Does watching the news affect your mood?

[Waffles's iconWaffles]

This has been on my mind a while...

I consider myself a deeply sensitive person (to the point of being an actual liability for me), so I have always taken the news as a minefield I had to traverse each day just to live a somewhat informed life. But with modern newscasting's weird fixation on reporting only the bad, the miserable and the outrageous just to move the needle on an already lost battle against social media and independent sources, the toll of knowing the hell's going on on my neck of the woods was starting to really get to me, to the point of affecting my mood and even mental well-being.

... But I'm also the kind of person who cries easily, so whatever. Maybe I'm just not modern-age material. Cool, I guess.

That was my take, anyway.

So, you can imagine my deep surprise (and weird validation) when I heard one of the hosts from the award-winning Fresh Hell Podcast (which deals with the utterly gruesome and the violently disturbing) say that she doesn't read/watch the news anymore because IT WAS DEMOLISHING HER MENTAL HEALTH.

And if this wasn't all flavors of messed up already, she said so in the middle of an episode about a SERIAL KILLER.

Let that sink in for a minute.

I thought not being able to hack living under a constant barrage of bad news was my weird cross to bear, but it apparently also affects someone who's *main job* is to research bloodstains and ghosts. Like, damn.

What about you? Does watching the news bother you like that? Doesn't at all? Or is it something you have forfeited entirely?

Tell us!

And please try to steer clear off political discourse, y'all, even if it feels relevant (and I bet it is) -- that never ends well.

 

[χKai]

I hate watching things that will make me feel sad or angry. I really have no need to put myself through it and a lot of the time it's blown out of proportion, or trying to make you feel a certain way, or just made-up entirely so I tend to avoid the news that isn't stuff that directly affects us.

 

[Strategist's icon Strategist Strategist]

Yeah, watching the news as of late is not good for anyone's mental health. I generally get angry because of the news I hear lately but that's not good as it sometimes boils over to unrelated things. But it is also an important time to be aware of what's going on so I can't look away and bury my head in the sand.

 

[dropsmegamega]

Oh, certainly. It literally feels like we are living the end of the times sometimes. I am even stupid enough to read the commentaries in order to further destroy my faith in humanity. And it isn't just news about some far place that I can just ignore, but things that are affecting the lives of everyone and will reach you one way or another... but that's life I guess

 

[SpcDaicon]

Yeah, you are not alone in that but there is some things to consider.

1 - News, nowadays, is about spectacle, not about truth. News outlets are business and survive by means in clicks, relevancy and engagement, so news outlets realized making their line of business as entertainment was more profitable than information.

2 - Due to hyperconnective we have today, we are bombarded with information all the time and everywhere. Everything is happening at the same time, everywhere. It doesn't looks like but this really takes a toll on us, we feel overwhelmd and impotent.

So, you can imagine my deep surprise (and weird validation) when I heard one of the hosts from the award-winning Fresh Hell Podcast (which deals with the utterly gruesome and the violently disturbing) say that she doesn't read/watch the news anymore because IT WAS DEMOLISHING HER MENTAL HEALTH.

And if this wasn't all flavors of messed up already, she said so in the middle of an episode about a SERIAL KILLER.

There is some sense in that, tho.

Although the subject she researchs is deeply unsettling, they still confined to themselves while what appear on the news are things that can actually impact you, like, real impact. Wars, economic recessions, climate change, pandemics, all of that reminds us that the world is in constant danger and it can affect us much more than some random serial killer in a place we've never heard of.

I used to lurk Twitter and I felt my mental state worsen because of it. The best course of action was to stop using it altogether. Now I only look for news on things that actually matter to me, everything else is just noise.

 

[Dyne]

The news is not made to inform you. Its made to get you to engage with it more.
More clicks, more interactions, more profit.

It does this by sensationalizing things. Making you angry is one of the most effective forms of this. So things are always framed in a way to make people angry.
And no, I don't think this is good for our mental health generally speaking.

 

[Zerohour2k12]

It's always a downer in my home country so I refrain from watching.

 

[Strategist's icon Strategist Strategist]

The news is not made to inform you. Its made to get you to engage with it more.
More clicks, more interactions, more profit.

It does this by sensationalizing things. Making you angry is one of the most effective forms of this. So things are always framed in a way to make people angry.
And no, I don't think this is good for our mental health generally speaking.

Yeah, you are not alone in that but there is some things to consider.

1 - News, nowadays, is about spectacle, not about truth. News outlets are business and survive by means in clicks, relevancy and engagement, so news outlets realized making their line of business as entertainment was more profitable than information.

This is true, up to a certain extent. The news is legally required to not report obvious falsehoods, so they don't get sued. Outside of that, yes they spice it up to get ratings. 24 hour news channels are the worst for this because they take a headline and spend hours with opinion givers interpreting the news and that's when the biggest misinformation happens. I find local news more reliable in that sense because they don't have as big of a perverse incentive for ratings. Even then, my local news is still equally sensationalist in the sense that they report every murder, drug deal, robbery or domestic violence case they get and they portray where I live as a crime ridden place when I personally haven't seen much crime in my daily life.

There's also the opposite case where they chose to not report something or minimize a situation because it makes certain politicians or business partners look bad. That's where you have to be very careful of where you get your news from and investigate what they are quoting, which sources they are using for information and if the statistics they are using for their report are reliable. There are news aggregator apps nowadays that give you percentages on the reliability of each source and give you a better holistic picture of the bias of each news source, that's the best way to get truly informed on what's going on.

Its way too much work to know the truth nowadays.

 

[Bakuma1997]

In my country stuff are real bad, not to downgrade another countries' problems but here is a total madhouse of impunity and violence, so watching an hour of me beign reminded that isn't exactly a good idea

 

[ZEGA ZONIC]

I don't watch the news.

 

[What's His Face]

The news annoys me. Almost every national/international story and commercial utterly fails the NCI Engineered Reality Scoring System. What is this, you ask? It's a scoring system used to determine if you're being programmed. Aka "Psyop." Examples? Remember commercials back in the 80's about how "milk grows strong bones" and "eggs raise cholesterol?" Or the line "healthy fats?" Or those old commercials proclaiming "4/5 doctors/dentists/etc. prefer Brand X?"

All psyops.

Some are just to encourage you to buy X over y. But some, like the tobacco industry, were used to to hide how their product causes cancer. Then you have the news. Remember the Persian Gulf War, and how the US got involved only after a pretty young lady testified to congress how Iraqi solders stormed the hospital she worked in, removed babies from incubators, and stole said incubators for whatever reason?

Psyop to convince America to go to war.

Want a more recent psyop? Covid-19, its' origin, and the vaccine. Only you're getting psyop'd from both sides of that argument! The Steele Dossier? A now-proven psyop. The hiding of the "Biden mental-health decline?" Fails the test linked above. "Anti-vaxxers are fringe lunatics!!!" That also fails the linked test. But so do the statements made by pro-vaxxers, too.