Watching The News Is Bad For You

I have previously written about this issue but thought I would revisit it in the light of all the talk about 'fake news' and media bias that has bombarded us during the past year.

If you are prone to depression then watching or listening to the news can be one of the worst things you can do.

I would say that 99.9% of news stories you see or hear are about things you have absolutely no control over and make no difference to your daily life. It is mostly irrelevant to you. Media organisations push the idea that keeping up with the news will give you a competitive advantage. It doesn't. The media gives you sound and sight bites but little substance. The really important and life-changing stories are those that are slow-moving but powerful events that just cannot be covered in a few minutes of airtime.

Yet this news constantly triggers your body to react. The daily diet of doom and gloom that make up most of the media spur our system to release cortisol (produced in response to stress). Too much Cortisol can cause high blood sugar (hyperglycemia), reduce bone formation, inhibits protein synthesis, increases the time required for wounds to heal and can impair memory.

News also can make us feel more pessimistic, fearful, helpless and fatalistic. For those prone to depression a seemingly simple news story can trigger a depressive episode.

A Canadian study conducted in 2001 showed that comprehension decreased as the number of hyperlinks in a document increased. The brain has to make a choice to click or not whenever a link appears. This interrupts the pathway from short-term memory to long-term memory and decreases our understanding of a topic. News items are a series of constant interruptions. The neural pathways in our brain devoted to skimming and multitasking are exercised by these short news bites to the detriment of those pathways used for reading and focused thinking. Most avid news consumers have lost the ability to absorb lengthy books or articles.

I rarely watch the news or read a paper these days. I haven't missed it one bit. I suffer less depression and have less anxiety since I went 'cold turkey'.