CHALLENGE: Stay Informed (Without Getting Overwhelmed)

Mindful ways to deal with a tsunami of bad news

- BY STEPHANIE DOLGOFF

It's not just you: There's a lot of mind-meltingly awful news out there, and it's coming faster and with more fury than ever before. No matter whom you voted for, it's difficult to hear about people losing their livelihoods en masse, people being stripped of constitutional rights, measles and other viral outbreaks, dire predictions about the economy, war, climate change, and so on. These devastating events are being sprayed at us with fire-hose speed and force, and there's no hiding from them—even if you try not to watch or read too much.

“I think we will look back at June 29, 2007, as the day everything changed,” says Don Grant, Ph.D., a media psychologist and National Advisor for Healthy Device Management at Newport Healthcare. That was when the first iPhone was released, placing the Internet in the palms of our hands. The 24-hour news cycle was already in full swing, and soon social media—with algorithms favoring discord—shined more negative news into our faces and allowed us to share it with our near and dear even while buying veggie chips at Costco.

And because there is so much media and only so many eyeballs, we see more and more scary, salacious headlines, says Grant, often as Breaking News!!! “Think about it: For adults over a certain age, breaking news used to be a president being assassinated, an airplane crash, or a zombie apocalypse,” he says. Now everything is “breaking,” with breaking commentary on the breaking news, which gets rebutted two minutes later (“This just in!”).