What Happens to Your Brain When You Can't Stop Reading the News?

By most estimates, the average person now takes in 3.5 times more information per day than their parents did at the same age. Most of that is news, and the news is mostly bad. In the past month alone, an avalanche killed nine backcountry skiers near Lake Tahoe, a man in Florida shot and killed his ex-partner and five of her family members, and the Supreme Court issued a ruling that dominated feeds for days before being replaced by threats of strikes on Iran. You already know all of this, which is sort of the problem.

A growing body of research suggests that sustained news consumption changes the way the brain responds to perceived threats, fueling anxiety that can impact you well beyond the moment you stop reading. Trying to balance the responsibility to stay informed with the responsibility to stay present, it helps to understand what happens to a brain that gets real-time alerts for every crisis on the planet.

Your stress response hasn't caught up to your phone

The pace of technological advancement has been considerably faster than evolution for quite a while, so our brains haven't kept pace with the world we've built. While you and I can now access information from every corner of the planet in seconds, the way we process that information is better suited for a much smaller, much quieter life. 

In 2012, researchers at the University of Montreal found that reading negative news didn't raise people's stress hormones in the moment, but it made their bodies significantly more reactive to stress later in the day. They had people spend ten minutes reading real news stories and then put them through a standardized stress test. The people who'd been reading negative news had a measurably stronger stress response to the test than the people who'd been reading neutral news. (The effect was stronger in women, who also remembered more of the negative details the following day.)

I'd already been living that study before I found it. A few weeks ago, I gave up social media for Lent, deleted the apps from my phone, and limited my news to working hours on my laptop. I soon noticed I was exercising more and tolerating it better, sleeping more easily, and getting less frustrated with my kids. I can't prove that cutting out the morning news made me a better parent (and more faithful gym-goer), but the Montreal researchers showed that negative news primes your stress response to overreact to whatever comes next. So, in theory, cutting out the news did give me more capacity to tolerate distress without overreacting.

That was my experience with less news, but there is considerable research on what happens with more. Dr. Roxane Cohen Silver, a psychologist at UC Irvine who has been tracking media exposure after national tragedies for over twenty years, found that the news consumption cycle tends to feed on itself: distress from the news makes people more vigilant, so they consume more, and the additional consumption makes them more distressed. After the Boston Marathon bombing, people who consumed six or more hours of news coverage reported higher acute stress than people who were at the finish line when the bombs went off.

The difference between staying informed and staying activated

No one I know watches the news because they like the constant existential dread. “Just don’t watch the news” doesn’t work when there are, objectively, very important reasons to stay updated on what’s going on in the world. For example: knowing what's happening in your community, understanding who you're voting for, and caring about people whose lives are affected by policy decisions you benefit from or contribute to. I gave up social media for Lent, but I didn’t give up my laptop. I still read the news almost every day during working hours because I think it's part of being a grown-up in a democracy.

Even the researchers measuring the mental health impact of news consumption still read the news—with a caveat. Dr. Roxane Cohen Silver herself has changed her habits in response to her research. She doesn't watch television news or use social media. “I pay a lot of attention to what's going on,” she says, “I score highly on news quizzes, but I don't immerse myself in the details... I don't think that it's psychologically beneficial, and we have data to suggest that it may be physiologically and psychologically harmful.”

Most people know their news consumption habits aren’t beneficial either. There’s a reason we have the word “doomscrolling.” Even the most avid news watchers can tell the difference between engaging mindfully in current events and getting lost in the news feed at 11 P.M.

What to ask yourself before you open the app

In medicine, there's a concept called titration: adjusting the dose of a medication until it does what you need it to do. People who take blood pressure medication have different doses because everyone has a different tolerance—what works well for one person might make another person dizzy.

News consumption works the same way. A journalist covering immigration policy needs a higher dose than a kindergarten teacher in Vermont. A person with family in a conflict zone is going to check their phone more often than someone whose connection to the story is abstract. So the question becomes whether your current dose is still working for you, or whether the side effects have started to outweigh the benefits.
 

Here are a few questions that can help you check your dosage:

1. What do I actually need the news for? If you need it for your job, your consumption will be higher. If you need it to vote and know what's happening in your community, that might be a few deliberate check-ins a day or a week, not a constant feed. If you can't remember the reason anymore, start there.
2. How (and how long) am I consuming it? Dr. Silver stays current on world events without television news or social media, the old-fashioned way: she reads. Push notifications, autoplay video, and infinite scroll are engineered to keep you going past the point where you've learned anything new. Picking a time, a source, and a stopping point changes the whole experience.
3. What am I like afterward? Once you have a sense of how much news you need, pay attention to how you feel in the hour after you read it. If you're short-tempered, distracted, or wound up, you might need to build a buffer between the news and the parts of your day that require you to be present, like bedtime or picking up the kids from school.

I'm only a few weeks into my no-social-media experiment, and I already know I'm not going back. I don't miss the apps, and I'm not less informed, because I still know what's happening— I just don't know about it constantly. Not priming my brain to overreact to stress means I have more patience with my kids at the end of the day, I sleep better, and I've been going to the gym without having to talk myself into it for an hour first.

Your reasons for watching the news are yours, and your “dose” will look different from mine. But if you've been running on the assumption that more information makes you a better citizen, it might be worth testing that. I found that less news gave me more capacity to actually do something with what I knew, which, it turns out, was the whole point of staying informed in the first place.