Are you living in crisis mode, paying attention to everything and feeling mentally exhausted, overwhelmed, and on edge?
There’s a high psychological cost to paying attention to everything.
Key points
- Frightening and distressing content captures our attention.
- Ultimately, having our attention on distressing things we can’t control makes us anxious and depressed.
- We have a choice as to where we focus our attention and how we think about issues.
- These choices are key to our well-being and positive engagement with our world.
Today’s news is always breaking and almost always bad. Threat, urgency, crisis, divisiveness, and helplessness are all amplified.
Meanwhile, psychological research suggests that constant exposure to negative news distorts perception, harms mental health, and undermines our experience of agency. Ultimately, our emotional attention is a choice, not an obligation, and a selective, grounded focus can help us maintain a healthy perspective and an effective life stance.
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If It Bleeds, It Leads
Most people have heard the aphorism: “If it bleeds, it leads.” There’s a reason why news is structurally skewed towards the negative: Emotionally activating content captures our attention and the news wants our attention.
Large-scale studies have shown that emotionally negative content is more likely to spread on newsfeeds. This is because our brains are wired to respond to threats more than to neutral or positive stimuli. It makes sense why this would be so–it could be crucial to our survival to be alert to a negative threat. If we are about to be eaten by a tiger, we should probably pay more attention to that than to admiring a beautiful flower.
However, much of the urgency reported in the news is not a direct threat to us; it’s just made to feel that way. It’s not that the news is lying to us, it’s just that the story presented is incomplete and that creates a distorted perception of reality that is, ultimately, psychologically harmful.
In one study, for example, when scientists presented participants with news stories containing equivalent, but differently phrased, statements about political instability or terrorist incidents, they were able to manipulate their perception of how risky that country seemed. For example, saying a terrorist attack was caused by “al-Qaeda and associated radical Islamic groups” was considerably more concerning than saying “Domestic rebel separatist group” – though both have the same meaning.
For all of these reasons, research indicates that anxiety and depression are linked to media exposure, and that symptoms can increase even after as little as 15 minutes of news consumption.
Perceived Control vs. Actual Control
It’s not just what we’re witnessing–it’s what the brain does with repeated exposure to threats that we can do nothing about. We consume the bad news because we’re distressed and believe more knowledge will give us an experience of more control and vigilance.
Paradoxically, it actually makes us feel less in control and increases our distress. It reinforces pessimistic worldviews and lowers our sense of well-being. In other words, we doom scroll to feel safer and end up feeling worse.
Not only that, binary, crisis-oriented narratives–such as the news presents–flattens reality and increases psychological rigidity. The news favors framing stories such as good vs. evil and threat vs. safety, when the reality is almost always more complex.
Repeated exposure means we lose our cognitive flexibility and begin to catastrophize and overgeneralize, which decreases the accuracy of our perceptions and harms our ability to think in healthy ways about problems.
What We Can Do About Crisis Mode
We all feel an implicit moral pressure to stay informed, but constant emotional engagement is not, in fact, a requirement for ethical citizenship. Attention is finite, and being emotionally flooded actually reduces our ability to act in ways that might create positive change in our world.
The Serenity Prayer, used in the 12-step process (and written by the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr), can be a useful map for how to deal with the onslaught of information, and it maps closely onto evidence-based psychological principles related to locus of control, attention regulation, and behavioral activation: accept what we cannot change, change what we can, discern the difference.
In other words, most of us can’t control global crises, national events, and macro events. Acceptance of this immediately reduces distress. Most of us can have some effect on engagement with our community, taking local action, and nurturing the environment we live in. Focusing on these things improves our experience of well-being as well as having a positive impact. The more clarity we have about this, the less anxious we are and the more agency we experience.
The ultimate goal is not disengagement; it’s important to stay informed. The goal is a more nuanced, more complete, calibrated engagement. Good things are always happening with the bad, and psychological health requires us to hold multiple truths at once. A healthy–and more reality-based–approach to being informed requires us to limit our news intake and be discerning about what we take in.
This means not simply about how much time we spend, but being thoughtful about our sources of information. It requires us to shift our attention to local issues we can actually do something about, and shift our mindset from passive consumption to active contribution. In this age of massive amounts of information, we must be thoughtful about where the best use of our attention is.
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"Samantha Stein, PsyD, is a psychologist with more than 30 years of experience. She is the author of Evil at Our Table: Inside the Minds of the Monsters Who Live Among Us, about her work evaluating and treating serious sex offenders."
Written by Samantha Stein Psy.D.
Originally appeared on Psychology Today
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