[Reprint] Overwhelmed by Bad News? Looking Away is Not the Fix

Why 40 per cent of people are avoiding the news, according to a psychologist

Ali Jasemi, Wilfrid Laurier University

During several recent conversations, people have told me that they’ve stopped checking their phones in the morning. Not because nothing was happening, but because everything was. They described the feeling as standing under a waterfall of perpetual bad news.

This experience is far from an isolated one. According to Reuters Institute’s 2025 Digital News Report, 69 per cent of Canadians at least occasionally avoid the news now.

Globally, 40 per cent report they at least sometimes or often do the same, the highest figure ever recorded. People shared consistent reasons for this: the news put them in a bad mood, they felt overwhelmed and powerless to act.

As a researcher in developmental psychology, focusing on social development and psychological well-being, I argue that news fatigue is not laziness, weakness or a generational decline in civic interest. It’s the predictable response of a human brain meeting an environment it was never designed to navigate.

Wired for bad news

Long before smartphones or even the printing press, our cognitive architecture was shaped by a single problem: stay alive long enough to reproduce. Our ancestors whose attention drifted past the rustle in the grass left fewer descendants than those who froze, looked and listened.

The brain that paid attention to threats was the brain that survived.

This is the foundation of what psychologists call the negativity bias, one of the most replicated findings in cognitive science. Across decades of research, the human mind has been shown to weigh negative information more heavily than positive, attend to it faster and remember it longer.

A predator nearby mattered more than a beautiful sunset. The cost of missing a real threat was death, while the cost of overreacting was a few minutes of wasted vigilance. The asymmetry made this bias adaptive.

Here is the problem: the human brain has not changed since then. We are the same species as we were thousands of years ago. What’s changed is the size of the world it’s asked to scan for threats.

Scanning the whole world

For most of human history, the threats our nervous system processed were local. A neighbouring tribe. A drought. The illness of a child we personally knew. Information about distant places would barely arrive, and if it did, it was mainly irrelevant.

In 2026, the same neurological system is being asked to absorb a war in one region, a financial shock in another, a climate disaster in a third and a violent crime in a fourth, all before lunchtime.

A study published in the scientific journal Nature Human Behaviour examined more than 105,000 real news headlines viewed nearly six million times. Each additional negative word increased click-through rates, while positive words had the opposite effect.

Recent studies suggest people around the world demonstrate measurably stronger physiological responses to negative news than to positive news. The body is reacting before the mind has decided whether the threat is relevant.

Some researchers have introduced a clinical framework for what happens in this instance called Problematic News Consumption (PNC) — a pattern of news engagement that results in preoccupation, dysregulation and disruption to daily functioning. In their 2022 study, the researchers found that 17 per cent of American adults qualified as having severe levels of PNC. Among that group, 61 per cent reported feeling unwell quite a bit or very much, compared with six per cent of those who didn’t.

For minority populations, news fatigue may be even more consequential.

Repeatedly witnessing harm directed at our own groups, even when we’re not the immediate target, can have a significant psychological impact on people from the same group affiliation. For racialized communities, such as immigrants, the cognitive load could be even heavier, and the option to simply stop watching is much harder to exercise when the news is about their country of origin.

Looking away is not the fix

Reprint: The Joy of Mindful Reading

 

Deep reading can boost your critical thinking and help you resist misinformation – here’s how to build the skill

Just slowing down gives you time to question and reflect. Morsa Images/DigitalVision via Getty Images

JT Torres, Washington and Lee University and Jeff Saerys-Foy, Quinnipiac University

The average American checks their phone over 140 times a day, clocking an average of 4.5 hours of daily use, with 57% of people admitting they’re “addicted” to their phone. Tech companies, influencers and other content creators compete for all that attention, which has incentivized the rise of misinformation.

Considering this challenging information landscape, strong critical reading skills are as relevant and necessary as they’ve ever been.

Unfortunately, literacy continues to be a serious concern. Reading comprehension scores have continued to decline. The majority of Gen Z parents are not reading aloud to their young children because they view it as a chore. Many college students cannot make it through an entire book.

With their endless scrolling and easy reposting and sharing of content, social media platforms are designed to encourage passive engagement that people use to relieve boredom and escape stress.

As a cognitive scientist and a literacy expert, we research the ways people process information through reading. Based on our work, we believe that deep reading can be an effective way to counter misinformation as well as reduce stress and loneliness. It can be tough to go deeper than a speedy skim, but there are strategies you can use to strengthen important reading skills.

Counterintuitively, social media can make you feel more bored and lonely. Dmitrii Marchenko/Moment via Getty Images

Deep reading versus doomscrolling

People use smartphones and social media for a variety of reasons, such as to relieve boredom, seek attention, make connections and share news. The infinite amount of information available at your fingertips can lead to information overload, interfering with how you pay attention and make decisions. Research from cognitive science helps to explain how scrolling trains your brain to think passively.

To keep people engaged, social media algorithms feed people content similar to what they’ve already engaged with, reinforcing users’ beliefs with similar posts. Repeated exposure to information increases its believability, especially if different sources repeat the information, an effect known as illusory truth.

Deep reading, on the other hand, refers to the intentional process of engaging with information in critical, analytical and empathetic ways. It involves making inferences, drawing connections, engaging with different perspectives and questioning possible interpretations.

Deep reading does require effort. It can trigger negative feelings like irritation or confusion, and it can very often feel unpleasant. The important question, then: Why would anyone choose the hard work of deep reading when they can just scroll and skim?

Reprint: Traumatic Bereavement and How to Help

 

When grief involves trauma − a social worker explains how to support survivors of the recent floods and other devastating losses

Rain falls over a makeshift memorial for flood victims along the Guadalupe River on July 13, 2025, in Kerrville, Texas. AP Photo/Eric Gay

Liza Barros-Lane, University of Houston-Downtown

The July 4, 2025, floods in Kerr County, Texas, swept away children and entire families, leaving horror in their wake. Days later, flash floods struck Ruidoso, New Mexico, killing three people, including two young children.

These are not just devastating losses. When death is sudden, violent, or when a body is never recovered, grief gets tangled up with trauma.

In these situations, people don’t only grieve the death. They struggle with the terror of how it happened, the unanswered questions and the shock etched into their bodies.

I’m a social work professor, grief researcher and the founder of The Young Widowhood Project, a research initiative aimed at expanding scholarship and public understanding of premature spousal loss.

I was widowed when I was 36. In July 2020, my husband, Brent, went missing after testing a small, flat-bottomed fishing boat called a Jon boat. His body was recovered two days later, but I never saw his remains.

Both my personal loss and professional work have shown me how trauma changes the grieving process and what kind of support actually helps.

To understand how trauma can complicate grief, it’s important to first understand how people typically respond to loss.

Grief isn’t a set of stages

Many people still think of grief through the lens of psychiatrist Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’ five stages of grief, popularized in the early 1970s: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.

But in fact, this model was originally designed for people facing their own deaths, not for mourners. In the absence of accessible grief research in the 1960s, it became a leading framework for understanding the grieving process – even though it wasn’t meant for that.

Despite this misapplication, the stages model has shaped cultural expectations: namely, that grief ends once people reach the “acceptance” stage. But research doesn’t support this idea. Trying to force grief into this model can cause real harm, leaving mourners feeling they’re grieving “wrong.”

In reality, mourning is often lifelong. Most people go through an acute period of overwhelming pain right after the loss. This is usually followed by integrated grief, where the pain softens but the loss is still part of everyday life, returning in waves.

Although grief is unique to each person and relationship, researchers have found that mourners often strive to a) make sense of the death; b) adjust to a world without their loved one; c) form an ongoing connection with their deceased loved one in new ways; and d) figure out who they are without their loved one.

It’s difficult and at times disorienting work, but most people find ways to carry their grief and keep living.

Coping Strategies in an Ongoing Pandemic

From time to time, I focus on an article that in my estimation offers valuable information or reflection on the stresses of the times. These last four years have presented one crisis after another. And now a pandemic that threatens not only my life and health, but those of my loved ones and friends. So it's a good time to review what enhances our resilience and remind ourselves that we are indeed resourceful. We are not always so, and not all of us are at the same time. Not every piece of advice will seem appropriate to each of us. One of the many benefits of community is that we can remind one another of our strength, we can role model sanity and self-care, and those of us who have hope at any given moment can carry those of us who are mired in despair through the dark hours.

We'll get through this. Together.

On to the article: This is by Craig Polizzi, a PhD Student in Clinical Psychology, and Steven Jay Lynn, Distinguished Professor of Psychology, both at Binghamton University, State University of New York.

Your coping and resilience strategies might need to shift as the COVID-19 crisis continues

The authors highlight three strategies we might use to reduce stress and rebuild our lives, even while the pandemic is still raging. This is going to go on for a while, folks, so let's see what we can do to make the best of this episode in our lives.

Cognitive reappraisal involves reframing the way one interprets an emotional or stressful event or situation to regulate or neutralize its harmful impact. You can think about working from home, for example, as an opportunity to spend more time with family, engage in hobbies or get caught up on projects, rather than as a threat to job security. This strategy tempers the kind of all-or-nothing thinking – such as “the world is unsafe,” “I cannot do anything to help” and “our leaders know nothing” – that can take people down a road of anxiety, worry and mistrust of others. Instead, reappraisal helps you move toward healthy perspectives on stressful situations, dampens negative emotions and boosts positive emotions and keenness to participate fully in life.

Problem-focused coping can be another helpful strategy. It frames a stressful situation as a problem to be solved and fuels planning and the search for practical solutions. For example, people who know they feel worried or depressed after consuming news can plan to monitor and control the timing (such as not before sleep), nature and amount of news they consume. Effective problem-solving increases positive emotions, self-confidence and motivation. It also lessens the psychological impact of stressors.
As society opens up, you need to weigh the pros and cons of shopping, eating in restaurants, or seeking medical treatment, informed by the best available evidence. Problem-focused coping can help you make decisions about whether an activity is safe and consistent with your personal values and the needs of others.

Lovingkindness meditation can help you get through trying times. It involves contemplating and generating positive feelings and tolerance towards yourself and others. Combining lovingkindness meditation with empathy for those with different political views, for example, can help heal frayed bonds of friendship when social support is most needed. Pausing each day to embrace love and kindness counteracts self-blame, guilt, feelings of alienation and social isolation.

And anything that increases the amount of compassion and love in the world is surely a good thing.

For the complete article, click on the title link.

Martian Sand and Other Wonders

Ancient Asteroid Impact Exposes the Moon's Interior

"The mantle of the Earth is made mostly of a mineral called olivine, and the assumption is usually that all planets are like the Earth," said Jay Melosh, Distinguished Professor of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at Purdue University, who led the study. "But when we look at the spectral signature of rocks exposed deep below the moon's surface, we don't see olivine; we see orthopyroxene."

Around 4 billion years ago, an asteroid collided with the moon and created the largest and deepest impact on the moon: the South Pole-Aitken basin. The collision exposed lunar mantle in the basin and splashed up material onto the far side of the moon.

Where Does the Sand Come From?

Discovered in images from the Context Camera, this region exhibits dark material that is being eroded from dark layers in the bedrock of a semicircular depression near the boundary of the Southern highlands and the Northern lowlands. Downslope lineations support the notion that these dark sediments are derived locally, and did not accumulate here by coincidence because of the winds.

Sand grains can also roll along the ground as they are blown by the wind, and they are also jostled by other sand gains that are similarly flying across the surface. All of these repeated impacts tend to wear down the sand grains, smoothing them into a more spherical shape and breaking off small fragments that supply the vast dust deposits of Mars. This process (known as comminution) ultimately destroys sand grains and limits the length of time that the particles exist. The fact that we see active sand dunes on Mars today requires that sand particles must be resupplied to replace the grains that are lost over time. Where are the modern day sources of sand on Mars?

Best Way to Recognize Emotions in Others: Listen

Across all five experiments, individuals who only listened without observing were able, on average, to identify more accurately the emotions being experienced by others. The one exception was when subjects listened to the computerized voices, which resulted in the worst accuracy of all.

Jupiter and Two of Its Biggest Moons

Io and Europa are two of Jupiter's four Galilean moons, which are so named because famed Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei discovered them back in 1610. (The other two Galilean satellites are Callisto and Ganymede.) Io is the most volcanic object in the solar system, and astrobiologists regard the ocean-harboring Europa as one of the best bets to host life beyond Earth. 

Unusual Mountain Ahuna Mons on Asteroid Ceres

Ahuna Mons is the largest mountain on the largest known asteroid in our Solar System, Ceres, which orbits our Sun in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Ahuna Mons, though, is like nothing that humanity has ever seen before. For one thing, its slopes are garnished not with old craters but young vertical streaks. One hypothesis holds that Ahuna Mons is an ice volcano that formed shortly after a large impact on the opposite side of the dwarf planet loosened up the terrain through focused seismic waves. The bright streaks may be high in reflective salt, and therefore similar to other recently surfaced material such as visible in Ceres' famous bright spots.

New American Psychological Assn Guidelines On Trans and Non Gender Conforming Folks

The American Psychological Association has released a 55-page document detailing guidelines for psychologists treating transgender and gender non-conforming (TGNC) individuals. 

The purpose of the Guidelines for Psychological Practice with Transgender and Gender Nonconforming People (hereafter Guidelines) is to assist psychologists in the provision of culturally competent, developmentally appropriate, and trans‐affirmative psychological practice with TGNC people. Trans‐affirmative practice is the provision of care that is respectful, aware, and supportive of the identities and life experiences of TGNC people.

Here are the new guidelines:

1. Psychologists understand that gender is a non‐binary construct that allows for a range of gender identities and that a person’s gender identity may not align with sex assigned at birth.
2. Psychologists understand that gender identity and sexual orientation are distinct but interrelated constructs.
3. Psychologists seek to understand how gender identity intersects with the other cultural identities of TGNC people.
4. Psychologists are aware of how their attitudes about and knowledge of gender identity and gender expression may affect the quality of care they provide to TGNC people and their families.
5. Psychologists recognize how stigma, prejudice, discrimination, and violence affect the health and well‐being of TGNC people.
6. Psychologists strive to recognize the influence of institutional barriers on the lives of TGNC people and to assist in developing TGNC‐affirmative environments.
7. Psychologists understand the need to promote social change that reduces the negative effects of stigma on the health and well‐being of TGNC people.
8. Psychologists working with gender questioning and TGNC youth understand the different developmental needs of children and adolescents and that not all youth will persist in a TGNC identity into adulthood.
9. Psychologists strive to understand both the particular challenges that TGNC elders experience and the resilience they can develop.
10. Psychologists strive to understand how mental health concerns may or may not be related to a TGNC person’s gender identity and the psychological effects of minority stress.
11. Psychologists recognize that TGNC people are more likely to experience positive life outcomes when they receive social support or trans‐affirmative care.
12. Psychologists strive to understand the effects that changes in gender identity and gender expression have on the romantic and sexual relationships of TGNC people.
13. Psychologists seek to understand how parenting and family formation among TGNC people take a variety of forms.
14. Psychologists recognize the potential benefits of an interdisciplinary approach when providing care to TGNC people and strive to work collaboratively with other providers.
15. Psychologists respect the welfare and rights of TGNC participants in research and strive to represent results accurately and avoid misuse or misrepresentation of findings.
16. Psychologists seek to prepare trainees in psychology to work competently with TGNC people.

In the past, some psychologists have attempted to change gender identity (as well as sexual orientation) through so-called "conversion therapy" or other coercive means. The APA’s statement, in effect, states very strongly that attempts to change gender identity should not be attempted. In this statement, the APA underscores the need for ethical treatment of transgender people and of affirming transgender and gender non-conforming people.

Thanks to Open Minded Health for blogging on the APA document.