Here’s something that might shock you. According to psychological studies, your media exposure to an event – a riot, say, or an accident – can be a stronger predictor of stress than had you actually been at the event itself. 

“When you’re at the site [of a negative event] what you see is over and done. You may see horrible things but you’re not constantly re-exposed to them,” explains Professor Alison Holman, of the University of California, Irvine, and the psychologist behind the study. “With the media you see the most distressing clips over and over.”

But are you aware of the impact that following the news is having? Holman has found that the amount of media that people expose themselves to in the immediate aftermath of a news event is a strong predictor of their mental health condition in response to that event. Or, in other words, the more media you consume on a news topic, the worse you feel. 

And the symptoms are very real: anxiety, low mood, edginess, intrusive thoughts. In fact, one Harvard University study suggests that just three minutes of bad news exposure in the morning makes for a 27% greater likelihood of being in a negative mood six to eight hours later. 

Those headlines over your cornflakes can literally ruin the rest of your day. After all,l those headlines are almost certainly about war, terrorism, crime, catastrophe, disease, division, disaster or death, day after day. Studies still on-going suggest that they may even be taking a physical toll years later, on your heart health in particular. 

So should you quit following the news? Holman says not. “I’d never advocate that people cut themselves off from the news entirely because we need citizens to be engaged,” she argues. And maybe all the more so since polls suggest the numbers of us closely following the news are falling rapidly, especially among younger people. “We can’t be ostriches but we can’t keep hurting ourselves either,” she adds.

She and others looking into the impact of news on our mental health – the likes of Dr. Don Grant, National Advisor of Healthy Device Management at Newport Healthcare, US – do, however, suggest adopting some better habits. 

Holman and Grant recommend putting the effort in to check that your news sources are reliable, and focusing on those sources – perhaps just one or two. Schedule the time you give to following the news – perhaps no more than 30 minutes, twice a day – and then switch off. If your phone’s notifications are set to alert you with news flashes, switch those off too. 

Instead of flirting with a topic in the news, get a better understanding by taking a deep dive and reading books on it. And don’t get trapped in your bubble. Don’t just dwell on the news – get out there and discuss it face to face with real people. It brings perspective.

“Make news consumption a deliberate, conscious act – and pay attention to your body as you do so, your breathing rate, your heart rate,” Holman says. “Assess whether what you’re seeing is good for you right now or can maybe wait”.

Changing these habits won’t be easy, not least because an increasing number of us get our news from social media. That’s not only notoriously unreliable – one study suggests that the more social media is used to understand a news topic, the less accurate our knowledge of it becomes. But, as Grant points out, it’s problematic for being always on. 

“Are we consuming too much news? Yes,” Grant asserts. But it’s the way it’s presented that is most concerning, he says. It’s not just that social media thrives on eyeballs – so news coverage skews towards the extremes. The more horrific, salacious, outrageous or upsetting the way that news is presented, the more likely you are to share it, the more money it makes. It’s that it’s fundamentally a visual form of media. And some things you can’t unsee.

“The kids I work with see the kinds of images daily that I would never have seen when I was a kid,” he says. “What’s more, they don’t even know if the images they see are real. Worryingly, I think this exposure is making us harden to them too – they’re not as shocking as they would have been a generation ago”.

What we all need, both Holman and Grant argue, is a better understanding of how news media works: that while the news, almost by definition, focuses on rare events – commonplace events wouldn’t be newsworthy – it nonetheless encourages us to believe that they are happening every day and everywhere.

And this just isn’t true. Statistically more people actually live longer, safer, healthier lives than at any time in history. Crime rates are falling, death and destruction from natural disasters is in decline, the numbers killed in war between nations is on a long-term downward trend, survival rates from once terminal illnesses are rising, and so on. 

You’d never know that from the news. But then, as Grant explains, we’re hardwired to go looking for the bad stuff. As a necessary survival skill we’re adapted to look for possible danger everywhere.

“We don’t look at a lovely meadow and think, ‘wow, what beautiful flowers’. We think ‘what might be hiding in the grass over there?’,” Grant says. “What’s more, we’re social creatures. We love to gossip and, like the media, we don’t restrain ourselves in sharing it either. We even share things we know may just be rumour,” he adds. 

Maybe, just a little bit then, we only have ourselves to blame.