Your brain was never designed for this much bad news
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- Reuters Institute's 2025 Digital News Report found 40% of people globally now sometimes or often avoid the news — the highest figure ever recorded — with 69% of Canadians at least occasionally doing the same; top reasons were bad mood, overwhelm, and feeling powerless to act.
- Negativity bias — the brain's evolved tendency to weigh threats more heavily, attend faster, and remember longer — is among the most replicated findings in cognitive science, and the brain's wiring has not changed even as the scope of threats it processes has expanded from local to global.
- A Nature Human Behaviour study of more than 105,000 real news headlines viewed nearly 6 million times found each additional negative word increased click-through rates, while positive words had the opposite effect.
- A 2022 study introduced Problematic News Consumption (PNC) as a clinical pattern of preoccupation, dysregulation, and disruption to daily functioning; 17% of American adults qualified as having severe PNC, and 61% of that group reported feeling unwell quite a bit or very much, versus 6% of those without it.
- For racialized communities and immigrants, news fatigue carries extra weight — repeated exposure to harm directed at their own group adds cognitive load, and the option to disengage is much harder when news concerns their country of origin.
- Author Ali Jasemi (Wilfrid Laurier University) recommends containing news to defined time windows, choosing depth over volume, closing the awareness-agency gap by identifying what one can actually do, and recognizing "rage bait" engineered to provoke rather than inform.
Why it matters: A record 40% of people globally now sometimes avoid the news — Reuters Institute's highest-ever figure — and with 17% of American adults meeting clinical thresholds for Problematic News Consumption, the behavior has crossed from personal habit into a measurable mental-health pattern with stakes for how democracies sustain informed citizens.
