• by Gord Hotchkiss , Featured Contributor, February 18, 2025

When I started writing this post, my plan was to unpack some of the psychology behind  news consumption. I soon realized that the topic is too complicated to realistically handle in one post.

So I narrowed my focus to this, which has been top of mind for me lately: How do you stay informed without becoming a trembling, psychotic mess? How can you arm yourself for informed action, rather than becoming paralyzed into inaction by the recent fire hose of sheer WTF insanity that makes up the average news feed?

Pick Your Battles

There are few things more debilitating than fretting about things we can’t do anything about. Research has found a strong correlation between depression and our locus of control – the term psychologists use for the range of things we feel we can directly impact. There is actually a term for being so crushed by bad news that you lose the perspective needed to function in your own environment. It’s called Mean World Syndrome.

If effecting change is your goal, decide what’s realistically within your scope of control. Then focus your information gathering on those specific things. When it comes to informing yourself to become a better change agent, going deep rather than wide might be a better strategy.

Be Deliberate about Your Information Gathering

The second strategy goes hand in hand with the first. Make sure you’re in the right frame of mind to gather information. There are two ways the brain processes information: top-down and bottom-up. Top-down processing is cognition with purpose – you have set an intent and you’re working to achieve specific goals. Bottom up is passively being exposed to random information and allowing your brain to be stimulated by it. The way you interpret the news will be greatly impacted by whether you’re processing it with a top-down intent or letting your brain parse it from the bottom-up.

By being more deliberate in gathering information with a specific intent in mind, you completely change how your brain will process the news. It will instantly put it in a context related to your goal, rather than letting it rampage through your brain, triggering your primordial anxiety circuits.

Understand the Difference between Signal and Noise

Based on the top two strategies, you’ve probably already guessed that I’m not a big fan of relying on social media as an information source -- and you’re right. A brain doom-scrolling through a social media feed is not a brain primed to objectively process the news.

For broad context in news, I picked two international information sources I trust to be objective: The New York Times, and The Economist out of the U.K. I subscribed to both because I wanted sources that weren’t totally reliant on advertising as a revenue source (a toxic disease which is killing true journalism).

For Americans, I would highly recommend picking at least one source outside the U.S. to counteract the polarized echo chamber that typifies U.S. journalism, especially that which is completely ad-supported.

Include sources that are relevant to your objectives. For example,  if local change is your goal, make sure you are informed about your community. With those bases in place, even If you get sucked down a doom-scrolling rabbit hole, at least you’ll have a better context to allow you to separate signal from noise.

Put the Screen Down

I realize the majority of people (about 54% of U.S. adults, according to Pew Research) will simply ignore all of the above and continue to be informed through their Facebook or X feeds. I can’t really change that.

But for those of you concerned about the direction the world seems to be spinning and want to curate your information sources to effect some real change, these strategies may be helpful.

For my part, I’m going to try to be much more deliberate in how I find and consume the news.  I’m also going to be more disciplined about simply ignoring the news when I’m not actively looking for it. Taking a walk in the woods or interacting with a real person are two things I’m going to try to do more.