Staying Informed vs. Staying Alarmed: How to Manage Anxiety about Current Events

Staying Informed vs. Staying Alarmed: How to Manage Anxiety about Current Events

By Arthur Newbould, LMHC

Have you heard that 2024 is a presidential election year in the United States? It’s always a major topic of public conversation, but hearing about it can become exhausting if you follow the news at all. Whether you’re liberal, conservative, or of any other political persuasion, the messages we receive about the election in the media are often suffused with such a tone of urgency to arouse a number of feelings in us, not least of which are fear and anger. Sometimes the people and entities that produce the news consciously attempt to manipulate our emotions, and sometimes the emotions are a natural consequence of the information presented. In the moment when you are, say, reading an article about the latest poll numbers in the presidential race that present bad news for the candidate you favor, you may feel alarmed or appalled regardless of the intent of the author. The presidential election feels like the largest thing in the world, the singular event that will be determinative of the fate of all mankind to a degree that dwarfs all else.

But then, if you’re a particularly anxious person, you think: what about climate change, nuclear proliferation, war, antibiotic resistance, terrorism, mass shootings, or the fact that the sun will explode at some point in the next several billion years? You might then enter a kind of spiral, looking for information about everything that could possibly be a danger in the world. It’s better to be informed and screwed than uninformed and screwed, right? Or maybe you feel the impulse to shut down and stick your head in the sand, because the world is just too big and scary and you might as well just pretend that nothing matters at all.

Well, I’m here to tell you that your relationship with current events and the media does not have to be this way! Here are some tips for remaining an informed citizen while also protecting your mental health in the process:

Limit Your Media Consumption

We all know that these days, there are a vast number of sources of information that we can all easily access as compared to the past. Where we once could only get any word about what happened outside of our immediate surroundings by reading one of a limited number of newspapers, or later by watching the nightly news broadcast on a small selection of television networks, today we are drowning in alternatives. Some get their news from 24/7 cable channels, others from podcasts, others from blogs, others from TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X, and on and on and on. And much of this information comes to us through the devices, such as our computers and smartphones, that most of us already rely on for a number of other uses and for hours each day. It’s a lot! We are biologically the same creatures as the prehistoric homo sapiens who lived hundreds of thousands of years ago, meaning that our brains have not yet evolved to easily comprehend the now exponentially larger amounts of information to which we are exposed on a daily basis without becoming exhausted.

This is why limiting your screen time can be such a powerful tool for managing your mental health in general as well as for managing the anxiety that comes with exposure to news information in particular. This can be done through a variety of strategies, such as turning on the function that monitors screen time on your device, setting an alarm to allow yourself short periods of time to browse social media, or trying to spend more leisure time with others in an environment that does not encourage looking at a screen. Unplugging regularly allows you to replenish your mental energy, refresh your perspective, and prevent yourself from becoming overwhelmed by too much information.

Avoid Propaganda, Misinformation, and Bias

An excess of information, as mentioned above, is one of the byproducts of modern technology. But another consequence of the great number of news sources is the wide variability of the quality of the information presented. Particularly if you browse social media feeds, watch cable news channels, or read news aggregator sites, you are likely to encounter an assortment of items that range from the slightly biased to the outright propagandistic. Some indicators of less-than-reputable sources can be subtle, but you can watch out for some telltale signs that a piece of content contains some misleading or inaccurate elements. For example, language on the part of the writer or speaker that is overtly emotional in tone, or that employs all-or-nothing words like “always” or “never,” should be looked upon with some suspicion. This is particularly true when something is presented as purely informative journalism and not explicitly marked as an opinion piece.

It can furthermore be useful to maintain an informed impression of the trustworthiness as well as the general political orientation of the media outlets you encounter. No one wants to be minding their business, credulously reading an article someone shared with them on social media, only to realize later that it was full of inaccuracies or presented a misleading view of the facts! This media bias chart from Ad Fontes is one good beginning resource for comparing the degree to which media sources are or are not characterized by ideological bias. Improving your media literacy in this way can help you to avoid investing your time and energy in content that may be intended to deceive and outrage rather than inform you.

Focus on What You Can Control - or Get Involved!

Anyone who has ever watched the local news on television knows that the news that gets reported is usually negative in nature: scandals, crimes, disasters, etc. This is so often true of any form of news from any source that the natural response tends to be mainly either outrage or despair, or some combination of the two. Both emotions can lead to significant anxiety if left unchecked. And one key method for managing anxiety is to cultivate the ability to focus on accepting what you can’t control and changing what you can. But when the news is getting you down, what does that look like in practice?

Let’s go back to where this article started, with the example of the 2024 presidential election. On the one hand, you may generally find politics to be cynical, nasty, volatile, and dismaying. You may desperately hope that one candidate or the other wins, and that some policies are adopted in place of others, so you know who you’re going to vote for. But beyond that, you keep in mind that you only have one vote and that you cannot personally control the outcome. That’s taking the acceptance route of anxiety management. On the other hand, you can harness the anxiety you feel about the election and channel it into some kind of action. This strategy is not mutually exclusive with acceptance, as you still must recognize that it is not within the power of anyone in a representative democracy to dictate the results of an election from above. But if you have the means to do so, and if it calls to you, you can take the paths of advocacy or activism - canvass for a campaign, volunteer as a poll worker, organize fundraising for a cause. You might just start to feel a little less anxious when you know you’re at least doing something about it!

To engage as a full member of a modern society is to participate in the democratic process. To participate in the democratic process is to keep yourself informed about the world around you. But to keep yourself informed about the world around you is not to inundate yourself with a volume of information that you do not have the capacity to absorb! News articles, podcasts, books, think pieces, and television shows all have their place for a well-rounded person, and it is healthy to learn and challenge your mind - in moderation. Learning to limit and filter your media consumption, to get involved where you can, and to accept what you can’t control are powerful strategies for managing your anxiety while engaging with the myriad issues this great big world can throw at you.