In this, the age of doom scrolling, people tend to equate “staying informed” with “constantly retraumatizing yourself with endless exposure to new details about horrible issues you were already adequately aware of.”
A Black man sitting outside, scrolling through his phone. Source: Timi David/Unsplash It’s hard to stay away from Twitter, even if you’ve already read all the headlines, all the bad takes riffing on those headlines, and all the even worse takes riffing on those bad takes. It's hard to stop refreshing the polling results as they come in, to stop consuming the ceaseless stream of speculation about what it all means. No matter how useless the information is, it’s easy to feel some ethical obligation to watch it. You want to be informed.
Is it working? Is it helping? Is knowledge still power, or is there a point where it becomes a cage?
Knowledge can give people a sense of control and purpose, especially when that knowledge is provided by the internet—research shows that when people are holding their smartphones, they report feeling more psychologically powerful. When you take a person’s phone away, their confidence and sense of security drops.
Phones put us in contact with the wider world, granting us access to a new universe of constantly-updated information. But much of the “knowledge” on the internet is complete junk data, a sea of nonsensical comments, bad faith takedowns, inflammatory screeds, and journalistic speculation that won’t ultimately bear any fruit. The more you follow the news, the more news there seems to be—but that’s because you can no longer separate the wheat from the chaff.
When people consume too much information, it is very hard for them to process any of it in a meaningful way. Excessive information consumption can even make it hard to remember all the facts you’ve been exposed to. To properly think about new information and unfamiliar opinions, you need time to mentally elaborate on what you’ve read or heard.
Elaboration is what happens when you really sink your teeth into a new idea: You test it against the reality you’re familiar with, see if it lines up with other facts you know, and reflect on what new revelations might logically follow from it. Elaboration improves the quality and complexity of a person’s thinking, and increases the odds that a new piece of data will be stored in their long-term memory. But in order to elaborate on something, you need time and motivation. You cannot be panicking or overwhelmed.
In realms such as academia and financial markets, psychologists have observed that having too much information actually makes thinking and decision-making worse. If you can’t elaborate on everything you’re taking in, you may stop reflecting on anything at all. You’re not carefully considering the facts anymore. You’re not integrating new info into your mind’s preexisting data structures. You’re just passively absorbing, letting the onslaught raise your blood pressure, erode your attention span, and destroy your sense of control.
Many years ago, I attended a talk by a top political strategist in Ohio. The political strategist talked at length about how many hours per day every senator spends making fundraising calls. He discussed how relentless campaign season is, how strategic people like him had to be in making their commercial media buys. One fact that he shared stood out to me:
THE BASICS“Driving down voter turnout is a powerful tool,” he told us. “That is what negative political advertisements are actually for. A negative political ad has never convinced a person to switch who they were voting for. But it has convinced people to feel apathetic and disengaged from politics entirely.”
The strategist went on to tell us that confusing and negative information fills potential voters with dread and confusion. How can you tell what is real, and who is good? Is everyone equally bad? Is any of this worth it? What are we even fighting for? The more overstimulating and negative you make politics seem, the fewer people engage with it. They don’t vote. They don’t make it to protests. They just check out.
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Healing in Motion And that, he told us, is how candidates can win in districts where they are losing the popular vote. Not by converting new voters to their side. Just by inundating them with negativity, until they fall into exhausted submission. Negative political advertisements are a large piece of that puzzle, but so are debates, media appearances, and contentious fights in comment sections and on social media.
Psychophysiological research backs up everything this political strategist had to say. When people are exposed repeatedly to negative political information, their aversive motivation system is activated. This is the system that tells us to "get away" from something disturbing or unsafe. On a biological and cognitive level, upsetting political information makes us want to disengage.
Is the world a better place when you sit on Twitter for an hour, cycling through the same news over and over again and giving yourself a headache? What if, instead of doing that, you took a walk outside, checked in with your neighbors, maybe gave a stranger asking for spare change a couple bucks? I think the latter option is actually far more politically engaged and socially responsible. It certainly is more sustainable, and puts more good into the world.
I want to say this loud and clear, because I think a lot of people need to hear it: You do not have to expose yourself to information that is designed to leave you feeling scared and disempowered. Constantly retraumatizing yourself is not the same thing as staying informed. You don’t have refresh the election results all night long. You don’t have to be on Twitter. You don’t have to read the news every day. Consuming upsetting junk data is not your civic duty.
Too much information (especially too much upsetting information) floods the sympathetic nervous system and makes it very difficult to focus. Being overwhelmed with bad news leaves a person feeling helpless, unmotivated, and too exhausted to take action. Fear and despair make you easy to manipulate.
I am a compulsive doom scroller as much as anyone else. I don’t always know what healthy media habits ought to look like. But I do know how it feels to be overstimulated, and I have experienced the clarity and calm that comes from being more careful and reflective. To help me find a healthy balance, I ask myself these questions:
- What kinds of information help me think more clearly and understand problems better?
- What habits help me feel capable, competent, and able to take action?
- Which habits leave me terrified, paralyzed, and hopeless?
- Who benefits from me feeling this way?
Your answers to these questions may look nothing like mine. Perhaps you function best if you only read a recap of the news once per week. Reviewing headlines for a half an hour per day could be best for you. Maybe you need to focus on local news and grassroots politics instead of national coverage, or maybe you need to delete Twitter off your phone. Maybe you learn best when you get to discuss the news with a trusted friend. Maybe you need a lot of time and in-depth reading to make sense of complex social issues.
I support whatever media-consumption habits work best for you. I want you to feel comfortable and secure enough that you are empowered to take action. You get to decide what your political calling is, and where you belong in the fight. Don't let anyone convince you that you are obligated to be stressed out and overloaded all the time.