How do I stop doomscrolling in a chaotic news cycle? originally appeared on Quora: the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.
Answer by Emma Varvaloucas, Executive Director at The Progress Network, on Quora:
Being attached to the firehose of the 24/7 news cycle is anxiety-inducing and literally bad for your health. How do we stop doomscrolling when it seems like the bad news just won’t stop coming?
There’s no shortage of anti-doomscrolling advice out there that usually revolves around controlling your news intake, taking breaks, or participating in calming activities like meditation or nature walks. That’s good advice. But from my own experience running The Progress Network, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media outlet that focuses on constructive news, those suggestions can be like Band-Aids instead of proper fixes for figuring out how to healthily engage with current events. I’ve found that a change in mindset in how we understand the news—and ourselves—is much more sustainable in the long run.
Here are my five pointers for how to read the news without losing your mind:
#1 Remember the Nature of the Beast: News Is Negative by Design
News covers the negative because that’s what it’s designed to do. There’s not much of a story in a longstanding government program operating the way it’s supposed to or the daily routine of the rising global middle class. And yet that’s currently the story of the majority of life here on planet Earth. While the problems you read about in the news are real, remember that the news is not painting a complete picture of daily life, and it’s not meant to. Extraordinary accidents, crimes, and deaths; tragedies of all kinds; sundry societal dysfunctions that don’t meet our standards of morality—it’s a sign of a well-functioning society that the negative is the exception. Don’t mistake it for the rule.
#2 Remember Your Psychology: Baby, You Were Born This Way
It’s not just the structure of the news working against you—it’s your own brain. Psychologists have identified various “shortcuts” our mind uses to function efficiently in the world, called heuristics. One heuristic is the availability bias, which explains why you might be more frightened of earthquakes than hepatitis, despite the fact you are likelier to die from the latter. As the author and public intellectual Steven Pinker explains in The Guardian, the availability bias means that “people estimate the probability of an event or the frequency of a kind of thing by the ease with which instances come to mind.” What kinds of things easily come to our minds? Things we’ve seen recently or frequently. Things that are especially frightening or grotesque. Things that the news loves to cover (see above).
The second heuristic working against you is our negativity bias, which means that we’re more prone to pay attention to the negative than the positive in the first place. You can easily see this in action in your daily life: a friend’s backhanded comment stings for longer than the good feelings from a compliment last; we lie awake at night worrying about what could go wrong in the future, not basking in gratitude about what has gone right in the past. There are media personalities across the political spectrum who trigger this bias by reminding us of all the ways we could be heading toward destruction, some of which have enough basis in fact to be truly hair-raising. The Washington Post in September 2020: “What’s the worst that could happen? The election will likely spark violence—and a constitutional crisis.” National Review, in response: “The Democrats’ Dangerous Delegitimization of the Election.”
Remember your psychology! First, just because you read a lot about something scary does not mean that the resultant fear is an accurate assessment of risk. Second, there is a difference between news and alarmism. Trust evidence-backed reports, but don’t assume that anything speculative will definitely manifest in the future.
#3 Remember Your Math: Don’t Freak Out About Lonely Numbers
Journalists like numbers because they’re hard proof of what they’re reporting on. But even numbers can be misleading. The late global health professor Hans Rosling, who made it his life’s mission to spread awareness about basic (but surprisingly positive) global stats, called this the “size instinct”—as he wrote in his 2018 book Factfulness, “recognizing when a lonely number seems impressive and remembering that you could get the opposite impression if it were compared or divided by some other relevant number.”
One example of a lonely number in the wild is the June 2019 Fox News opinion piece “Border crisis puts everyone’s health at risk,” which warns against epidemics caused by illegal immigration to the United States. Commentator Heather Higgins made her argument for fixing the “porous border” based on fears of such diseases as measles:
According to the CDC, measles can cause serious illness that can lead to permanent brain damage and even death. Globally in 2017, it caused 110,000 deaths.
Yikes. Scary, especially now in the context of the COVID-19 era, where we’ve seen firsthand the death and damage a pandemic can cause. Should we be concerned that illegal immigrants will bring measles to our country and kill us all? The reason why these facts aren’t well known is because measles has been considered eradicated in the US since 2000. It is simply not a present concern for almost all of us here. So while the CDC global death number is correct, these US-based numbers are also: in 2017, the year Higgins references, there were 120 measles cases. The main outbreak that year, in a Somali-American community in Minnesota, was caused not by illegal immigration but by declining vaccination numbers, starting in 2008, due to concerns over autism. There were 0 deaths linked to that outbreak.
It’s not only in opinion pieces that lonely numbers can confuse and mislead us. Approach articles with numbers but no context for them with caution—eye-popping figures are not always what they seem.
#4 Remember the Long Game: In Case of a Crisis, Zoom Out
The word crisis gets a lot of exercise in the news. In 2018 the Los Angeles Times and others reported on “an epidemic of nicotine addiction among kids” because of the rising numbers of teens who had tried vaping, or electronic cigarettes. CDC figures attest that between 2011 and 2018, there was a 1.5% increase in high schoolers who reported that they used e-cigarettes in the past 30 days and a .6% increase in middle schoolers.
Meanwhile, during this nicotine “epidemic,” cigarette, cigar, and smokeless tobacco use all went down during the same period for high schoolers, with a 7.7%, 4%, and 2% drop, respectively. (Hookah use stayed the same.) And lest you still think that today’s kids have just switched from Marlboro to Juul, take a look at these long-term numbers from the US Department of Health & Human Services. This is the percent of students by grade who smoke cigarettes, including traditional cigarettes, e-cigarettes, cigars, pipes, and hookah, daily from 1976 to 2018. Since the seventies, and consistently from the late nineties on, youth tobacco use has been plunging:
So are we in the midst of a nicotine epidemic, or simply a changing landscape in the midst of a long-term success story? The point is not that we shouldn’t be concerned by teenagers vaping—we should, especially if new companies are specifically targeting young people and nonsmokers. There is a reason why this story appeared in the news, and tobacco use hasn’t dropped so dramatically because action wasn’t taken.
But as always in the case of a crisis, take a moment before you panic, and try zooming out. No one has the time to research the wider long-term narrative of every news story they read. You can, though, keep in mind that there often is one. (Or you can subscribe to The Progress Network’s newsletter or check out our podcast, where we specialize in adding context like that to current events.)
#5 Remember You’re Not Alone: Change Does Happen, Just Slowly
Problems are inevitable in any society, and it is journalists’ job to cover them. But the existence of problems, even large and complex ones, doesn’t mean those problems are unsolvable, or that those capable of solving them won’t.
The various injustices and issues journalism shines a light on can be difficult to read about. Sometimes they are devilishly complicated or morally outrageous. Most of the time there’s not much you personally can do about them, and you end up feeling like nobody else is doing anything, either. But while you personally might not be in a position to do much, others are—and often do, despite assumptions to the contrary. (Federal politicians are not the only ones in the universe able to enact change!)
But the larger a transformation is needed, often the slower it goes. Keep going, and keep the faith even when it seems like nothing is happening. It might be—it’s just that change often operates at a slower pace than the news does, and you might not have heard yet what’s at work.
Your awareness of an issue is not for nothing. Many movements—civil rights for women, LGBTQ folks, and minorities, to name a few big ones—have made profound strides due to cultural shifts driven by public support. You don’t exist in a vacuum, even when reading the news alone on your couch.
#6 Bonus: Remember Why You Read the News to Begin With
Holding these five points in your awareness as you read the news can be a gamechanger in keeping yourself sane while keeping yourself informed. If you have room for one more, remember that the news, in its essence, is a public service. Journalism exists to inform and empower us, not the opposite. We can take the best from it to introduce us to the world, guide our voting choices, civic engagement, and community-building, and to expand our minds—not lose them.
That doesn’t mean that we’re letting journalism off the hook. The last 20 years have been a particularly negative time in journalism. Trust in media is declining, sometimes for good reason. Efforts are underway to transform journalism to showcase solutions better, and more work is needed to disincentivize the type of negative headlines that drive clicks. In the meantime, as readers, we too can start identifying emerging solutions within coverage of even the most serious events.
After years of teaching myself how to follow these pointers, I can’t say that doing so is obvious or easy. But it is the strategy that allows me to keep up with the news on a daily basis without falling into a rabbit hole of despair.
This question originally appeared on Quora - the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.
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