3 Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Follow The News
About a year ago, I write the article: “I Did Not Follow The News For A Year — Here’s Why You Might Want To Do The Same”
Now, another year has passed, and I’m still going strong!
To see if my opinion was changed, I decided to write another piece. Spoiler: It hasn’t. So, written in different words, here are the 3 reasons why you shouldn’t follow the news:
- It’s bad for your mental health
- It creates a skewed vision of the world
- It’s a source of irrelevance.
1. It’s Bad for Your Mental Health
Here’s the truth: A majority of news media focuses on negative disaster reporting and creating sensational headlines to attract attention. In fact, research shows sensationalism, and negative news coverage has increased drastically over the last decades.
Why is this the case?
Similar to social media, news media are part of the ‘Attention Economy’, as more attention means more readers, listeners, or watchers. Their existence depends on it.
And the reason why negative news works so well is because of the ‘Negativity Bias’, a human tendency to react more strongly to negativity compared to positivity.
“Our evidence suggests that, all around the world, the average human is more physiologically activated by negative than by positive news stories.”
From an evolutionary perspective, this bias makes sense. Paying attention to negativity is more advantageous for survival as negative information alerts us to potential dangers — sometimes deadly.
If your tribe chief shares the news a tiger has been spotted near the camp, you better pay more attention during your daily stroll outside the compound. Your life depends on it!
In today’s world, however, we’re not limited to a tribe chief sharing information. We have instant (internet) access to news coverage of natural disasters, crimes, political unrest, and celebrity scandals on a global scale.
On an evolutionary time scale, this availability of information happened instantly. We’re simply not wired for knowing about every major threat and catastrophe that happens on the planet.
Now, what’s worrying, is that reading this news makes people feel bad, as studies show that constant exposure to negative news stories can lead to increased anxiety and stress levels, seriously impacting mental health.
In fact, excessively watching the news can have a bigger effect on mental health than an experienced event:
“One study explored the psychological impact of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, looking at how people’s stress responses in the weeks that followed were shaped by their level of exposure to the attack and by the amount of news coverage of it that they consumed.*
It found that spending more than six hours a day following the news in the aftermath of the attack was associated with a nine-fold increase in acute stress symptoms. In fact, the obsessive news-watchers were more likely to experience these symptoms than those who were directly affected by the attack.”
According to the authors, this may be because a constant reminder of the event encourages rumination, without the opportunity to create some emotional distance from the incident.
But why watch so much news in the first place?
The thing is: The more anxious people are about something, the more likely they are to seek out information about it (due to our survival instinct to pay attention to the negative). And this sets off a vicious cycle because the more news they read, the more anxious they become.
“The more frequently you check the news, the more time you spend reading, and the more sources you consult, the more likely you are to feel depressed and anxious.”
2. It Creates a Skewed Vision of the World
Based on the Negativity Bias of news media, here’s what happens:
- Mainstream media mostly reports sensationalized negative news.
- You receive primarily negative information about the state of the world
- You receive almost no positive information about the state of the world
- Conclusion: Your worldview is negatively biased and incomplete.
Of course, nobody will ever have a complete picture of the state of the world and we’re ignorant of most things. However, if we’re constantly exposed to a one-sided view our vision of the world becomes terribly skewed.
To illustrate this point, substack writer Adam Mastroianni performed an experiment looking at two weeks of New York Times (NYT) front pages and color-coded stories based on whether they were about people being bad (red), good (green), or neither (gray).
Based on this coloring, if you read the NYT every day, you will likely think the world is mainly filled with corrupt evildoers. But you’re not!
Comparing the public perception of crime rates with actual crime rates confirms this point:
In the words of Adam:
“Villainy is rare in the world but common in the news”
Hans Rosling, the author of ‘Factfulness’, did more elaborate data-driven research. He explored the state of developmental issues in the world and tested his findings against what a majority of people think.
For example, most people underestimate:
- How many of the world’s children today have been vaccinated against some disease (more than 80%)
- The change in the number of deaths per year from natural disasters (decreased to less than half in the last 100 years)
- The proportion of the world population living in extreme poverty (almost halved in 20 years)
When asking questions about global developmental trends, on average, people are way more pessimistic than the data shows us. Not only does this create a more pessimistic view of the world, but it also creates a wrong risk map in our heads as the news selects what kind of negativity they show.
As Rolf Dobelli, mentions in his article Avoid News Towards a Healthy News Diet:
- “Terrorism is overrated. Chronic stress is underrated.”
- “The collapse of Lehman Brothers is overrated. Fiscal irresponsibility is underrated.”
- “Airplane crashes are overrated. Resistance to antibiotics is underrated.”
So, we not only do we miss out on the good things that happen in the world, we might also overlook dangers that need actual attention.
Some things improve slowly and gradually over time, such as the decrease in natural disaster deaths, or the rise in global chronic stress. However, a daily update on a tiny change doesn’t catch the attention of many readers.
On the contrary, things that go catastrophically wrong very quickly make a very catchy news headline. As a result, we create skewed vision of the world.
“Our brains are wired to pay attention to visible, large, scandalous, sensational, shocking, people-related, story-formatted, fast-changing, loud, graphic onslaughts of stimuli.
Our brains have limited attention to spend on more subtle pieces of intelligence that are small, abstract, ambivalent, complex, slow to develop, and quiet, much less silent. News organizations systematically exploit this bias.”
- Rolf Dobelli, Avoid News Towards a Healthy News Diet:
3. It’s a Source of Irrelevance
As it happens, we’re being seduced to constantly check the news by yet another human bias: to pay attention to new available information — known as ‘Information Bias’.
This bias makes us believe that the more information we have, the better, as extra information can potentially help us make us better informed important decisions — even if that information is irrelevant for the decision.
“To the brain, information is its own reward, above and beyond whether it’s useful,…
…people seek information not just because it has value and can bring them benefits but also because we simply want to know, regardless of whether we intend to use the information or whether it is useful at all.”
Looking through the lens of evolution, it makes sense: In our ancestral past, information was a scarce resource, and a new piece of information could greatly benefit us for survival. Also, most often we could act directly on the news as it was within our sphere of influence.
However, in modern society, we have an overabundance of information, with most daily news having no benefit for our survival and being outside our sphere of influence.
In other words, most news is irrelevant to us personally, but we aren’t very good at recognizing the difference between what’s relevant and what’s new.
To help you become better at this, ask yourself the following questions:
- “What do I want to experience in life?”
- “What new skills do I want to learn?”
- “What causes do I want to contribute to?”
Really, take 2 minutes to write down the most important one for each question.
The goal of this exercise is to identity what’s relevant to you personally and to become aware of what information you have to expose yourself to in order to live a successful life based on your definition of success.
Now ask yourself the following:
“Out of the hundreds (if not thousands) of news stories I’ve read over the past year, can I name one that allowed me to get closer to the things I want to achieve in life?”
The point is: the consumption of news is mostly irrelevant to what really matters in your life. For the most part, it’s entertaining but rarely relevant.
But what if you miss something important?
Speaking from personal experience: You won’t.
As you know, I stopped following the news 2 years ago and still have no feeling of missing out. If something truly important happens, I will find out about it soon enough — either through friends, family, or accidentally catching a news headline somewhere.
Medium writer Moreno Zugaro, who hasn’t watched the news for over 6 years concluded the following:
“You won’t change the world by watching the news. You might feel that as a good citizen, you have to watch them, but really, the world doesn’t care. If you want to make an impact, go start a project, donate clothes, or get politically active — but stop watching the news because you think you’re supposed to or it makes you feel good about yourself.”
To be clear, it’s not my intention to label the news as totally irrelevant for everyone. My goal with this chapter is to help you become more conscious about WHY you’re following the news.
Does is matter to you?
Is it helping you reach your goals and make an impact on the world?
Or has it just become an unquestioned habit?
For most of us, the news is a source of irrelevance, and there are more important matters we should pay attention to instead, like our family, our friends, and our own life and happiness.
“The most succinct way to sum up the issue today is that news media optimizes for information that feels important with little regard to its actual importance.”
- Mark Manson, Why You Should Quit The News
