Anxiety About The News

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Surely, I'm not the only one who has anxiety about this, so hear me out, and please keep the discussion civil:

Why do I always have to worry about things I hear in the news that are largely beyond my control? Is it a natural thing, because of my anxiety (which I think I may have)? It always seems like all you hear in the news is negative events. There's plenty of good, as I stated, but how the media is like in North America isn't helping things. There wasn't always a 24-hour news cycle, and the current presidential administration is giving me worries about its unpredictabilities.

I also wanted to add this: There are now so many news sources these days, and some of them may be "fake", and some are opinion, and it's hard to tell what's true and what isn't; and some news sources uses "loaded" words to invoke fear.

I hope you have some words about this....

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Yah man.. I go through that anxiety from the news every now and then. I told my sh***y shrink and he said to not watch it. I remember thinking, "But I have to watch it so I know what's going on." Nothing is going on though. It's the same old s**t day after day. People getting killed, robbed, beaten, molested and raped and burned at the stake. You could at least take a break from it. Try to shift your attention elsewhere for a little while. You're not gonna miss anything.

I don't have news anxiety anymore but I used to, and I found that avoiding news sources helped. Don't buy newspapers, don't watch news on TV, don't listen to it on the radio, deactivate your Twitter account (if you have one) or mute/unfollow accounts that are posting news.

If your health insurance covers Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, then that might be a thing to try because worrying about things out of your control isn't healthy or conducive.

It's normal what you're feeling. The news is fear mongering and while there are obviously real terrible things happening in the world, you're getting a skewed perspective. For example the crime rate has actually been decreasing a lot for many years in most places, but that doesn't get TV ratings. You watch traumatic events, disasters, death, political terror, etc. That in itself is stressful to watch, but feeling like you have no control over it is even worse and makes us feel helpless and hopeless.

I don't watch TV anymore. I visit news sites occasionally when I'm prepared to be exposed to it, or google specific events and issues I've heard about to learn more if I think it's important, and follow a few specific pages on Facebook (more like feature articles on world issues and with some kind of intelligent commentary, rather than mainstream disaster-porn general news).