Stressful News Cycle Tips: 13 Ways to Protect Your Mental Health

 

Being a human with an internet connection in the 21st century means being exposed to one stressful news cycle after the other—we’re constantly inundated with headlines, images, and stories about the many newsworthy (often troubling) events unfolding around the globe. It’s true that staying informed about and connected to what’s happening around us can help us better understand and participate in the world we live in. But it’s no secret that being so plugged into the news can also be tough on your mental health—especially during particularly intense media coverage surrounding things like war and conflict, environmental disasters, political elections, mass violence, public health threats, and social calamities. self.com

“We know from a lot of the research that high levels of media exposure, especially when it’s repetitive, tend to be associated with psychological distress,” Dana Rose Garfin, PhD, assistant professor at the University of California, Irvine, who studies how trauma exposure impacts physical and mental health, previously told SELF. A 2020 paper published in the American Psychological Association journal Health Psychology documented this effect, linking increased media exposure in the aftermath of tragic events (like 9/11 or mass violence) to higher psychological distress as well as poorer physical outcomes.

So how do we navigate interacting with the news during these times of heightened media coverage, when it seems like what’s happening in the headlines is all anyone’s talking about? How do we strike a balance between staying educated and engaged on one hand, and taking care of ourselves mentally and emotionally on the other? There are no simple answers here—but there are a lot of excellent tips and ideas that can really help. Here are 13 ways to cope with a psychologically trying news cycle, based on expert-backed advice from SELF reporting.