The first time Roxane Cohen Silver noticed the media may be psychologically damaging was in 1999. She had been in Littleton, Colorado, conducting research on the Columbine High School shooting when she observed an alarming trend—many of the parents and students she spoke to found it exceedingly difficult to cope with the journalists who interviewed and filmed them just hours after the tragedy.
But it wasn’t until the 9/11 attacks that Silver, a professor of psychology, medicine, and public health at the University of California, Irvine, began to understand just how harmful the media could be. She discovered, after tracking people for three years, that the more people engaged with news about the terrorist attacks, the more likely they were to report mental and physical health problems over time.
Two decades later, there’s now ample evidence showing that brutal news cycles can wreck the body’s stress response and lead to an onslaught of psychological issues in the days, weeks, months, and even years to come. Here’s why.
The news activates your stress response
Humans are wired to pay attention to threats, says E. Alison Holman, a UC Irvine health psychologist who has collaborated with Silver for years. Thousands of years ago, that vigilance helped us survive predators like bears or mountain lions. Today, the same instinct pulls our eyes to alarming headlines.
When you see a threat (in real life or through a screen), your fight or flight response turns on and your body releases cortisol and adrenaline, two hormones that provide you with the energy and mental acuity to take on said conflict.