How to Consume News Without It Eating You Alive
The world is on fire. Here’s how to stay informed without making yourself sick.
This is a rough time to be a news junkie. Every day we are getting bombarded with reportage that feels overwhelmingly negative, often dire even. There has always been bad news to report, but we seem to be in a particularly long, particularly intense news cycle and it appears it won’t be ending any time soon.
Whether we get our news from television, newspapers, or social media, the effect can be the same: despair, depression, and a pervasive sense of helplessness and hopelessness.
Headline stress disorder
During the 2016 election cycle therapist Steven Stosny, Ph.D., coined the term “election stress disorder” to describe the elevated stress levels that people were reporting related to the presidential election. But when the election was over and the stress levels didn’t seem to decrease, Stosny came up with a new term: headline stress disorder.
What Stosny identified was that, even after the election concluded, people were still reporting “a sense of foreboding and mistrust about the future.” Following most elections, people tend to feel like things are settled — even if the election didn’t have the outcome they…
