As The Beatles so famously sang: ‘I read the news today – oh boy’. It can seem that every time you check in with current affairs, it’s another tale of war, riot, terrorism, crime, catastrophe, disease, division, disaster or death. It never seems to change. There is the sense that having read one newspaper, you’ve read them all. And, given that the experience is rarely mood-enhancing, what’s the point?
‘Rarely mood-enhancing’ doesn’t even cover it. Research by Professor Alison Holman, a psychologist with the University of California, Irvine, finds that the amount of media that people expose themselves to in the immediate aftermath of an event is a strong predictor of their mental health condition in response to that event. Or, in other words, the more detail you go into on a news topic, the worse you feel.
Symptoms include those akin to the early stages of post-traumatic stress: anxiety, edginess, intrusive thoughts, low mood. And the more you’re likely to worry about things that haven’t happened yet too. That worry can encourage the consumption of yet more media – a vicious cycle.
The Science Behind News-Induced Stress
The effects are very real. One Harvard study suggests that just three minutes of bad news exposure in the morning makes for a 27 per cent greater likelihood of being in a negative mood six to eight hours later. Those headlines over breakfast can ruin the rest of your day.
We’re still trying to understand the processes here but, remarkably, another of Holman’s studies has shown how media exposure to an event can be a stronger predictor of stress than actually being at the event itself. ‘When you’re at the site what you see is over and done. You may see horrible things but you’re not constantly re-exposed to them. With the media you see the most distressing clips over and over,’ she explains.
A further ongoing study even suggests that acute stress symptoms that people experienced after 9/11, having only experienced the event via the news, are associated with new onset cardiovascular ailments two or three years later – so perhaps media is damaging to our physical health too.
Presumably then Holman would argue that, for the sake of our health, we should turn away from the news and discover that ignorance is bliss. After all, most news events have little direct bearing on our own individual lives. But no.
‘I’d never advocate that people cut themselves off from the news entirely because we need citizens to be engaged,’ she says. In fact, knowing what’s going on in the world is widely considered a social duty, and its opposite some kind of failing – even if polls suggest the numbers of us closely following the news are falling rapidly, especially among younger people. And perhaps no wonder.
‘The kids I work with see the kinds of images daily that I would never have seen when I was a kid. What’s more, they don’t even know if the images they see are real.’
Dr. Don Grant, Newport Healthcare
‘We can’t be ostriches but we can’t keep hurting ourselves either,’ Holman adds. ‘We do all need to self-regulate more and pay more attention to our news sources.’
Doomscrolling
Of course it doesn’t help, says Dr. Don Grant, National Advisor of Healthy Device Management at Newport Healthcare, US, that an increasing number of us now get our news from social media – which, unlike newspaper editions or regular TV news – is always on, feeds you more of the same, and is fundamentally visual. And, as the saying goes, some things you can’t unsee. That’s not to mention podcasts, websites, and radio.
‘Does that mean we’re consuming too much news? Yes it does,’ he asserts – indeed, one study suggests that the more you use social media to get news, the more the accuracy of your knowledge about the news is reduced. ‘But the fact that there are so many news sources online now also means there’s intense competition for eyeballs.’
That only encourages coverage to skew towards the extremes – the more horrific, salacious, outrageous or upsetting – since that encourages sharing. ‘And the kids I work with see the kinds of images daily that I would never have seen when I was a kid,’ he adds. ‘What’s more, they don’t even know if the images they see are real. Worryingly, I think this exposure is making us inured to them too – they’re not as shocking as they would have been a generation ago.’
Healthy News Habits
So what can you do? Holman and Grant recommend putting the effort in to check that news sources are reliable, and focusing on those sources – maybe just one or two. Schedule the time you devote to news consumption – perhaps no more than 30 minutes, twice a day – and then switch off. If your phone’s notifications are set to alert you with news flashes, switch those off too.
‘Make news consumption a deliberate, conscious act – and pay attention to your body as you do so, your breathing rate, your heart rate,’ Holman says. ‘Assess whether what you’re seeing is good for you right now or can maybe wait’. If it comes to it, go cold turkey on news for a while. The world will keep turning.
Other, more productive ways of approaching a news topic news might be to read books around it rather than just consuming daily media – take a deep dive, especially into complex subjects rarely given the space in papers or online. And to keep touch with real people: discuss the news rather than just dwell in it. Grant goes further: ‘If you’re worried about something, do something about it. Get into action. Volunteer. Be part of the solution.’
Both also suggest coming to terms with how and why the media works the way it does. ‘Right now I don’t think many people know how the media functions. We need to give young people especially the tools to interpret and understand what they see in the news,’ Holman says.
After all, news, almost by definition, focuses on rare events; commonplace events wouldn’t be newsworthy, though news coverage encourages us to believe that these rare events are happening every day and all around the world. Statistically, however, more people actually live longer, safer, healthier lives than at any time in history.
This might explain why new media attempts to sell positive news remain niche. In one experiment, when the City Reporter news website tried reporting only good news for a day in 2014, it lost two-thirds of its readership
Yes, you read that right – broadly, crime rates are falling too, death and destruction from natural disasters is in decline, the numbers killed in war between nations is on a long-term downward trend, survival rates from once terminal illnesses and income levels alike are rising. It would, however, be hard to get that impression from the news. The news warps our impression of the state of the world and how we respond to it.
Part of the problem, Grant explains, is what’s called our ‘negativity bias’ – our leaning towards consuming bad news is part of our hard-wiring: as a necessary survival skill we’re attuned to look for possible danger everywhere. This might explain why new media attempts to sell positive news remain niche. In one experiment, when the City Reporter news website tried reporting only good news for a day in 2014, it lost two-thirds of its readership.
‘We don’t look at a lovely meadow and think, “wow, what beautiful flowers”. We think “what might be hiding in the grass over there?”,’ Grant says. ‘What’s more, we’re social creatures. We love to gossip and, like the media, we don’t restrain ourselves in sharing it either. We even share things we know may just be rumour,’ he adds.
Put another way, we can’t help being human – so the battle with the news blues is, ultimately, a battle with our very natures.
