How to stay informed without feeling overloaded
- Travis M.
- 1 hour ago
- 12 min read
Short of time? Read the key takeaways
📰 News outlets are structurally biased toward negativity. Violent, tragic, and catastrophic stories reliably attract more attention and engagement, giving media organizations strong incentives to emphasize bad news even when positive or improving trends exist in the real world.
📉 Consuming lots of negative news can harm mental health. Many studies link exposure to negatively framed news with worse mood and affect, helping explain why frequent news consumption is associated with stress, anxiety, and declining engagement over time.
🧠 Feeling overwhelmed by news is common and predictable. News overload happens when the volume or intensity of news exceeds your ability to process it, producing stress, confusion, and avoidance, and it is one of the strongest predictors of disengaging from the news entirely.
🛠️ You can stay informed without sacrificing well-being. Evidence-based strategies include ending news sessions with positive news, reducing overload by curating sources carefully, and combating despair by focusing on solutions, effective action, and problems at scales where impact feels possible.
If you ever find yourself in a newsroom, where stressed editors and journalists are clamoring to put together a publication or a broadcast before a deadline, there’s a chance you’ll hear the expression: “If it bleeds, it leads.” Which means that, if it’s a story about violence, tragedy, or catastrophe, it gets priority coverage.
In the time since the expression was coined, scientific studies have provided evidence for the reasoning behind it, thereby confirming some things you have probably already noticed: Negative stories are shared more and get more engagement than positive stories, and people are more interested in reading about disaster and conflict than anything else. Ultimately, this means that news outlets are incentivized to focus more on negative events than positive ones if they are trying to maximize views.
For example, you’ve probably seen plenty of stories about a fentanyl overdose crisis. But did you see that U.S. drug overdose deaths fell by roughly a quarter in 2024. The Director of the CDC's National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, Allison Arwady, said of this: “It is unprecedented to see predicted overdose deaths drop by more than 27,000 over a single year [...] That's more than 70 lives saved every day.”
These facts about negativity in the news mean that consuming a lot of news media can mean consuming a lot of negative information, and this can have detrimental effects on your mental health. Of course, this is a surprise to nobody, but there are numerous studies showing connections between seeing news stories that are perceived as negative and negative affect. (For similar results, see also here, here, and here.)
One option, of course, is to disconnect from the news. If the news makes you feel really bad and also doesn't change your actions in the world or help you in any way with what you value, then maybe you should cut down on news consumption. But many of us want to stay informed about what's going on in the world, or may take actions informed by the news. If that's you, then how can you engage with the news in a way that protects your mental health? That’s what this article is about. We’re going to take you through a few tips for staying engaged with current affairs, without sacrificing your well-being quite so much. What follows is a selection of evidence-based options for you to consider.
Understand Your Relationship with the News
If the news is getting you down, then understanding your relationship with it can help you figure out what’s driving that feeling and what kinds of changes might help. There are a few assessments used in academic research that could help you to understand your relationship with the news - we’ll focus on two:
News overload assessments
The Problematic News Consumption Scale
Since these assessments are the intellectual property of the academics who developed them and the journals that published them, we can’t reproduce them verbatim, but we can tell you about them in enough detail for you to hopefully learn a bit about yourself.
News Overload
Information overload occurs when the amount of information you have access to is more than you can process, and you feel stress, confusion, pressure, anxiety, or low motivation as a result. News overload is the same phenomenon, but caused by news information in particular. Studies find that many people surveyed experience some amount of news overload (90% in one study, 72.8% in another), and this is often discussed as one of the factors most contributing to declining rates of engagement with the news. This study even found it to be a strong predictor (the strongest they studied, in fact!) of whether someone avoids the news or not.
Some studies use a single question to determine how overloaded participants are by the news, usually along the lines of: “How much do you agree with the statement ‘I feel overloaded by the amount of news available today’?”
If you feel like you have an intuitive sense of the concept of ‘news overload’ and how it applies to you, then maybe answering that single question is enough. But if you want a bit more help understanding whether the concept applies to you, Victoria Chen and Gina Chen developed an assessment for news overload that breaks it down a bit more. They asked people questions on three themes:
To what extent they feel negative emotions from the news (like stress, overwhelm and confusion)
To what extent they worry they'll miss important news
To what extent they feel there is too much news to process
If you find yourself thinking “Very much!” to questions listed above, then you might be experiencing news overload. Don’t worry, the latter portion of this article is all about how you can combat this experience.
Problematic News Consumption
McLaughlin et al. define problematic news consumption as “a cycle of being absorbed in news content (i.e., issues and events), compulsively checking the news, and experiencing interference with daily life.” It breaks down into five dimensions. If the descriptions of these dimensions feel like they capture something about your experience with the news, you might well have what researchers call ‘problematic news consumption’. The more accurate and more familiar these descriptions feel, the more likely it is that you do:
Transportation: You become deeply immersed in news narratives (cognitively and emotionally), the way you might in entertainment media like films and books.
Preoccupation: Your thoughts are dominated by news-related concerns, similar to the way you might ruminate on stressful personal events or imagined personal futures.
Misregulation: You consume news in an attempt to reduce your stress levels or regain a feeling of control, which paradoxically increases your emotional distress over time.
Underregulation: You lose the ability or motivation to control your news consumption, despite recognizing its negative effects. This often leads to compulsive checking.
Interference: Your news consumption negatively impacts your daily life. This might be via reduced well-being, or via effects on your relationships, work, or school performance, due to excessive or compulsive news engagement.
Whether or not you engage in problematic news consumption, the tips in this article could be a helpful starting point for improving your relationship with the news. However, if you experience significant or persistent distress as a result of problematic news consumption, you may also want to speak with a mental health professional (particularly one familiar with anxiety or compulsive behaviors).
With that, let's get into techniques and tips for engaging with news in a healthier way.
Technique 1: End News Sessions With Good News
We’ve put this technique near the top of our list because it’s so simple, easy, and potentially fun to implement. Numerous studies find that consuming positive news can have a positive effect on your mental health, after consuming negative news. (For example, here, here, and here. Though this study found no effect, complicating the story somewhat.) The studies suggest it may be worth trying for yourself to see if it helps you - particularly given how simple it is!
There are lots and lots of online outlets dedicated to positive news, and we’ve collected just a small handful into the following list. You may want to explore these sources (or find others) and bookmark ones you like, so that you can return to them after time spent reading negative news:
Along a similar line, you might find some benefit in using our Mood Boosters tool that gives you a selection of evidence-based 3-minute techniques for boosting your mood and walks you through whichever one(s) you choose. You can try it here (it’s free):
If you know of more great sources of good news, please feel free to share them with us. If we check out your recommendation and like it, we’ll update this article!
Technique 2: Combat ‘Overload’
As mentioned above, news overload occurs when the amount of news information you have access to is more than you can process, and you feel things like stress, confusion, pressure, anxiety, and low motivation as a result. The research on this topic often posits a connection between news overload and negative effects on well-being, resulting in news avoidance. So, if you want to reduce the negative effects of the news on your well-being without avoiding the news, you may want to explore strategies for combatting overload.
Pop psychology publications usually suggest combating overload by setting boundaries with your news consumption. This typically involves doing things like:
Limiting the amount of time you spend consuming the news in any one day or sitting
Disabling news-related notifications on your devices
Taking breaks when you need them
No-screens policies for certain contexts (e.g., meal times, social events)
Regular, dedicated no-screens times
Those can be helpful tips, and it’s worth reflecting on whether they might be useful for you. One limitation they have is that they only address the amount of time spent consuming the news.
Overload isn’t just caused by the amount of time you spend consuming the news. The sources of news and the kinds of news matter a lot too. So let’s go beyond the simple boundary advice above.
Going beyond the simple boundary advice is also important for people who either (a) don’t want to set boundaries with their news consumption, (b) know they wouldn’t stick to such boundaries, or (c) feel overloaded even with boundaries in place.
Here’s some more action you can take. Let’s start with a list of common strategies for combating news overload (discussed in this paper). You’re probably doing some of these already:
Reduce the number of sources you engage with (e.g., by focusing only on the highest quality sources)
Reduce the volume of information you engage with (e.g., by reading only extracts or summaries)
Filter news based on relevance to your interests or privacy policy of the outlet
Personalize or customize the news content you are shown by adjusting social media settings or algorithms (e.g., by clicking ‘Not interested’ on stories that show up in your Facebook feed)
Select ‘pull media’ (delivered to you automatically) over ‘push media’ (that you actively seek out)
Rely on socially curated information (e.g., reading only things shared by people you follow on a particular platform)
Categorization and sorting methods that allow you to save stories and come back to them later (when you’re less overloaded)
These are all ways that people reduce the cognitive load of news information, but they should all be done with care. The biggest risk with strategies like these is selective exposure: If you curate your news consumption in these ways, you can easily and inadvertently build a biased media diet that protects your mood at the expense of accuracy and exposure to articles expressing different opinions.
For these reasons, we like platforms like Ground News and The Flip Side. Ground News is highly customizable, providing you with lots of filtering options, but ensures that you stay exposed to diverse viewpoints and doesn’t break the business model of traditional journalism (because it sends you to other news sites, rather than keeping you on their platform). It also has options to save articles, which one study points out:
Given that the purpose of the saving approach is to delay news consumption until users have enough time and energy, it might be a way to immediately lower the level of overload stemming from excessive news, simultaneously allowing [users] to continue necessary news consumption.
The biggest downside of Ground News (and similar services) in this context is that it offers so much choice, which can feel overwhelming. Once you get set up with it, we think it can be a useful tool for reducing overload, but it does have some upfront cognitive cost.
Note: Because we believe that Ground News can help make some people’s news consumption healthier, we've become a paid affiliate of theirs. That means that we get some money for each paid membership purchased through the link above - and all of that money goes towards supporting our mission. This did not affect the content of this article, and nobody at Ground News has consulted on this article (or even seen it, at time of publication). We genuinely believe in this use case for their service and we have attempted to present it in a balanced way (explaining why it might be helpful and why it might not), and have included a host of other options.
If that all sounds a bit too much, you could opt for news that is delivered to you automatically (push / passive media), rather than news that you have to seek out (pull / active media). There is some evidence that this is associated with less feeling of overload. TV news is the quintessential example, but there are other options. The Flip Side is an option that does the filtering and summarizing for you by distilling talking points from both sides of the aisle (of US politics) into “a 5-minute digest each weekday morning.” Of course, the fact that other people are curating the stories and writing the digests means that you are viewing stories through a third party’s worldview, so it’s worth reflecting on whether you think their perspectives are compatible enough with your own to be valuable. This is true of all media, but can be doubly so with push / passive media that has an additional layer of curation and retelling.
The suggestions in this section have dealt with the ways that the amount and the sources of news can negatively impact our mental health via overloading. But what about the content of the news? That’s where the next section comes in.
Technique 3: Combat Despair
Does the news make you feel hopeless, like the problems of the world are too big and overwhelming to do anything about, and therefore doom and gloom are foregone conclusions? We’ve recently discussed two solutions to despair in the context of value-action gaps (which occur when you regularly act in ways that are out of step with your values). Here’s some good news: The solutions we discussed in our value-action gaps article can also be applied here!
The first solution is to look into what is already being done about the issues that make you feel despair. For any large problem in the world, there is some combination of charities, non-governmental organizations, government programs, and grassroots organizing attempting to tackle it. By looking into the actions they’re taking, you can often find concrete evidence of genuine impact on the problem.
The second solution is to change the scale of your focus. We are all constantly bombarded by news about national and global events that can feel far too big or distant for us to do anything about. But, as we’ve said previously:
[T]hat’s because we’re only being shown things at the biggest scale. If global poverty or disaster overwhelms you, it can help to change your focus from a national or global level to an individual level: You might not be able to solve global poverty or end a war, but you could help specific individuals escape poverty or conflict. This is unlikely to be as cost-effective as donating to effective charities, but it may be deeply personally meaningful and help overcome a sense of futility.
The same is true of politics: Many of us feel powerless in the face of national or international political affairs that we find despair-inducing, but many of us never think to look into local politics. There are always things you can do at the local level that have an impact.
The fact that more local and individual news is often more tractable means that learning about it can feel less despair-inducing. This doesn’t mean switching off all the national or international news, but it does mean making sure you carve out time to specifically look into news about things at other (more manageable) levels. On this point, it can also help to read news from outlets that make ‘constructive journalism’ (which focuses on solutions to issues) a priority. For example, the news platform The Conversation has a Solutions section on their website.
Take Control of Your News Consumption
You’ve no doubt heard the old adage “no news is good news.” It is supposed to mean that if you haven’t heard from someone (i.e., there’s no news about how they are doing), things are probably going well for them. But it could be given a new meaning today: It could be taken to mean that there is no news that is good news. Strictly speaking, this would be an exaggeration, but the propensity of news outlets to lead with and promote negative stories can make it feel accurate. It’s easy to consume so much negativity in the news that we end up feeling overloaded or brought to despair. Fortunately, there are things you can do:
Understand your relationship with the news. If it seems to be unhealthy, consider taking steps to change it. If it seems particularly unhealthy, consider seeking professional help. Academic frameworks to help with understanding your relationship include News Overload and Problematic News Consumption assessments.
Finish your sessions of news consumption by visiting a source of good news and reading about positive things happening in the world.
Combat overload by setting boundaries or employing strategies that affect the sources and amounts of news you engage with. But be careful to avoid the hazards associated with bubbles, chambers, …
Combat despair by learning about the most effective and promising work of people engaging with the issues that concern you, and by changing the focus of your news consumption to areas you can have an impact on.