Mind Over Matter Psych Talks | Season 1 Episode 12 | Written Reflection

A friend of mine gave me one of the more clarifying answers I’ve gotten in a long time when I asked her, almost as a throwaway question, how much news she takes in on an average week. Her answer was close to none. Not out of avoidance dressed up as denial, and not because she’s uninformed in any broader sense. She’s raising a young son and made a deliberate, considered decision somewhere along the way to simply stop letting the news cycle into her house. Talking to her cracked something open for me, because most people I’d asked before her described the opposite: constant exposure, constant notifications, a kind of low-grade tether to their phone that they’d stopped noticing was even there.

What her answer actually revealed, once we kept talking, wasn’t apathy. It was a thought-through relationship with information, built after years of the opposite. She described being around fifteen when she first started encountering real, unfiltered footage online, back when social platforms had far fewer restrictions than they do now, graphic material with almost no context or warning attached, most of it about things happening in other countries and none of it anything a teenager should have been processing alone. Her parents had no idea what she was seeing. There was no conversation to help her make sense of it, because the adults in her life didn’t know there was anything to make sense of. She just felt sad, and scared, and kept scrolling anyway, because that’s what the algorithm is built to make you do.

That kind of early, unsupervised exposure isn’t rare. It’s closer to the default experience for an entire generation of American kids who grew up with a smartphone in one hand and no real media literacy education to go with it. And it tends to produce one of two outcomes down the line. Either the nervous system adapts and starts treating a certain baseline of dread as normal background noise, or a person eventually hits a wall and steps back entirely, the way she did. For her, that wall arrived during COVID, when the volume of information became impossible to sort through, competing claims about where the virus came from, what was safe, what wasn’t, layered under headlines built to alarm rather than clarify. The world had gone quiet in every literal sense, everyone stuck indoors with nothing else happening, so the news had nowhere else to put its attention except directly on the one thing already terrifying everyone. She stepped away then and never really stepped back.

There’s a term for what a lot of us have been doing instead of stepping away: doomscrolling, the compulsive, repetitive consumption of distressing news even when it’s actively making us feel worse. It’s not a character flaw. It’s closer to a design feature. Outlets and platforms are optimised for engagement, and nothing engages faster or more reliably than fear, outrage or grief. Headlines get built around emotive language on purpose, not because the underlying story requires it, but because a reader who’s already emotionally activated is a reader who clicks through. She put it plainly when I asked about it. If you’re already feeling a certain way about a person or an event, you’re far more likely to tune in and see how everyone else is reacting to it too. That’s not journalism responding to public interest. That’s public interest being manufactured on purpose.

In the American context specifically, this gets tangled up with something else, the near total collapse of any shared sense of a trustworthy source. Ask most people which outlet they actually trust and you’ll get a long pause before an honest answer, because the honest answer, for a lot of people, is nobody, fully. Media coverage here skews heavily toward whichever political current is driving the day’s attention, sometimes in ways that are almost comedic in hindsight, like the sustained, invasive scrutiny into whether Barack Obama’s birth certificate was real, treated with a seriousness that an urgent story happening on the other side of the world often never receives. The imbalance isn’t subtle. An assassination attempt on a major political figure can dominate every channel for a week straight, while an ongoing humanitarian catastrophe somewhere else barely registers as a passing headline. That’s not proportion. That’s a business model, and it teaches audiences, quietly and continuously, which lives and which crises are considered newsworthy.

There’s a psychological term for what happens to people who consume a heavy, sustained diet of this kind of coverage, sometimes called mean world syndrome, the tendency to overestimate how dangerous and hostile the world actually is because the version being fed to you is disproportionately built from its worst moments. Constant exposure to tragedy, conflict and threat, even from a physically safe distance, produces real physiological stress. It shows up as anxiety, low mood, a persistent hum of fear that has nowhere useful to go because most of what’s being reported sits entirely outside any individual viewer’s control. And sensationalised coverage doesn’t just distort how frightening the world feels. It actively reshapes how people understand each other. She also brought up how a movement like Black Lives Matter got reframed by parts of the media into something almost unrecognisable from its actual message, twisted into claims about which lives were supposedly being valued over others, until the resulting anger and division became almost self-sustaining. That’s the quiet damage sensationalism does to marginalised communities specifically. It doesn’t just misinform. It reinforces exactly the stereotypes and biases that were already sitting underneath the surface, giving them a headline and a news cycle to hide behind.

What I found refreshing in her approach was how she handles the gap that comes with stepping back. She’s not under any illusion that she knows everything happening in the world, and she’s made peace with that trade-off in a way that felt strikingly mature. When I asked whether she ever feels guilty for not knowing about a major event, her answer was honest rather than defensive. She doesn’t, because not knowing also means not speaking with false confidence on things she hasn’t actually taken the time to understand, and that, to her, is worth more than staying current for its own sake. There’s real wisdom tucked into that. A huge amount of the noise clogging public conversation right now comes from people who absorbed a headline, skipped the nuance entirely, and ran straight into an opinion. Choosing not to participate in that particular cycle isn’t ignorance. It’s arguably a form of discipline most of us could use more of.

None of this is an argument for total disengagement, and it’s worth saying clearly that staying informed still matters, particularly for anyone with the capacity to act on what they learn. But there’s a real difference between being informed and being marinated, and most of the American media landscape right now is built for the second, not the first. What her approach points toward, and what a growing number of media researchers have started calling for too, is something closer to solutions-oriented reporting, coverage that doesn’t ignore hard truths but also doesn’t treat every single story as an opportunity to maximise alarm. She said something toward the end of our conversation that’s stuck with me since. She hopes the next generation, her son’s generation, gets to see more of the good than the bad, not because the bad doesn’t exist, but because right now it’s almost the only thing being shown. The quiet, local, human stories, the ones about people showing up for each other, used to have space in the news cycle too. Somewhere along the way they got crowded out by whatever performs best in the algorithm, and that loss is worth naming as its own kind of harm.

Protecting your peace, in this context, isn’t the same as burying your head. It’s an act of discernment, choosing where your attention goes with the same care you’d bring to any other resource that’s finite. The news was never designed to be consumed the way most of us currently consume it, endlessly, passively, at all hours, without a filter between the world’s worst moments and our own nervous systems. She found her own way back to a healthier relationship with it. It might be worth asking, honestly, what yours actually looks like right now, and whether it’s one you chose on purpose or one that simply happened to you.

Mind Over Matter.

Disclaimer: This article is for general psychoeducational and informational purposes only. It reflects personal experiences and perspectives and is not a substitute for individual counselling, psychological assessment, diagnosis, or treatment. Where personal experiences are shared, identifying details have been changed or omitted to protect privacy.