Roxane Cohen Silver, professor of psychological science, offered her expertise in a BBC article. An excerpt:
One study in the wake of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing for example, found that participants who followed news coverage of the attack for six or more hours a day in the week following the atrocity were nine times more likely to report high levels of acute stress even several weeks later. (Learn more about how the news changes the way we think.)
“It’s also a cyclical pattern,” says Roxane Silver, a psychologist at the University of California, Irvine and one of the study’s authors. “The more stressed you are the more you are likely to be engaged with the media. And it can be hard to break the pattern, especially when the news is bad. The more news, the more stress, the more stress the more news.”
While watching the news for updates about the latest lockdown rules and the spread of the virus has been important during the coronavirus, it is a source of rising levels of anxiety for many people during the pandemic.
“It’s not psychologically beneficial and likely to be associated with distress, anxiety, worry and fear, and potentially sadness,” says Silver. Instead of being immersed in the news, she suggests selecting a handful of sites and checking them no more than twice a day.