Tags

, , , , , , ,

Do you receive too much negative news?

As a child at Faith Temple Church, I heard Pastor Jimmy Thompson tell about bad things recorded in the Bible. He told about Cain killing Abel, about Jacob’s sinful sons selling their brother, and about soldiers nailing Jesus to a cross. But Preacher Thompson told also about God making a way — through Christ — for us to be saved. Pastor Jimmy spoke of injustice but told of sacrificial love, too.

Nowadays, some of us absorb too much negative news and not enough Good News!
“A steady stream of disheartening news can alter your perception of the world, causing you to lack motivation and view the world with a sense of cynicism and hopelessness. Negative news has the potential to exacerbate your personal anxieties and the stressful situations occurring in your own life,” sources say.

The way we get news has changed over the past 10 years or more. We now have news at our fingertips all day, every day.

Have you seen people “scroll” on the internet, looking for news? Someone gave that activity a name — it’s called “doomscrolling.”

When you consume lots of negative news from activities such as doomscrolling, your sympathetic nervous system causes your body to release stress hormones, including cortisol and adrenaline. This is your body’s natural response to a crisis.

“Doomscrolling is a word that describes the act of obsessively reading bad news despite the onset of anxiety … research stretching back for decades has long warned that consuming too much negative news can take its toll,” says Benjamin Plackett.

So much news is “open-ended and uncertain” at the time we read or hear it. Psychologists refer to our uneasy feelings as an “intolerance of uncertainty.”

“News consumption may be affecting you adversely,” says Shayne Looper, a pastor whose writing is often published in The Greenville News.

Greater mental and physical ills may exist among people who obsessively consume news media. People who obsess over bad news may experience fatigue, physical pain, poor concentration, and gastro issues.

Researchers describe one result of news over-consumption as “transportation” — a mental state in which a person is “transported” into a story and the immediate world around them recedes.

“During the past few years, I have seen people break off relationships with family and church because they had been transported into pandemic-related stories, election stories, and war stories,” Pastor Looper says. “This has happened among both liberal and conservative media consumers.”

A critic might say that a similar thing happens when people hear the Christian gospel.

“They hear the story repeated over and over. They dwell on the story, are transported into it, and it becomes their story,” Looper says. “And Christians view this ‘transportation’ as a good thing. They encourage each other to meditate on the story and repeat it often.”

There is a difference (according to Looper):

“Transportation into the media’s news stories, so often used as propaganda, breaks relationships, instills anxiety, and creates a sense of insecurity. Transportation into the gospel has the opposite effect: it heals relationships, instills peace and provides security.

“Whereas preoccupation with news stories tends to isolate people from one another through fear and anger, preoccupation with the story of Christ encourages people to embrace others with love and acceptance,” Looper says. “Of course, one must decide which story best reflects the real world. Is it the story of chaos, corruption and danger that is told by media outlets in various ways all day long? Or is it the story of the God who has redeemed and will make new our admittedly broken and troubled world?

“The Christian gospel does not ignore the evil in our world. If anything, it sheds light on its causes, which run much deeper than politics and economics. But, unlike the so-called news stories, the Christian story offers a reason for hope.”

Judith Andersen, a health psychologist at the University of Toronto in Canada, says, “There are things that people can do to protect their mental health from the potentially damaging effects of obsessively consuming news. It’s important to be informed, but we don’t want you to be doomscrolling. Check the news just once a day, and I don’t think it’s best to check in the morning because it clouds the rest of your day.” She also recommends confining yourself to well-established and credible news sources to avoid the risk of hyped or misleading news.

“Don’t put your head in the sand — just monitor the frequency and volume of news you consume,” someone advised.

Consume some “Good News” — from the Bible.