Media overload is hurting our mental health. Here are ways to manage headline stress

Many of the teens and young adults Don Grant, PhD, has worked with, both through Newport Academy treatment center and his Los Angeles-based private practice, are experiencing a stress that is directly related to news they have learned about through social media or more traditional outlets.

“They may have just read about an animal on the verge of extinction or the latest update on the melting polar ice caps,” said Grant, who is also president of APA’s Division 46 (Society for Media Psychology and Technology). They may not even recognize at first that the news has affected their mood. But, he said, “They’re perseverating on it—it’s bothering them.”

In today’s hypercompetitive and incessant news delivery ecosystem, slightly more than half of U.S. adults report that they get their news through social media “often” or “sometimes,” according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted from August 31 to September 7, 2020. To drive “clickbait,” news coverage and social media postings also tend to highlight the more negative or dramatic news.

This leads to suffering from, as Grant describes it, “media saturation overload,” and he is not the only mental health professional noticing this specialized type of stress. Similar terms that have emerged recently include “doomscrolling,” “headline anxiety,” and “headline stress disorder.” While these terms are newer, the psychological strain of living through and absorbing dismal news is by no means confined to recent years. But lately, said Grant and other psychologists, the steady drumbeat of headlines and related social media commentary has been without pause: an ongoing pandemic, racial injustice, climate change, election controversy, mass shootings, and the list extends onward.

[Related: How much news coverage is OK for children?]

Though there is no formally recognized disorder or diagnostic criteria, many psychologists are seeing patients suffering from news-related stress and seeking guidance on how to help them. Researchers are working to understand the science behind the condition.

Recent research studying news seeking and emotional responses has found that more exposure to the latest headlines—whether through traditional news outlets or highlighted on social media—can undercut mental health. One study, which surveyed 2,251 adults in the spring of 2020, found that the more frequently people sought information about Covid-19 across various mediums—television, newspapers, and social media—the more likely they were to report emotional distress (Hwang, J., et al., International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, Vol. 18, No. 24, 2021).

Another study, conducted by Matthew Price, PhD, of the University of Vermont in Burlington, followed 61 young adults for 30 days and asked them to assess how they were getting their pandemic-related news each day, along with documenting any symptoms of depression or posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) (Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy, 2022). Price and his colleagues found an association between the amount of exposure to news on social media and more depression and PTSD symptoms.

To help patients cope in a world where news is omnipresent, psychologists with media expertise advise practicing dietary media restriction and taking steps to better process and rightsize the news in their personal lives. To guard against patients becoming overwhelmed, and developing a sense of learned helplessness, psychologists can encourage them to become more proactive in healthy ways on the issues that matter to them, added Price, the university’s George W. Albee Professor of Psychological Science.

If the news surrounding climate change is weighing a patient down, they could get more active in an advocacy organization or a local nonprofit working to address the climate crisis, Price said.

“What sort of values does the patient want to strive for, and then what can they actually do to achieve, to work toward those values,” he said. “Scrolling more on Twitter is not going to be in service of that value, or of any value that one might have.”

The adults from the 2021 Hwang study, who also rated the frequency of their news consumption, reported on how often they had felt “anxious,” “overwhelmed,” or “afraid about what might happen” since they became aware of Covid-19. Overall, all types of news media consumption increased emotional distress, but television and social media exposure were more strongly associated, the researchers found. Younger adults and women were more vulnerable. People with conservative ideology were less likely to be distressed.

Broadly speaking, uncertainty is “a difficult psychological state for us,” said Markus Brauer, PhD, one of the study’s authors and a psychology professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Thus, seeking out information should “lead to a more positive psychological state,” he said. But when people feel like there is little they can do, such as when Covid-19 infection-prevention guidance kept shifting in the early months of the pandemic, they can develop a feeling of learned helplessness, Brauer said.

The research shows correlation; the study was not designed to assess cause and effect, Brauer said. “It’s also possible that those who are emotionally distressed turn to the news to try to alleviate their emotional distress,” he said. “My guess is that it [the relationship] actually works both ways,” he said.

By June 2020, 83% of Americans reported stress over the nation’s future, as they attempted to process dispiriting and converging news events, including economic turmoil, racial injustice, and the pandemic, according to APA’s Stress in America survey. That feeling of strain continued to be reflected in the March 2022 survey; 73% of Americans reported being overwhelmed by the number of crises facing the world at that point. Yet another survey snapshot, this one conducted in October 2021, found that a third of adults reported that pandemic-related strain was sapping their ability to make basic decisions, including about what to wear or eat.

Prior to the pandemic, most studies looking at the psychological effects of news turned their lens on acute time-limited traumas such as the September 11 terrorist attack or the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, Price said. But the ongoing exposure to pandemic news is different, he said, and still not understood in terms of its mental health impact.

“We call it posttraumatic stress disorder because we assume it’s posttrauma,” Price said. “What do we do when the trauma is still happening?”

The term “doomscrolling” emerged during the Covid-19 pandemic to capture the negative impact of viewing too much pandemic-related media, Price said. “It’s the transient feeling that one has when they are scrolling through these articles—they have a real spike in negative affect,” he said.

Price’s study found that the link between daily exposure to pandemic news through social media and reports of more depression and PTSD symptoms was stronger among those adults with a history of mistreatment in childhood. As one possible explanation, Price and his colleagues cited a prior study that posited that individuals might overuse social media in an attempt to ease their emotional distress (Psychiatry Research, Vol. 267, 2018).

But an emotional correlation wasn’t identified among adults who relied more on traditional media sources, such as newspapers or television, for news, Price said. He said that the heightened effect with social media sites might be embedded in the way they use news to reel in and retain their users.

“They’re designed to be limitless scrolling,” he said. “When there’s a big [news-related] topic of conversation that’s negative, it can dominate what you’re seeing. It can give the impression that this is the only thing that’s happening.”

Meanwhile, the changes in infection-control guidance and other uncertainties starting from the early days of the pandemic likely further solidified people’s information-seeking habits moving forward, said Chrysalis Wright, PhD, an associate lecturer in the psychology department at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, who specializes in media psychology.

“Covid drew our attention to the news media probably more so than before, because it was a worldwide health crisis,” she said. “It seemed like every hour there was a new headline.”

Steven Stosny, PhD, who specializes in treating people suffering from anger and resentment, first noticed a surge in those symptoms, along with anxiety, leading into the 2016 election. For instance, many of the couples he treated were arguing more frequently, said the Darnestown, Maryland, therapist.

Stosny initially assumed the symptoms would fade after the election. But he soon realized that they had become chronic in some patients, a form of “headline stress disorder,” as he described it in a Washington Post opinion piece in 2017.

Although Stosny acknowledged that the disorder is not a formal one with diagnostic criteria, he has observed patterns of symptoms that are clearly connected to news exposure. “The red flag is if you get this body tension, or a rise in your pulse rate, just before you check the news,” he said. “Then you have intrusive thoughts about the headlines—you think about them throughout the day.”

Along with propelling anger and anxiety, the constant news exposure seems to erode one’s resilience, Stosny said. “It lowers your coping capacity, so things that normally you’d cope with OK, you are not coping with as well.”

Other signs include drinking more, or a diminished interest in activities outside the news, Stosny said. At their worst, he said, people can develop learned helplessness, which further fuels anger and other volatile emotions. “Whenever you focus on things you can’t control, you feel powerless,” he said. “Anger is really a cry of powerlessness.”

In this media environment, Stosny described the smartphone as a sort of drug delivery system, incessantly delivering news and other information. Research has demonstrated that a phone alert spurs a small release of dopamine, a powerful motivator, he said. “Your phone buzzes, and you are going to reach for it, if you are hanging by one arm on a cliff.”

Even so, Stosny doesn’t advise his patients to drop all links to the information ecosphere, but instead to moderate their exposure. “If you try to go cold turkey, your imagination of what might be happening tends to be worse than what actually is happening,” he said.

Grant similarly works with children and teens, as well as their parents, on healthy digital device management. Just as individuals with eating disorders can’t avoid food entirely, it is nearly impossible for people to bypass all media, he said.

Some strategies Grant suggests: Turn off all notifications, add tech-free periods to the day, and don’t bring phones to the dinner table. Limit social media checks to 15 minutes. Parents can model good behaviors by not constantly checking their phone. For instance, when they are waiting in line, they can chat with the people around them rather than stay glued to the small screen.

The payoff of moderating news exposure was reflected in the findings of a study conducted early in the pandemic during Spain’s shutdown. Researchers found that two-thirds of the 5,545 Spanish adults surveyed reported anxiety or depressive symptoms. But those who limited their exposure to Covid-19 news and tried to eat healthy, along with pursuing hobbies and more time outdoors, were likely to experience less stress (Fullana, M. A., et al., Journal of Affective Disorders, Vol. 275, 2020).

Psychologists can also help their patients size up their own perception of risk more realistically as they peruse the latest news, Brauer said. Rare events, like a lightning death, can get a lot of media play. “People vastly overestimate how likely it is that unusual events will happen to them,” he said.

Providing broader context, including about relative risk, is particularly important when working with children, said Jacqueline Toner, PhD, a retired psychologist and author of the Magination Press book What to Do When the News Scares You: A Kid’s Guide to Understanding Current Events.

Parents may attempt to shield their children from scary news like a mass shooting or extreme weather, and thus the children may only hear about bits and pieces of what happened, which may result in frightening misconceptions, Toner said.

[Related: How to talk to children about difficult news]

Psychologists can ask open-ended questions from the start, gaining a better sense of what the child knows, including context, Toner said.

If the child is worried about news that might pose an ongoing risk, such as wildfires that periodically flare nearby, work with them to develop an action plan, Toner said. What would they do, and who could help them in an emergency? Ask them to list all the people in their lives who could assist, not just family members but also neighbors, teachers, and firefighters, she said. “It demonstrates to the child that there is a larger safety net for them.”

One practice Stosny uses with his adult patients is to suggest they write down an anxiety-producing headline in longhand. The idea is to slow down the processing, hopefully moderating anxiety in the process, he said.

“Anxious thoughts speed by, and the faster they go, the less realistic they get,” Stosny said. “If you slow down the process by writing them down, they’re more realistic. And then you can assign a probability—how likely it is to happen.”

Uniformly, psychologists said that regardless of the patient’s age, encourage them to be more active in issues they care about, rather than just a passive observer of the news.

If a teen is fretting about the looming extinction of an animal, they can get involved in an organization trying to save it, Grant said. “Be a part of the solution, which will bind your anxiety, and it will make you feel not so powerless [or] that the world is spinning off its axis,” he said.

And it’s not just patients who suffer from media oversaturation stress, Price noted. Early this year, Price realized that amid his habit of scrolling Twitter, he was too often soaking up “the deluge of negativity,” as he described it.

“I became aware that, to put it clinically, it was bumming me out,” he said, with a short laugh. So, he scaled back dramatically, with only occasional posts to support his students or to quip about the challenges of parenting young children. After just several days, Price said, “I had turned the temperature down on my despair and outrage.”