"It doesn't affect me"

You may accept that checking teaches you little and still think it's harmless. You're an adult. You've been reading bad news all your life. A headline about a distant war is sad, and then you get on with your day. You're not one of those people who get upset by the news.

Psychologists have tested this, and the results are consistent enough to take seriously.

The classic experiment was run in the 1990s by Johnston and Davey at the University of Sussex. They put together three versions of a fourteen-minute television news bulletin from real broadcast material. One was made up of negative stories, one of positive stories and one of neutral ones. Volunteers were assigned to watch one of the three. Those who watched the negative bulletin came out measurably more anxious and sadder than the others, which is no surprise. The second result is the interesting one. Before and after the bulletin, the researchers asked people about a worry from their own life, something personal that had nothing to do with the news. After the negative bulletin, people were more inclined to catastrophise about their own worry, meaning that they spun it out further towards worse and worse outcomes.

So the effect of bad news isn't confined to its subject. A report about a war doesn't just make you sad about the war. It lowers your mood, and the lowered mood then colours whatever else is on your mind, your job, your health, your children, the winter. This is the tightness in the chest on Monday morning that you didn't connect with anything.

You might say that fourteen minutes of solid bad news is more than a glance at a phone. A more recent experiment used much smaller doses. During the pandemic, Kathryn Buchanan and colleagues had people spend just two to four minutes looking at a social media feed of Covid news, or watching a short video about it, while a comparison group saw nothing of the kind. Those few minutes produced an immediate, measurable drop in positive mood, and in one of the studies a drop in optimism as well. A third group, who were shown stories of people being kind to each other during the pandemic, didn't suffer the drop.

Two to four minutes is about the length of one of your looks, and you have twenty-five of them in a day.

I'm not claiming that each one ruins your day. The effect of each is small, which is why you don't notice it. But they're spread across the day at intervals that never let the mood fully recover. It's the residue I described in chapter 1. Each look leaves a trace, and the traces add up to a mood.

People who say the news doesn't affect them are usually reporting, accurately, that they don't feel a strong emotion when they read a headline. The experiments don't measure strong emotions. They measure a small downward shift and a greater readiness to worry. You wouldn't notice those in yourself any more than you'd notice the room getting slightly colder. You might only notice that you've gone quiet at dinner.

You can run a fair test on yourself. On two comparable days, rate your mood out of ten at lunch and at bedtime. On one of the days, check as normal. On the other, don't look at any news until the evening. See whether the numbers differ.