Psychologist: The Brain Was Not Built for This Much Bad News

News fatigue — the exhaustion many feel after scrolling through headlines — is not laziness, weakness or a generational decline in civic interest, argues Ali Jasemi, a lecturer in psychology at Wilfrid Laurier University, in an article written for The Conversation and republished by ScienceDaily. It is, he writes, the predictable response of a human brain meeting an environment it was never designed to navigate.

A waterfall of perpetual bad news

Jasemi describes people who have stopped checking their phones in the morning — not because nothing was happening, but because everything was. One described the feeling as standing under a waterfall of perpetual bad news. The numbers match the anecdote: the Reuters Institute's 2025 Digital News Report found that 69 percent of Canadians now avoid the news at least occasionally, while 40 percent of people globally say they do so at least sometimes or often — the highest figure the report has ever recorded. The reasons given are consistent: the news puts them in a bad mood, and it leaves them feeling overwhelmed and powerless to act.

Wired for bad news

The human mind weighs negative information more heavily than positive information, notices it faster and remembers it longer — a well-replicated effect known as the negativity bias. Our ancestors whose attention drifted past a rustle in the grass left fewer descendants than those who stopped, looked and listened: missing a real threat could be fatal, while overreacting cost only a few minutes of wasted vigilance.

The brain itself has not changed since then. What has changed is the size of the world it is asked to scan — a war in one region, a financial shock in another, a climate disaster in a third, all before lunchtime. A study published in Nature Human Behaviour examined more than 105,000 real news headlines viewed nearly six million times and found that each additional negative word raised click-through rates, while positive words had the opposite effect.

Researchers have proposed a clinical framework for what follows: Problematic News Consumption, a pattern of engagement that produces preoccupation, dysregulation and disruption to daily functioning. In a 2022 study, 17 percent of American adults qualified as having severe levels of it; among that group, 61 percent reported feeling unwell quite a bit or very much, compared with six percent of those who did not.

Looking away is not the fix

Avoidance is not the answer, Jasemi argues: a democracy depends on informed citizens, and withdrawing from accurate, trustworthy information only deepens the problem. Instead he suggests managing the supply — confining news consumption to defined windows of time, choosing depth over volume, and identifying what you can actually do about what you read, however small, because the gap between awareness and agency is one of the strongest predictors of psychological distress. He also advises recognising rage bait: content designed to provoke rather than reflect reality.

The news will not become lighter. The relationship with it can become more deliberate.