This post first appeared on October 15th, 2025 on my Substack here.
Last spring, an Ohio State University survey found that nearly half of the adults in the U.S. reported being stressed out at least once a week from reading the news. That seems pretty low, don’t you think?
Whatever the numbers, news fatigue is a real thing and a lot of us feel overwhelmed, anxious, and sad. I was at the flea market in Paris this past weekend when I overheard three American women talking about it. One of them said she had measured her blood pressure while reading the New York Times, and it shot sky high. Yikes!
After working in and around the media for the past twenty years, I’ve found a few ways to counteract this problem. But first, a bit of history.
I had a massive case of news fatigue in 2017. Healthcare communications had become a battleground as the first Trump administration tried to repeal the ACA. (Thank you, John McCain, wherever you are.) By March of that year, I was so burned out I had to escape to a ranch in the Colorado Rockies. At one point I remember sitting atop a lovely paint, bawling my eyes out and wondering if they needed another ranch hand.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t just quit my job and muck out stalls for a living. I had to figure out how to consume and respond to the news on a daily basis—without letting it kill me.
Then it hit me that this was a lot like my experience finding out years ago that I was pre-diabetic. Back then, I’d thought of food as something to grab and go. I ate what was easiest to find and I didn’t really think about it. At the time, my doctor suggested I keep a food diary and stay very present when I was eating. I followed his advice, and it completely changed my food habits. My blood sugar levels have been fine since then.
Conscious curation over mass consumption
After returning from Colorado, I realized my news habits needed the same awareness as my diet. I needed to stay present with what what I was “eating.” I wrote a little news diary for a few days, and then asked myself questions about it:
- Did I choose a certain article because it informs me or because it’s easy to grab?
- How many clickbait headlines sent me down an anxious rabbit hole today?
- Am I giving myself a little “treat” of humor now and then?
I also noted how anxious I was that day, the whole thing was an eye opener. Slowly, I started reading only the news or articles that didn’t make my own blood pressure jump, at least not so much. Today, I’m consuming news even more carefully.