Today’s news is always fast and almost always bad. Threats, urgency, crisis, isolation and helplessness all increase.
Meanwhile, psychological research shows that constant exposure to negative news distorts cognition, harms mental health, and impairs our experience of agency. After all, our feelings attention is a choice, not an obligation, and selective and reasoned attention can help us maintain a healthy perspective and a more effective life posture.
If it bleeds, it causes it
Most people have heard the aphorism: “If it bleeds, it causes it.” There’s a reason news is structurally biased: emotionally activating content grabs our attention, and news wants our attention.
Large scale reads showed that negative emotional content is more likely to be broadcast in news channels. This is because our brains are more responsive to threats than to neutral or positive stimuli. This explains why this happens – it may be important for our survival to be alert to the threat of negativity. If we are about to be eaten by a tiger, we may pay more attention to it than to pity a beautiful flower.
However, much of the urgency in the news report is not a direct threat to us; it’s just made to feel that way. This is not news a liar to us, it’s just that the narrative presented is incomplete and creates a distorted perception of reality that is ultimately psychologically damaging. In one study, for example, when scientists presented participants with news stories that contained statements about political instability or terrorist incidents, to manage their perception of how dangerous the country appeared to be. For example, saying a terrorist attack was caused by “Al-Qaeda and radical Islamic groups” is significantly more relevant than saying “a domestic separatist group” – although the two mean the same thing.
For all these reasons, research shows anxiety and depression is associated with media exposure, and these symptoms can develop even after less than 15 minutes of news consumption.
Perceived control and actual control
It’s not just what we witness, but what the brain does when faced with threats that we can’t do anything about. We consume bad news because we are sad and we believe that more knowledge gives us the experience of greater control and awareness. Ironically, it actually makes us feel less in control and increases our anxiety. strengthens pessimistic outlook and lowers our sense of well-being. In other words, we move to feel safer and end up feeling worse.
Not only that, crisis-focused binary narratives like the news flatten reality and increase mental toughness. The news favors stories like good versus evil and threat versus safety when the reality is almost always more complex. Repeated exposure means we lose our cognitive flexibility and start to to cause disaster and overgeneralization, which reduces the accuracy of our perception and damages our ability to think about problems in a healthy way.
What can we do?
We all feel a moral pressure to be aware, but constant emotional involvement is not necessarily a requirement of moral citizenship. Attention spans are limited and being overwhelmed by emotions actually reduces our ability to act in ways that can create positive change in our world. The Serenity Prayer, used in the 12-step process (and written by theologian Reinhold Niebuhr), can be a useful map for dealing with the onslaught of information, and it is based on evidence-based psychological principles related to place of controlattention regulation and behavioral activation: accept what we can’t change, what we can change, make a difference.
In other words, most of us cannot control global crises, national events, and macro events. Taking this immediately reduces anxiety. Most of us can make some impact by working with our community, taking local action and educating them environment We live in it. Focusing on these things enhances our experience of well-being and also has positive effects. The more clarity we have about this, the less anxiety we experience and the more agency we experience.
The end goal is not to break up; It is important to be aware. The goal is more accurate, complete and calibrated engagement. Good things always come with bad, and mental health requires us to hold several truths at the same time. A healthier and more reality-based approach to awareness requires us to limit our news consumption and be aware of what we receive. This means being careful not only about how much time we spend, but also about the sources of our information. It requires us to focus on local issues that we can actually do something about and shift our thinking from passive consumption to active contribution. In this age of information overload, we need to think about the best use of our attention.
