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'Doomscrolling' breeds anxiety – how to stop the cycle

npr.org

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Re: 'Doomscrolling' breeds anxiety – how to stop the cycle

#21

Post by matwood »

moultano wrote: post #12
countername wrote: post #4

Yeah reading hacker news since 4 hours and didn't even planned to open it. Now the world is more dangerous and don't know if people are commenting or GPT-3 bots. Any solutions to find sleep?

Read a really charming and escapist novel. Worst case, you end up staying up too late because the book is so good, but I haven't found anything more reliable for making me disconnect from the world and its churning. Substituting a book for Twitter for the hour before bed has markedly improved the overall quality of my life. To get yourself into the habit, don't read anything on your "to read someday list of important…

Completely agree. Reading a book before bed slows my mind and removes the days anxieties. I’m currently reading The Lost Fleet sci-fi series. Pure entertainment.

Re: 'Doomscrolling' breeds anxiety – how to stop the cycle

#22

Post by unknownkadath »

dbtc wrote: post #16
moultano wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read a really charming and escapist novel. Worst case, you end up staying up too late because the book is so good, but I haven't found anything more reliable for making me disconnect from the world and its churning. Substituting a book for Twitter for the hour before bed has markedly improved the overall quality of my life. To get yourself into the habit, don't read anything on your "to read someday list of important…

I recommend Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

Whoa, slow down there, Satan.

Re: 'Doomscrolling' breeds anxiety – how to stop the cycle

#23

Post by creato »

I don't like the implication that mental health is just feeling good. Maybe if more people would read and understand the news, and feel bad about it, they'd be willing to do even trivial things like wear a mask.

In my opinion, good mental health should be considered to be that your feelings align with reality. If reality sucks, it's not mentally unhealthy to feel bad about it. Feeling bad should spur making changes to make it better.

Re: 'Doomscrolling' breeds anxiety – how to stop the cycle

#24

Post by whatshisface »

creato wrote: post #23

I don't like the implication that mental health is just feeling good. Maybe if more people would read and understand the news, and feel bad about it , they'd be willing to do even trivial things like wear a mask. In my opinion, good mental health should be considered to be that your feelings align with reality. If reality sucks, it's not mentally unhealthy to feel bad about it. Feeling bad should spur making changes…

The issue is that understanding the news and understanding the real world can be very, very different things. An endless stream of anecdotes about rare crimes and individual misbehavior will upset anyone, but it can't help anybody understand the real world.

Re: 'Doomscrolling' breeds anxiety – how to stop the cycle

#25

Post by 0xy »

clairity wrote: post #19

the hypocrisy of this story is thick, from a news organization where every other story (and that's not much of an exaggeration) is about how we're all going to die from covid because everyone else is being a jerk in endlessly various ways. but to their credit, they did air a story recently featuring maria hinojosa, founder/host of latino usa and the first latina host at npr, that was not especially kind to npr itself…

Not to mention the journalistic malpractice of calling victims of being threatened with a firearm and having their vehicle attacked randomly "right-wing extremists", and then wiping the evidence of their false allegations from the internet without retracting or apologizing for it. The individuals who attacked the victims were charged by police. [1] [2]

NPR is in the same class as the rest of the mainstream media who don't bother to vet stories they lather with political bias.

[1] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EbEIlsUUcAACYht?format=jpg&name=...

[2] https://www.wave3.com/2020/06/18/protesters-arrested-followi...

Re: 'Doomscrolling' breeds anxiety – how to stop the cycle

#27

Post by skwb »

From my own personal experience: back in March, when COVID started getting out of control, I found myself desperately trying to get access to more and better information from experts in the field. I turned to twitter, to try to get more and better information on the subject. This inevitably turned into 'doomscrolling'.

I felt that there was a lot of nuanced scientific opinions that reporters were doing a poor job of communicating. I get that often deeply technical topics are complicated, but I think more than anything else COVID has helped how unprepared media has been in communicating these complex topics.

And it's not just COVID; it's been a range of subjects such as law (Trump's immigration ban) and elections (in particular the 2020 Democratic primary and all the media coverage over Bloomberg's supposed supremacy in the race). I think overall journalists are well intentioned and can be trusted in most situations, but it's clear to me that there are systemic failures in communicating complex subjects.

Re: 'Doomscrolling' breeds anxiety – how to stop the cycle

#29

Post by currymj »

creato wrote: post #23

I don't like the implication that mental health is just feeling good. Maybe if more people would read and understand the news, and feel bad about it , they'd be willing to do even trivial things like wear a mask. In my opinion, good mental health should be considered to be that your feelings align with reality. If reality sucks, it's not mentally unhealthy to feel bad about it. Feeling bad should spur making changes…

I would be willing to bet that refusing to wear a mask is strongly correlated with spending a lot of time reading about news and politics online.

Re: 'Doomscrolling' breeds anxiety – how to stop the cycle

#30

Post by baddox »

whatshisface wrote: post #24
creato wrote: post #23

I don't like the implication that mental health is just feeling good. Maybe if more people would read and understand the news, and feel bad about it , they'd be willing to do even trivial things like wear a mask. In my opinion, good mental health should be considered to be that your feelings align with reality. If reality sucks, it's not mentally unhealthy to feel bad about it. Feeling bad should spur making changes…

The issue is that understanding the news and understanding the real world can be very, very different things. An endless stream of anecdotes about rare crimes and individual misbehavior will upset anyone, but it can't help anybody understand the real world.

Also, it doesn’t sound healthy to me to read news with the attitude that a lot of the bad stuff that happens is because you just didn’t research enough and vote hard enough. The point of democracy shouldn’t be to blame the people for bad government policies and actions. It should be the government that is accountable.
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