You are right to be concerned, negative news has a greater impact on people than positive: https://assets.csom.umn.edu/assets/71516.pdf
Media sites know this, and use it to drive engagement:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-023-01538-4
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/social-media-facebook-twitter-politics-b1870628.html
And so, negative headlines are getting worse: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0276367
But negative news is addictive and psychologically damaging: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/why-we-worry/202009/the-psychological-impact-negative-news
So it’s important to try and stay positive:
https://www.goodgoodgood.co/articles/benefits-of-good-news
If you want a break from the constant negativity, here are some sites that report specifically on positive news:
- https://www.goodgoodgood.co/
- https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/
- https://fixthenews.com/
- https://positivenewsfoundation.org/
- https://www.onlygoodnewsdaily.com/
And here’s 35 more: https://news.feedspot.com/good_news_websites/
Some communities on Lemmy you might be interested in:
- !lemmybewholesome@lemmy.world
- !goodnewseveryone@sh.itjust.works
- !upliftingnews@lemmy.world
- https://lemmy.world/c/hopeposting
- https://lemmy.world/c/worldinprogress
- https://lemmy.world/c/climatehope
Remember, realistic optimism is important and, unlike what some might have you believe, is not the same as blissful ignorance or ‘burying your head in the sand’: https://www.learning-mind.com/realistic-optimism-blind-positivity/
https://www.centreforoptimism.com/realisticoptimism
And doesn’t mean you must stay uninformed on current affairs: https://www.goodgoodgood.co/articles/how-to-stop-doom-scrolling
https://goodable.co/blog/tips-for-balancing-positive-and-negative-news/
Ok, not preaching here… Just sharing something that helped me.
I was “terminally online”.
It got me down.
What I found out was that staying well informed doesn’t mean keeping up to date with what is happening at this very moment. It means learning all the wonderful things from history.
Well informed means learning, right?
There are so many brilliant things you can learn right now. And they’ll all make you a better, more useful, citizen.
Learn how to paint. Learn photography. Learn why the Japanese like squid. Learn cockney rhyming slang. Learn about Egypt’s history with gold. Learn it all. That’s also staying well informed.
News is such a small part of being human.
Learn why the Japanese like squid.
Even if you didn’t mean to coin an euphemism, I love this new euphemism.
Yeah. It’s hard to balance the need to know if i need to flee immediately with the massive amount of psychological damage from being aware of how dire the situation is. Like if I’m not well informed it could mean becoming stuck in a situation that is rapidly deteriorating. However if I am well informed then I just deal with constant panic attacks, worsening depressing, and spiraling mental health. I’m compromising by paying attention for a couple hours every few days and deliberately avoiding all news in the interim.
The issue is we aren’t being informed, we are being bludgeoned with ragebait “opinions as news” and “news as content” in competition with unlimited streaming subscription services as entertainment.
To Quote Mr. Rogers:
When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, “Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.” To this day, especially in times of “disaster,” I remember my mother’s words and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers – so many caring people in this world.
Step one is being qualified to recognize the difference between being informed and being cynical.
Yup. I made myself an alt account with heavy filters (and new ones being added whenever something shows up I can’t deal with) for when I just can’t handle the brunt of reality.
Mental health frog is still pretty beaten up, though.
I’ve got things blocked on Lemmy (primarily anything with Trump, Elon, Musk, or RFK in the title) but stuff still gets through occasionally. And just the stuff that gets through the cracks is depressing. I’m not gonna last four years.
I check the news once or twice a week. It’s often enough to stay informed but I also have time to recover. Once a day is too much. More than once was awful.
My mental heath can’t even keep up with being poorly informed anymore. I can’t seem to check out like I want to, but I think I might as well. We all know where this is going.
I don’t see the issue, you can choose to be outraged by everything all the time
Or not
