I don’t want to be totally uninformed about what’s going on, but I also don’t want to fall into doomscrolling.
I know that I could very easily just avoid any news sites and only find out about these things secondhand from people I talk to whether in real life or online. I also know that it’s not good to bury your head in the sand quite that far.
I could also very easily doomscroll different news sites and actively seek out more depressing news when I’m done scrolling one site. I’ve been doing more of this option lately, and as a reaction to that I’ve started doing total avoidance, which I know isn’t good.
So how and where did you strike a healthy balance between reading enough news to stay informed, but not enough to be in a constant state of anxiety about the world?
I’m looking for genuine advice here. I don’t want to be mean but I’m not too sure else how to say the following: I don’t want to come back to a lot of replies about “I didn’t find a balance lol I just doomscroll/stick my head in the sand” and “I feel this, same.” Not really sure if that’s going against the spirit of the chatting community, but seeing a lot of “same problem” and zero advice tends to make me feel more in despair. I already know this is a common problem, so what would usually be the correct social move of saying you relate in order to empathize and let the other know they’re not alone isn’t helpful for me in this particular instance.
Sometimes it’s easiest to think about what we have evolved to do, and compare that against societal expectations of us. By which I mean, as little as a thousand years ago, “staying informed” meant being up to date on the goings on in your village or town, with a vague notion of there being a wider world out there which was the purview of other people.
Over those past thousands years, our brains have barely evolved, but the sheer volume of information we’re expected to take on, has.
So ask yourself whether you have the capability to keep on top of All The News without it getting you anxious? And if you decide that you can’t, then give yourself permission to detach. Listen to one news bulletin a day so you can have a vague notion of events, but bear in mind that there’s almost nothing you can do to affect those events. War in Ukraine? What can you personally do to solve it? Not a lot, I wouldn’t have thought. Earthquake in Syria? Did you cause it? Can you travel to Syria to help dig people out? Seems unlikely. Hell, even if you were in a different bit of Syria, the chances are high that you couldn’t afford to take time away from work to go and offer help.
You’re not a bad person if you disengage.
Stay up to date on local news, be mindful of what your friends and family are up to, but you have no obligation AT ALL to ‘Stay Informed’ if it harms your mental health.