Anyone else feel that we as humans are not meant to consume this much bad news?

[purplehearts22]

Everyday all day we we are just bombarded from all angles about the worlds news and I feel like it’s started to affect my mood, anxiety and just mental state all round.

At least twice a year I have to take long breaks from social media and I’ll delete all apps (bar fb) because I need that for my business but I log out to stop myself from the habit of just picking my phone up and automatically opening the app. The instant relief from deleting those apps and being free from the negativity is great and I’ll almost forget about it and then time will pass and I’ll feel that I can manage my usage and I’ll slip back into using Instagram and before you know it TikTok and X are back and the cycle continues.

But today I feel different and I feel like this whole year has just been amplified with violence and hatred.

I have consumed two videos of murders this week, and not by choice and seen/read the lack of compassion from people who seem so desensitised that I’m sure they can’t differentiate real murders on a video to watching a movie of actors playing a role. It’s horrifying that there’s no value to human life.

Then theres the constant battle with the left v the right, our government, the march’s and protesting, the state of the country, and people just pitting against each other and fighting and belittling about who’s beliefs are right and who’s are wrong.

It’s constant negative news and it’s coming at you from all sides and there’s no getting away from it. As human beings we are not built to take in this much horror and trauma it’s detrimental to are well being. It isn’t any wonder there are so many that suffer from mental health conditions (myself included) being made to watch all the heinous crimes happening all over the world all at once.

ps sorry if this isn’t very well typed, I’m dyslexic

@purplehearts22 i feel the same. I don't watch the news on the TV anymore. I read it online once a day and that's enough for me. Best thing you can do is turn it off and leave it off x

It also seems (may just be me) that everything has a negative spin on it. A few weeks ago in August when we had that period of hot weather, and again, maybe I’m just being nostalgic, but you would have once had a smiling weather reporter with something like “and we’ve got a great few days of warm weather coming up “ . This time all I seemed to hear was the met office have issued an amber heat health alert and warned people etc … 😫

X and tiktok it’s just on your feed or fyp as your scrolling.

Not read the whole thread.

I don't know if this would work for you, but I also need to be on FB for my work. I took it completely off my phone about 3 or 4 years ago and it did wonders for my mental health. I only use it on my laptop when I am in "work" mode. I tend to only go on once or twice a week, do what I need to do and get off again. It really helps me compartmentalise that as "work stuff". I do have messenger for business on my phone so I don't miss direct messages for new business. I just made it clear that if you want an answer don't just reply to the post, send me an email or a private message.

I have a bit of an addictive personality and do take digital breaks but (as today) when I am tired I am sucked back in. Its not easy.

Where did I phrase it? And I follow not a soul from X

The business model of social media is based on outrage, anger, sensation. The whole idea is to keep people looking at it for as long as possible, and anger and lust and shock keep people hooked.

logs out of mumsnet, having remembered how addictively argumentative it can be

I agree with you @purplehearts22

I agree and I try not to look at the news often.
When we go away we have no tv and no phone scrolling, it's lovely, I am trying to introduce it into my everyday life more.
It's good to check in now and again, and if there is an election read the manifestos, so I know who to vote for, but it's not healthy to have all the bad stuff in your face every day.

I haven’t read the thread, but I thought it might be a nice place to post this story that’s on the BBC news website at the moment. I read it this morning and it really made me chuckle. Such a lovely little break from all the awful things that they’re reporting on.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c7v1d3r6y8mo

I was commenting on this the other day to my DH, years back it used to be lovely sunshine symbols, now it’s a cloud of red fire over the country, it’s designed to depress and scare people.

Yes, OP. I say this frequently. Humans were never designed to assimilate this much information on a daily basis. I have never struggled with mental health before but trying to stay abreast of current affairs and trying to be informed on even just a few of them is actually making me feel unwell. And this obviously comes from a place of privilege as I’m just observing what’s going on, I’m not part of most of it.

Of course we’re not! I haven’t watched/read/listened to the news since I felt I had to when Covid first arrived. I still know what’s going on in the world, who to vote for etc. If I need more info regarding a specific thing then I seek it out.

I hate the wording "I have consumed" If you need to use SM then educate yourself into locking it down better. I agree the news is terrible at the moment which is all the more reason to curate your intake better.

CS Lewis had the same view as you - he never read the newspapers and was derided for it. But I agree.

I skim the headlines at most, whereas my husband has always been obsessed with watching the news and by politics. As we are both retired, I am fully-aware of his consumption. Luckily, I can shut the door as I walk past the room where the TV set is disgorging its endless misery.

I agree with the pp who said it's been years since they looked at the future with any kind of optimism, and it's because of the onslaught of negativity from news channels and social media.

There's nothing I can do to change things - I do support charities - so it's far better that I protect myself and appreciate the good things in my life: the small things

Completely agree. After the news about Charlie Kirk and reading so many vile comments/watching videos of people celebrating his death, I just feel done with it all. Deleted Facebook, insta, tiktok and twitter because there's only so much gloom and negativity I can take.

I struggle to not think about things and get emotional, so I'm focusing on what's inside my own 4 walls and trying as much as possible to block everything else out.

The coverage of Charlie Kirk has made me realise how much 'news' and opinion I consume day to day. I have to add that MN is a pretty toxic place at the moment particularly on the politics board - some vile comments from posters who are either so addicted to being able to say exactly what they like and are commenting on their phones hour after hour or paid to comment and disrupt. I used to be interested in political views but this is vile stuff.

Yep, and those dark red weather maps.

It used to be “lovely weather.”
Now it’s “the planet is burning to a crisp”.

The recent rain is much needed by gardeners and farmers, but it’s probably reported as “extreme weather”.

Exactly. I worry for my children’s future, my youngest is 8 and I can’t imagine what the world and this country is going to look like when she reaches my age.

2019 to me feels like the last “normal” year, since then we’ve been living in some dystopian world and it’s mad.

well done on deleting it all I’m going to do the same

not sure where in the country you are but apart from the extreme heat days when we got warnings, my forecaster has been talking about wonderful summer weather and I have been under a hosepipe ban, watching my garden die and using up 2026's quota of bad language.

I think that humans aren't meant to have nation- and world-sized social groups! We've evolved with the right instincts to thrive in groups of a few hundred, which is what we've had for almost our entire evolutionary history, until the last few hundred years.

You can have genuine relationships within a group of a few hundred people. Everyone knows and sees each other, so there's personal accountability and everyone pulls their weight as much as they can - and if they don't, it's noticed and dealt with. Including expelling the worst individuals from the group. Reciprocal support is freely given when it's seen to be needed, and it isn't abused.

Our society ballooned in the last few hundred years. Rulers loved having power over more and more people (and armies), and tried to find ways to manage the resource-sharing problems, through tax and debt. On a human level, we basically ignored the existence of most people we didn't interact with on a day-to-day basis. .

But the global nature of social media - and the way it feels person-to-person - has made that impossible now. We instinctively try to apply our '100-person-sized-society' caring to the millions of people we see stories about and read messages from, which is very stressful. We're not able to tune people out or overlay imagined 'common values' on them, as we could when we just read newspapers. To make it worse, we can't influence such a huge social group, or even separate ourselves from the people who we don't want to share our fate with - so that's even more stressful.

Humans just aren't mean to live like this. We're primates, not termites.

I think it would be good if social media websites went back to ye olden days of you seeing posts from the people and organisations you follow in reverse chronological order. You could still have ads and promoted posts, they need to make money but get rid of the algorithm feeding people nonsense.

It's so annoying when you hover over something for more than half a second and the algorithm then bombards you with more of the same. However, I think you can control it to some extent as I don't get murder videos or rabid Reform/racist videos or posts. My Insta feed is exercise and cute animals.

Edited: I don't have Facebook, Instagram or LinkedIn on my phone either.

I do read a paper version of the newspaper at weekends.

I also agree with the negative spin and the media seems to be chasing the bad news stories and virtually creating them at times.

Tomorrow Never Dies becomes real life!

As humans no, depends on the individual, people deal with this type of stuff everyday, either living it or working in it.

We’ve not had extreme heat days though, which is my point. It got to 30s twice in August where I live , is that extreme ?