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Your Brain on Breaking News
The neuroscience behind why the news hooks us like never before (and what to do about it)
“I want to learn as much as I can.”
A patient said this to me recently during a session where we were discussing her struggles with climate anxiety and her reaction to political violence in the news. She had been applying some concepts we’d worked on, like distinguishing between stress (which goes away when you take action) and anxiety (which often gets worse when we try to make it go away). But something interesting happened as she described trying to manage her emotions around a political assassination that had just unfolded online.
“I was trying to watch my fear rising as it was happening,” she told me. “I was also noticing that desire to learn more…I am feeding the system by clicking on more links. But it’s back to that climate anxiety. I don’t want to be totally uninformed…” Then she talked about how she struggled sleeping after all of this.
Her phrase — “learn as much as I can” — stuck with me because I’ve been increasingly hearing variations of it over the past few years in my clinic. People find themselves caught in an impossible bind: they feel a powerful compulsion to stay informed, yet the more information they consume, the more anxious they become. They’re trapped between the fear of missing something important and the very real consequences of information overload on their mental health.
