Balancing your news diet
by Keelin Everly-Lang
Illustration by Guille Manchado. Our nonprofit generates funding in multiple ways, including through affiliate linking. When you purchase something through an affiliate link on this site, the price will be the same for you as always, but we may receive a small percentage of the cost.
A breaking news alert pops up on your phone. Your stomach drops and the panic starts to creep in. What will it be this time? Maybe a terrifying wildfire, political corruption, civil rights issues, another mass shooting, or continued coverage of devastation caused by unconscionable war.
If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed by reading or scrolling through negative news, you are not alone.
A 2022 article from the American Psychological Association (APA) reported recently that “Though there is no formally recognized disorder or diagnostic criteria, many psychologists are seeing patients suffering from news-related stress and seeking guidance on how to help them.”
The APA shares some signs of this issue, sometimes called news fatigue, media overload, headline stress, and other names:
Intrusive thoughts about news or current events throughout the day
Persistent anger, resentment, or anxiety generated by the news
Increased substance use to self-medicate related stress
Diminished interest in activities outside the news
Researcher, author, and public speaker Jodie Jackson first became interested in the subject after she experienced intense anxiety related to the news.
“I struggled massively with it when I was about 20. It was so overwhelming to me. It triggered such a fear in me about the world and how terrible it was,” she shared in an interview.
This challenge kick-started Jackson’s research into how to have a healthy relationship with news 10 years ago and the publication of multiple books, including You Are What You Read.
If reading the news is causing all of these issues, it may seem like the obvious solution is to simply stop reading or consuming it. Jackson tried this approach first, but realized that avoiding it completely was “such a flawed strategy to deal with the issues that I had with it, because it's insidious. You cannot escape the news. It will find you, whether it's through a radio bulletin, through a conversation with friends, walking through the supermarket and seeing it on the stand.”
Not only is it impossible to avoid the news completely, doing so can yield negative impacts on our lives, relationships, and society at large. News helps shape our view of the world and how we relate to our community, which in turn impacts our actions and everyday lives.
In a study called “The political is personal: the costs of daily politics,” researchers explored the relationship between political news and emotional well-being. The authors found that, “Knowing about subjects that make us feel negative emotions can be important.”
As one example from the study, ”In the realm of politics, the strong emotions that people feel in response to political events may inspire them to take political action. These actions — protesting, contacting representatives, donating to a cause — can create important societal change as individuals strive to improve upon the status quo.”
The catch is that these strong emotions only inspire action if we believe that we have some power to make a difference.
Jackson explains that if “You have urgency, with no sense of agency, you have despair.”
On the other hand, if those same feelings of “anxiety, fear, and worry” are combined with “feelings of aspiration, hope, desire, connection, you get a very different outcome. You get resilience, essentially. If you have a sense of real urgency combined with a sense of agency, you have resilience in action.”
The question then becomes: How can we cultivate these feelings of aspiration and agency when consuming the news?
Guille Manchado
Curating your newsfeed
Jackson shared that her research has shown introducing something called solutions journalism to your news diet can be an impactful tool to change this common cycle of despair.
Solutions journalism takes the usual reporting of describing problems in our community and expands on it. Instead of just talking about the problem, it focuses on the response to it. This approach invites the reader to understand how the problem exists in a larger context and how the community is attempting to move forward toward productive and positive change.
Reading these kinds of stories can really help with anxiety around news and even helps people remember the information better.
A study by the Center for Media Engagement found that participants who read solutions-based versions of a news article “were more ‘inspired and/or optimistic after reading the article’ than their non-solutions counterparts.”
Jackson explains that even a small change in your news diet can have big impacts.
“Content is infinite. But your attention is finite. You only have 24 hours in a day. Say you spend four hours consuming content. If you decide that for an hour of that, you're gonna inject something good, well that naturally takes out an hour of something bad.”
Reflecting on how you currently consume the news can be a great place to start with shifting your relationship to the news. Using social media as one example, “Who can we add to our social feed so that we see content that's helpful to us? What do we want to remove?” Jackson asks. “How can we clean up that space so that we can exist in it passively rather than having to constantly feel responsible for every piece of information you consume? Just go to the source and say, ‘I'm going to clean up my spaces and then I can chill out in them.’”
Adding solutions journalism sources can be part of this clean-up job. Choosing to add stories that include responses and some level of success in confronting problems can help with lowering your level of anxiety. It can empower us to remember our agency — individually as well as collectively — in the face of bad news. Jackson shared that this is because “anxiety is inversely related to optimism. So if your optimism levels are increasing, that in itself will lower your levels of anxiety.”
This works because “they're both future-oriented states. You can't be anxious and optimistic at the same time about the future in the same way.” Jackson also recommended considering which apps and notifications are helpful to us and whether or not we actually need breaking news alerts. This can start with asking yourself “Are they helpful to you? Do they help inform you?”
Many smartphones come with built-in news alert settings that can be customized or turned off completely. Organizations that produce solutions stories have many ways to access their news, whether that is by following their social media pages, subscribing to newsletters, or accessing their databases.
Other strategies offered by the APA include:
Write down the stressful headline on paper to slow processing.
Turn off smartphone news notifications.
If news or other distressing content is a part of your social feeds, set the phone’s timer for 15 minutes at the start of scrolling to limit the amount of time engaged in it.
Set a strict no-screens (including phones) policy for mealtimes and other moments that center serenity and connection to self and/or others.
Intentionally seek out content that highlights the positives as well as solutions to the problems.
Bind anxiety by taking some kind of action — perhaps donating to a cause, joining an aid group, or signing a petition.
No matter which tools you decide to use to help with your news fatigue, noticing how you consume news and how it impacts you is the first step. Jackson said it best, “It's just having that awareness of your relationship with the news, because ultimately that's gonna be a vehicle to have a relationship with the world.”