness and endurance, but fights are still brutal. I handle fatigue and pain from hits much better now, recover quickly and sleep deeply the next day despite bodily sensations that used to mess with me. But what’s really hard is maintaining my fight plan and keeping rhythm.

Both my coaches are former professional boxers with 200+ and 300+ amateur fights and 30+ professional bouts. They’re excellent sparring partners because they know the game, know how to avoid injuries while teaching you to fight in a realistic mode.

I kept asking them how mindset and thoughts during a fight affect results. Each shared their experience and that of other boxers. The lesson: thinking about anything else during a fight is extremely dangerous and often ends in defeat.

My coach once told me how he was dominating a fight with a crushing score. Time started dragging, and he began thinking about what he’d tell English-speaking journalists afterward. The fight ended with his complete and sudden defeat.

The anger trap: how professionals weaponize emotion

The second important topic is anger and its control. In professional boxing, it’s standard practice to stoke hatred in the press, at weigh-ins, conferences and social media to provoke opponents and excite audiences.

My mentors noted something crucial: if you can hit someone where it hurts and provoke anger with an offensive word or action, your chances of winning increase significantly. The angry opponent opens up in the fight, forgets their plan, and works on reflexes.

During fights, every boxer has an arsenal of offensive phrases, small tricks on the edge of rule violations, offensive looks and smirks. All designed to get under your skin, make you open up, forget defense and your fight plan, and walk into an effective counter-punch that’s optimal in terms of energy.

Sound familiar?

The news feed as boxing opponent

I try to spend minimal time on news and even headlines, but I notice almost every story that catches attention has bright emotional coloring - usually anger or outrage - while presenting facts that are impossible to analyze from short text. Social media algorithms amplify this dumbing-down effect.

I think with AI, you could build a color-coding system over a weekend to highlight such manipulations in text. It would identify authors’ attempts to break your rational thinking when reading news and force you to move on reflexes.

Just like a boxer trying to make you lose your plan.

The real cost of digital distraction

I notice many positive effects from almost completely giving up daily news reading and scrolling.

These tools added no conscious decisions or actions to my life. They clearly wasted time and created anxiety. They also created tension in conversations when I felt my conversation partner was “reading” different news or held views that didn’t match my information space.

Social platforms using algorithms have obvious side effects beyond addiction:

Filter bubbles: Algorithms show users content they’ve already interacted with, creating information bubbles. People see only content matching their views, limiting their ability to see other perspectives and contributing to opinion polarization.

Toxic content promotion: Algorithms clearly encourage content provoking strong emotional reactions like anger or fear.

Mental health disruption: The constant flow of algorithm-selected content aimed at retaining attention leads to excessive use and negative psychological impact.

What boxing taught me about mental discipline

The parallels between boxing strategy and media manipulation run deeper than I initially realized. In both cases, the goal is identical: break your opponent’s plan and make them react emotionally instead of thinking strategically.

A good boxer stays calm under pressure, sticks to their game plan, and doesn’t get drawn into emotional reactions. They know that anger makes you predictable, opens up your defense, and wastes energy on ineffective moves.

The same principles apply to information consumption. When news or social media content triggers strong emotional reactions, it’s often designed to do exactly that. The anger or outrage hijacks your rational thinking, making you more likely to share, comment, or stay engaged - all profitable behaviors for platforms.

The flow state connection

I’ve written before about finding the ideal flow state in clay shooting competitions. The same principle applies in boxing: you need to maintain calm focus despite external pressure. Your mind should be present, processing information clearly, not clouded by emotional reactions.

This is exactly what algorithmic feeds are designed to disrupt. They fragment attention through rapid-fire input, programming us for superficial engagement instead of depth. The constant dopamine hits from scrolling create dependency cycles that mirror addiction patterns.

The result? We lose the ability to enter and maintain flow states - those periods of deep focus that produce our best thinking and work.

Building mental defense systems

Just as boxers develop defensive techniques to avoid getting hit, we need defensive strategies against manipulative content:

Phone-free mornings: No digital input during the first hours of the day, when the mind is most receptive and focused.

Emotional awareness: Notice when content triggers strong reactions. That’s often a signal that manipulation is at work.

Fact vs. interpretation: Learn to separate factual information from emotional commentary. Most “news” is actually opinion designed to provoke reaction.

Time boundaries: Set defined periods for information consumption instead of constant checking.

Active alternatives: Have engaging offline activities ready when the urge to scroll hits.

The stakes of mental warfare

The comparison between social media effects and cognitive decline isn’t dramatic - it reflects real evidence from research and experience. We may be facing the first generation where cognitive abilities plateau or regress compared to parents.

In boxing, losing focus for even a moment can end the fight. In life, losing our ability to think deeply and independently can end much more.

Every hour spent in shallow consumption is an hour not spent reading, thinking critically, learning, or creating. The damage isn’t just wasted time - its diminished capacity for the deep work that creates real value.

Staying in the fight

The solution isn’t complete abstinence from technology or information. It’s about reasserting control of our attention and mental energy. Like a smart boxer, we need to recognize manipulation tactics and respond strategically rather than emotionally.

The platforms are designed by experts in behavioral science to exploit attention. Fighting back requires conscious system design, not just willpower.

The choice is clear: keep drifting deeper into digital dependency, or confront this trend and deliberately reclaim our minds. The direction we choose shapes not only individual capacity but society’s future intelligence.

Stay focused. Stick to the plan. Don’t let them make you angry.