Doomscrolling, a word that describes the act of obsessively reading bad news despite the onset of anxiety only entered popular language in 2020 Surprise, surprise. But research stretching back for decades has long warned that consuming too much negative news can take its toll on your mental health. In this video, I'll be exploring how your focus affects your well being and how you can avoid the negative mental health spirals that so many are struggling with nowadays, in this pandemic. Many studies have linked poor mental health to news exposure during negative and traumatic events, such as terrorist attacks or natural disasters. The more news a person consumes, during and after these events, the more likely they are to suffer from depression, stress and anxiety. For example, 2014 study surveyed 4675 Americans in the weeks following the Boston Marathon bombings, and they collected data on how much media they consumed. participants who engaged with more than six hours of media coverage per day, were nine times more likely to also experience symptoms of high acute stress than those who only watched a minimal amount of news. Research like this helps us to understand how bad news can affect our mental health. But one of the study's authors said that 2020 was difficult to compare to other events because of the sheer volume of negative stories. Last year's exceptional slurry of bad news makes it hard to tell if the effects are magnified or not. But that is something that future studies will hopefully explore. We've had so much news from COVID-19. And its impact on the global economy, to racial injustice and global extreme weather events that these bad news stories have swamped media channels, leaving little space for any good or uplifting information. The situation is probably made worse. Because we can feel as though we're lurching from one crisis to another in the last 12 months before we've even had time to process or recover from what's happened. This is what psychologists refer to as an intolerance of uncertainty. And unfortunately, it's a vicious cycle. Now, there are a lot of people out there who find listening to the news stressful and anxiety provoking, but they can't stop doing it. Because they need to know or at least they think they need to know what is going on. Now back in the 1990s, the news was taken an increasingly negative tone, the number of TV channels had begun to increase and the news had to compete with entertainment for its viewers. During this period, researchers at the University of Sussex in the UK designed the study to manipulate headlines into positive or negative and see how that affected people's mood. The researchers took 30 people and they split them into three groups, each of which was shown a different 14 minute news bulletin, either positive, a balanced view or negative. The participants mood was measured before and after seeing the news report. Those who were given the negative news finished the experiment in a more anxious and sad state of mind than those who were given the positive or the neutral reports. Funnily it also had a knock on effect that people in the negative group were more likely to worry about their own private concerns. In other words, the results suggested that watching negative news can make people worry about more than just the content of the bulletin.
The trouble is our thinking, our feelings and our physiology are all linked through a process that psychologists call the cybernetic loop. Every thought we have stimulates an embodied feeling. And that also causes physiological changes in terms of hormones, such as adrenaline and oxytocin. But our body chemistry also then affects our thinking. So if we are flooded with stress hormones, it's more difficult to think happy thoughts. So Doom scrolling has the potential to perpetuate a downward spiral that can start with mild anxiety from the news and end up with depression. So it's important that we don't spend too much time reading the news. Fortunately, there are things that you can do to protect your mental health from a potentially damaging effects of obsessively consuming news. It's important to be informed, but you don't want to Doomscroll. All you need to do is just check the news once a day. Personally, I don't think it's best to check in the morning because it changes your physiology and affects your day. Do it when you're feeling good, lunchtime ish when you've had a good day. And if you also confine yourself to well established incredible new sources that avoid the dramatising everything, or misleading you, this will also help your mental health. So there you go. If you think that you're a risk of doom scrolling, then just try to take a step back and just control the amount of time you spend looking at the news. And spend more time focusing on looking after your mental health and looking out for the people around you.
#doomscrolling #mentalhealth #cyberneticloop