Your heart rate is soaring, your blood pressure is rising, and your muscles are tightening. Is it match point in your pickleball game, overtime in your hockey game, or do you need to pedal your bike another 50 metres to summit Saylor’s Hill? You relish the tension and adrenaline, knowing it will be over in a moment. This is what you were designed to do.
It’s none of the above. You’re experiencing these symptoms while watching the news on television, your phone or computer, and it will never be over. This is absolutely not what we’re designed for – repetitive anger, continuous fight, flight or freeze decisions, and perpetual anxiety.
Remember Covid fatigue? We had to stay apprised of which new vaccines were available, how new strains like Omicron might harm us, and sort out all the differing expert opinions. For many, mental health suffered. Yet psychologists were generally in agreement on how to build our resilience: stay connected with family and friends, focus on the moment, think positively toward the future, preserve routines and realize you’ve successfully overcome difficult situations before.
The decisions each of us made mattered, and we could, to some degree, control our situation.
This time it’s different.
Doctor Steven Stosny, PhD, psychotherapist, author and teacher at University of Maryland, has named the mental and physical harm too much negative news can cause, “Headline Stress Disorder (HSD).” The causes are different, the way our body and brain react is different, and, most importantly, the way we must fight the negative effects of HSD has become more complex since the days of Covid fatigue.
Living through bad news and uncertainty is not new to us. What is new is the incessant, relentless and strategically planned news delivery through a multitude of digital and social media channels. Most TV, social media, and streaming news services (collectively referred to as digital in this piece) exist to make money, primarily through direct advertising and data sales.
Graphic images pervade digital news because they are addictive. Hectares of devastated apartments and hospitals in Gaza, lines of migrants being marched to planes and jails in the U.S., factory floors in Hamilton covered in massive rolls of soon-to-be-tariffed steel – take your pick.
These images stay with us in a way the written word cannot, and insert us into the story rather than allow us to be simple observers. Plus, AI is measuring how long we look at each image so that more of the same, designed just for you, will pop up on your phone the next time you open it.
Inflammatory language, dramatic and negative, delivered in short, cataclysmic bursts of calamity and disaster, similar to the sound bites President Trump has mastered, have the same lasting effect on our psyches. They come at us too fast to process.
Doctor Peter Lin, on a CBC news segment titled “Is bad news bad for your health?” explained that our brain is equipped with mirroring neurons, brain cells that make you smile when I smile for instance. These neurons allow us to mimic one another, but also allow us to feel what others feel. When we see a barrage of horrible images or constantly hear doomsday rhetoric blasted out in four-word sentences, our brains can no longer differentiate between what is real and what are merely images.
“Imagine those neurons are going crazy,” says Doctor Lin, “thinking this is really happening, and going through these cycles of depression and anxiety.”
Exacerbating the problem is the 24/7 delivery on a multitude of devices. A recent study by Matthew Price, of the University of Vermont, followed 61 young adults for a month to assess how they were getting their news and its effect upon them. Price found, “an association between the amount of exposure to news on social media and increased depression and PTSD symptoms.”
Exacerbating the problem is the 24/7 delivery on a multitude of devices
That’s right, post-traumatic stress disorder from getting one’s news via social media.
Two things become clear in analyzing possible solutions, suggested by psychologists, to maintain our mental health, and our physical health, against the onslaught of anxiety, fear, depression, anger, and resentment provoked by Headline Stress Disorder.
First, we still need the support of friends and family we can confide in, as well as the other suggestions noted above in connection with Covid fatigue. Added to these is the suggestion that we be more active on issues we care about to avoid the “freeze” response and feelings of learned helplessness. Volunteer advocacy work, whether on climate change, tariffs, or whatever news issue most bothers you, will return a sense of personal control over issues.
Second, we need to control our access to bad news.
Doctor Stosny and many others recommend disabling all news alerts as a first step to controlling news overload. Engage with your news source on your terms not theirs.
Understanding that withdrawing completely from news delivery is unrealistic, we need to set specific times and durations of engagement. Perhaps a 15-minute check on the news in the morning and again in the afternoon is enough to catch everything that’s new and dire, or relates specifically to you. No news at bedtime and mealtime should be non-negotiable, and adding other tech-free times could help.
Understand your triggers, both negative and positive. A personal connection to certain news may trigger anxiety, anger or helplessness, while other news may be informative without setting off negative emotions. Examine news sources to ensure they are delivering the news that is important to you in a factual and non-inflammatory manner.
Think critically and use calming tools. The world is not always as messed up as we might be lead to believe: Do I believe this, can I do anything about it, and does it help my understanding of the situation.
If you feel stress coming on—tense muscles, loss of concentration, or heart rate increase—get up and go for a walk outside or do something physical. The calming nature of physical activity is real, reducing your fight, flight, and freeze response in favour of your parasympathetic nervous system, which controls rest and digestion.
Read a real news source rather than obtain news on social media. Although opportunities to do this are dwindling rapidly, the advantages are many. Newspapers and legitimate news websites such as this one provide the news without overkill on dramatic and potentially upsetting videos and photos, and when we read rather than watch, we absorb the news at a speed our brains can keep up with.
These are not easy solutions. They require intention, strength and perseverance — all wins in themselves — to preserve our health going forward.