Understanding Attention

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What you pay attention to can have a powerful effect on your mental health—for better or worse.

Constant consumption of stressful news stories skews risk perception and amplifies anxiety, studies find.

Staying “informed” can leave you subtly misinformed and mentally taxed.

Take one week off the news and reclaim your focus.

Your attempts at keeping informed probably aren't doing you any favors, even if checking the news can feel like a civic obligation. And this is coming from a recovering RSS feed junkie who once prided himself on knowing every headline and stray piece of zeitgeist trivia in the cafeteria, and who still feels the twitch to refresh a newsfeed out of fear of missing something important—or worse, being exposed as the ignoramus he is.

For years, I equated awareness of world affairs with virtue—and something similar may be happening with you as well (I doubt Psychology Today is your only online pitstop today). Which is exactly why we need to talk about the growing stack of empirical studies that speak to the cognitive and emotional costs of staying constantly “informed.”

The Hidden Cost of Staying Informed

Author and entrepreneur Rolf Dobelli, who founded the intellectual community WORLD.MINDS, has long argued that modern news functions less as education and more as a gravity well for our attention that offers little in return. His claim is not that we should be ignorant or disengaged, but instead, he argues that the structure of contemporary news consumption systematically distorts our perception of reality.

Neutrality and objectivity are challenging goals for any attention-driven industry, particularly when its incentives are aligned with engagement rather than our psychological health. The cognitive consequences of the news industry are well documented by psychologists as well.

One subtle way news distorts our perception of reality operates through the availability heuristic, our tendency to overestimate the likelihood of events that are vivid and easily recalled (Tversky & Kahneman, 1973). When plane crashes dominate headlines or rare crimes are amplified, risk feels omnipresent because the mind confuses salience with prevalence, a distortion that Dobelli has argued is structurally embedded in modern news production (Dobelli, 2010).

In addition to skewing our perception of risk, sustained news consumption can exert measurable effects on psychological well-being. Research conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic found consistent associations between high levels of pandemic-related news exposure and increased anxiety, stress, and depressive symptoms (Bendau et al., 2021; Garfin et al., 2020). A large review indexed in PubMed Central concluded that intensive news consumption during crisis periods correlated with psychological distress across multiple populations (Su et al., 2022).

On the flip side, more recent experimental work suggests that reducing digital input can have measurable benefits. Randomized studies examining screen time reduction and mobile internet blocking have reported improvements in mood, well-being, and sustained attention (Allcott et al., 2020). While these studies do not isolate “news” in pure form, the implication is difficult to ignore.

Constant digital exposure, including news, taxes cognitive and emotional systems in ways that often go unnoticed.

What to Do Instead: Your Task for This Week

Here on the East Coast, the snow is coming down hard enough to quiet the streets. Blizzard weeks have a way of compressing the world into something smaller and slower, making ideal grounds for an experiment. Even if you aren't joining me in the shoveling, consider locking hands in taking the next seven days as a slow-burn week where we limit our intake of the immediate yet insubstantial, and focus on something more nourishing instead.

Understanding Attention

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We'll begin by doing our best to avoid the hot buttons and skipping the daily outrage cycle that often begins the moment we unlock our mobile phones. This week, let's simply have faith in the fact that if something truly consequential occurs, the world will find a way to let us know.

And once we have the subtraction part of the equation down, we'll move on to substitution and slap a nicotine patch on our doomscrolling habits. Before the week begins, choose one long read or long-form video that you have postponed. Load it onto every device that usually pulls you toward newsfeeds, and when the reflex to check headlines surfaces, open that tab instead.

Notice the discomfort that accompanies sustained attention and stick with it. For me, that text is Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, a book I have deferred for years in favor of easier intellectual calories. From a psychological perspective, this is habit replacement instead of a lifestyle overhaul, and we are simply retraining our attentional pathways rather than suppressing them.

The aim of this week's exercise is not to detach from reality but to recalibrate your relationship with it. Attention compounds over time, and so does distraction. A week will not transform your life, but it may reveal how much of your cognitive energy has been quietly siphoned away by the Sisyphean task of staying informed.

Snowstorms have a way of simplifying choices. Let this one be an invitation to test whether constant news consumption is nourishing your mind or merely occupying it.

Your neurons, and perhaps your nervous system, may thank you.

Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1973). Availability: A heuristic for judging frequency and probability. Cognitive Psychology, 5(2), 207–232.

Dobelli, R. (2010). The art of thinking clearly. New York, NY: Harper.

Bendau, A., Petzold, M. B., Pyrkosch, L., et al. (2021). Associations between COVID-19 related media consumption and symptoms of anxiety, depression and COVID-19 related fear. European Archives of Psychiatry and Clinical Neuroscience, 271, 283–291.

Allcott, H., L, Braghieri, S. Eichmeyer, and M. Gentzkow. 2020. "The Welfare Effects of Social Media." American Economic Review 110 (3): 629–76.

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