Are You Avoiding the News These Days? You’re Not Alone.
How to Stay Informed Without Losing Your Sanity
Benjamin Toff, Ruth Palmer, Rasmus Kleis Nielsen
It is hardly news that many see reporting on current events as anxiety-inducing, soul-crushingly depressing, or worse. What is new are the growing numbers who now say they are actively avoiding it. Nearly four in ten people now say they sometimes or often engage in “news avoidance.” That number has grown nine percentage points since 2017.
After years of studying this phenomenon, our work has shed light on many reasons news avoidance has grown. With the seeming inescapability of negative news and the expectation among users that digital platforms will allow important stories to “find them” via social media or will be easily found by an internet search, many people see spending time with news as a poor trade-off considering how confusing, toxic, and time-consuming it can be and how it seems to bring few benefits or rewards.
But we see reason for hope. As we enter another election year with seemingly endless international crises, our research highlights several lessons for how to stay informed without losing your sanity that even the most devoted of news lovers can learn from. We focus on four of them here.
First, give yourself a break.
Just because we live in a world where we can access news twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week doesn’t mean we should. Many blame news for making them feel anxious or depressed. While anxiety can lead some to seek out information, many find they need to screen out all news all the time to regulate their mood—much like dieters who remove entire categories of food from their refrigerators.
Cutting out all news can cause serious problems for both individuals and society, but mounting evidence shows that selective news avoidance—taking occasional or even regular breaks from news—can be restorative. There is a reason why digital detox regimes are so popular. Just as some people place limits on their use of social media, accessing it only on specific devices or during particular times of day, setting boundaries can make time spent with news feel more productive and less draining.
Second, choose a news format that fits your lifestyle.
News avoiders often say news is too costly in not only emotional resources but also time. Consuming news at the start or end of a stressful day can feel burdensome while caring for small children, working full-time, and balancing other daily demands. This is especially true when so much news is weighed down by strident opinion and confrontational takes—another consistent complaint we heard.
Most people can benefit from selecting sources and modes of news that better align with their daily routines without making them feel miserable. Fortunately, there have never been more options to choose from, many of which are designed to make the news more digestible and less emotionally taxing. These include, for example, short news podcasts, which can be consumed while doing other activities, or email newsletters that summarize the main stories of the day minus the sensationalism.
Third, pick a source to trust.
Only a fool would trust all news, but many new avoiders say they do not know which sources to trust. They think being a responsible news consumer requires independently verifying everything. Many give up. One of the biggest differences we find between them and people who love news is that the latter have decided to place their trust in a particular source (or sources) of news. They know these sources are not perfect—far from it—but see them as reliable enough, which makes navigating the information environment easier and even empowering.
Fourth and finally, talk about news with people you respect.
Friends and families shape the way people access and feel about news. What can make news enjoyable, despite its flaws, is how it connects us to one another. Being immersed in a community of people who talk about news, value it, and help make sense of it can make it go down easier. News avoiders often lack such communities. What’s more, they worry talking about news will cause conflict. But it is difficult to sustain the practice of following news if we try to do it alone and in silence.
It is undeniable that much of the news these days is upsetting. But if we accept that limiting news use is not a moral failing, select sources that fit our daily routines, and seek out social support groups, it is possible for news to feel more consistently like a part of the solution to life’s problems rather than a problem itself.
Benjamin Toff is an associate professor of journalism at the University of Minnesota; Ruth Palmer is an associate professor of communication at IE University in Madrid, Spain; and Rasmus Kleis Nielsen is a professor of political communication at the University of Oxford, where he is also the director of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. Together, they are coauthors of Avoiding the News: Reluctant Audiences for Journalism.