How the news is messing with your mental health

How to break out of the news habit to reset your mental health and use the time saved to do something productive.

This blog entry comes from experience of being in a bad place in the early part of the spring. The more people I’ve spoken to since then, the more I’ve realised this state I was in is actually very common. So many people have shared their experiences of anxiety and that has been truly illuminating. If you’d like to get a first view of future blogs please hit subscribe. I hope you enjoy this entry.

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Back in February, I got an alert on my phone. It was from the BBC and it totally ruined my day. We were out for a family walk. The sun was shining, it was stunning. The kids were having a great time, we’d just finished our picnic and we’re going to to wander around for an hour or so before grabbing a coffee and a piece of cake.

And then I glanced at my phone. For context, this was about a week after Russia had begun its invasion of Ukraine. It was all over the news.

The BBC app had sent me a notification.

“Putin has put Russia’s nuclear forces on high alert.”

I started to spiral. It was something that I felt so strongly that I started to think that every bang, every plane overhead was the end. That was the last thing I was ever going to hear before the bombs starting exploding and the world ending.

For the rest of the walk I was a mess. Totally consumed by what I’d just read.

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For about two weeks after that I was on “high alert”. Still every sound put me on edge. I read the BBC news website constantly. I watched YouTube videos of retired generals who were giving a blow by blow account of the war in Ukraine.

I was looking for clues. I was looking for whether I needed to take action. Action to save my family and friends. But what action could I realistically take?

If I’m honest, the anxiety and stress was physically painful. I had pain in my legs that wouldn’t go away. I woke up with pounding headaches and I couldn’t focus at work. I was pretty close to seeking professional help.

And then I decided to stop my consumption of news. I deleted the plethora of apps on my phone, unsubscribed to a myriad of YouTube channels and started to find other things to do with all that time! Some of that freed time has even led me down the path to writing this blog. That has helped incredibly.

Unsplash - Nijwam Swargiary

News channels make money from fear

What we need to remember is news channels make money from your fear. They know that by playing on your fears you will keep you coming back to see what the situation is. That was exactly what I was doing. I was checking back on the live feed every hour to see if there was some good news that would start to lift my mood but there very rarely was. Good news would have enabled me to move on and wouldn’t have brought me back in a hours time to check again. It was like a drug.

Learning about bad things chips away at your core

As I fell deeper into this cycle I was teaching my brain that there was only bad things in the world. Neural pathways were being created to only see the bad in everything. It was quite scary to constantly feel this way. The Ukraine war was an extreme example but you can see it with many other subjects in normal times too. The media will take a news story and twist it to anger one group or the other which will engender a reaction that will keep them coming back for more. We are probably lucky in the UK that we don’t have massively “shouty” media as they do in the US but the bad news slant is still there. Just a little more subtle maybe.

At the end of the day, news is entertainment. It prays on the same instincts that makes people stop on a motorway and look at a car crash. We are drawn like moths to a flame.

The world isn’t that bad

Firstly, you need to be aware of what the media is doing to you. Start from a position that the world isn’t as bad as it is being portrayed. Spoiler alert - it really isn’t that bad.

Once you’re aware, you can start to build systems around coping and then thriving in a world where you consume very little news.

Remove the temptation

I went down the route of removing the apps from my phone that were serving me the news. This helped from day one but I still found myself going on a browser and looking up a news website such as the BBC. One little look couldn’t do any harm though could it? Well, it could and it was.

Give yourself something else to form a habit around

When I picked up my phone I had the immediate temptation to click on a news app. Once those apps were gone I needed a new app to fill the habit but it needed to be a good habit. One that was going to help me do something positive with that time over the longer term.

I settled on creating a newsletter. I’d experimented with blogging before and it hadn’t really worked. Maybe I wasn’t really ready or hadn’t done enough background reading. This time it feels like it could really work. I now have these apps that I reach for by habit if I pick up my phone:

• Substack - I have four or five blogs on the go at any one time so there is always something I can add to.

• WhatsApp - sounds like a strange one but if I have an inspiration for a blog then I will WhatsApp the idea to myself.

• Day One - my go to journal app. Any more detailed thoughts go in here. I have been journaling for a month or so now and it is magic for getting thoughts down on paper and some of these can become blogs later on.

What if you need to stay up to date for your job?

If you need to know things to for you job read a good industry publication. There are loads of them out there. You probably already know which one you should be reading to stay on top of your job. You were probably too busy reading The Times to have even considered reading something like that. Just stay away from mainstream news.

Fill your life with beautiful things

If you look for it, the world will serve you up bad and depressing news. If you look for then good then you are equally likely to find good news. Slowly build good habits that take you away from the bad and seek out the good. One step at a time you will get there. I still find myself slipping back from time to time so I can see it takes a while to really embed those new habits but will get there.

Unsplash - Sean Oulashin

It’s simple really. Control what you can control and let the rest take care of itself.

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I hope you found some of this useful or some of the behaviours resonated. Please feel free to drop a comment below. I release a new blog each Thursday. Hit subscribe below to get it first.

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