Doomscroll detox

Yahoo

18-06-2025

In 2010, 16-year-old Hannah Ritchie arrived at the University of Edinburgh to start a degree in environmental geoscience. Environmental issues were her passion, and she was excited to learn how to solve some of these great global challenges.
'Four years later,' she writes in her first book, 'I left with no solutions. Instead, I felt the deadweight of endless unsolvable problems. Each day at Edinburgh was a constant reminder of how humanity was ravaging the planet.'
Contributing to this sense of deadweight was mainstream media. 'During my time at university, I made a conscious effort to keep up with the news,' Ritchie notes. 'Everywhere were images of natural disasters, droughts and hungry faces. More people seemed to be dying than ever before, more were living in poverty and more children were starving than at any time in history. I believed I was living through humanity's most tragic period.'
The unrelenting exposure to the world's negative trends looked like it was going to change the trajectory of Ritchie's life. 'Despite working relentlessly to get my degree, I was ready to turn my back on my obsession and find a new career path. I started applying for jobs far away from environmental science,' she writes. 'Those years made me feel helpless.'
This chapter of Hannah Ritchie's story may be familiar to many news readers.
'More people are turning away from news, describing it as depressing, relentless and boring, a global study suggests,' writes Noor Nanji for the BBC.
'Almost 4 in 10 (39 percent) people worldwide said they sometimes or often actively avoid the news, compared with 29 percent in 2017,' Nanji highlights from a report by Oxford University's Reuters Institute that noted record high levels of news avoidance.
A key reason for actively avoiding the news has to do with that emotion of helplessness that Ritchie experienced. The report's lead author, Nic Newman, tells the BBC that people often choose to avoid the news because they feel 'they have no agency over massive things that are happening in the world.'
People are similarly driven away by the focus on 'endless unsolvable problems.' 'Haunted by a sense that the news is relentlessly toxic, once-loyal readers and viewers have been gradually ebbing away,' Paul Farhi reports in The Washington Post. 'Digital media has made news ubiquitous. … And much of it, people say, drives feelings of depression, anger, anxiety or helplessness.'
Farhi quotes one reader who's backed off her dedicated news reading: 'I can't handle the stress put on me when I go to the front page,' she said. 'It feels like it affects me directly. I don't know if the world is worse now than it was before. But it never used to feel like a personal threat.'
Ritchie once felt powerless to make a difference. But she didn't stop consuming news; instead, she expanded the kinds of stories she reads. Today, she is one of a growing number of voices in journalism dedicated to highlighting what's improving in our world and how we can lean into progress. When we know what's going well — and why — we can help it keep going.
Michelle Cottle became a champion of spotlighting progress in the news for similar reasons. In 2018, Cottle joined The New York Times as a national political writer for its opinion section. In the two years following the January 6 insurrection, she had a particular focus on 'ways to protect democracy.'
'This is not a question of ideology,' she says. 'I have deep respect for members of the Republican Party and the Democratic Party.' The concern was over 'efforts to undermine the foundations of democracy, like the peaceful transfer of power, respecting the will of voters.'
The question was, what role would the news play in helping shore up those foundations of democracy?
That lack of awareness of crucial facts can have serious consequences. One is the uptick of anxiety that negative misperceptions can cause. Another is the way that anxiety can prevent engagement.
'On one level, that's a very important story that people get very stressed out about. But when you get down to the mechanics of what you have to worry about, like the officeholders way down the political food chain, like county clerks, secretaries of state, the attorneys general … election board commissioners, those are really boring races for people,' Cottle says. Even though these stories about obscure elected offices are crucial to explaining how U.S. elections function, it's hard to get readers to take an interest in them.
The potential danger of this lack of interest surfaced in the 2022 midterm election season.
As Cottle explains, there had been a push from certain quarters after January 6 for those who believed the electoral process was corrupt to take over local election machinery: 'Steve Bannon, the Trump adviser, pushed this strategy out nationwide, trying to stack the election infrastructure with people who were convinced that there was massive democratic fraud and they needed to stop it at all costs. You saw stories of election watchers out eyeballing people and being vaguely intimidating. So we learned that this was an ongoing, multi-pronged plan.'
In response to this election-stacking plan, the Times and other news organizations strove to alert voters to the candidates running for less prominent local offices. 'In addition to all the pieces about the Senate races and the House races,' Cottle says, 'we were constantly hammering the whole, 'These secretaries of state candidates need to be watched; they are a danger.''
If voters had just avoided the news, they might never have known about the candidates' positions. They might not have reflected their real values with their vote, or might never have turned out to vote at all.
As it turned out, voters apparently did pay attention to the news. Candidates who questioned the legitimacy of the 2020 election were overwhelmingly defeated in battleground states. For Cottle, the midterm results had a very positive message about people's ability to change outcomes — and she wants this message shared.
'What I learned is that you really do need to put the spotlight on these things. One of the things that you worry about when you cover politics is that people just get exhausted and frustrated and they lose any sense that they have the ability to affect things. And so when they do, it's very important to jump up and down and say, 'See, you need to go out and vote. This matters.''
The direct impact of local politics on individual lives is one reason many media scholars recommend reading and supporting local news. If you're concerned about making an impact in the world, your own community is a good place to start. Following local news will help you discover where your efforts can make a positive difference.
Whatever you can do locally, you might still feel overwhelmed by the crises you see happening around the world. If so, it's essential to remember that 'the news' isn't actually the best way to understand the world.
Discouraged by a fiercely negative picture of global events, Ritchie was tempted to abandon environmental science as a career path. But her mind was changed when she came upon a new way of looking at global issues — something quite different from the tragic headlines and images she saw in every day's news. It started with a presentation by a man named Hans Rosling.
Rosling, who died in 2017, was a physician, professor of global health and statistician who developed new ways of visualizing and understanding statistics. In particular, he used big sets of data to reveal hidden truths about global trends. These truths were often startling to his viewers because of the positive picture they portrayed, exposing audiences to a different perspective than the one they had seen while scrolling the web, watching cable TV or thumbing through the paper.
The news is designed to tell us something new. But those unlikely events are not the most probable ones.
Rosling's presentation changed Ritchie's outlook on the state of the world. She had assumed everything was getting worse. What Rosling showed in this presentation was how many things were actually getting better — how countries around the world, for example, were getting healthier and healthier. There was a vast gap between Ritchie's perception of the world and reality — a gap that comes from the way we take in information about the world.
The kinds of daily news stories we consume are not designed to tell us the whole truth about world trends. 'The news is designed to tell us, well, something new — an individual story, a rare event, the latest disaster. Because we see them in the news so often, unlikely events seem like probable ones. But they're often not,' Ritchie explains. 'That's why they make the news and why they capture our attention.'
It is the disasters, in particular, that are highlighted to draw us in. In an attention economy, news outlets bank on crises as the best bet for attracting our clicks. They've learned that their audiences are drawn to catastrophes and potential threats to their well-being.
'These individual (news stories) are important,' Ritchie writes. 'But it's a terrible way to understand the bigger picture. Many changes that do profoundly shape the world are not rare, exciting or headline-grabbing. They are persistent things that happen day by day and year by year. … The only way to really see these changes is to step back and look at the long-run data.'
And what Ritchie saw, as she studied that data, was a global picture far more positive than the one she'd seen in those despondent years at university. As she states in her book, 'If we take several steps back, we can see something truly radical, game-changing and life-giving: Humanity is in a truly unique position to build a sustainable world.' Her book is, fittingly, titled 'Not the End of the World: How to be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet.'
There are still many ways we can change the world for the better. A crucial way to make these changes is to find broader and better stories about the world. Broader, in that they capture more data. Better, in that they focus on what's going well.
Ritchie is a featured author with 'The Progress Network.' Supported by over 100 scholars in diverse fields, this organization is dedicated to sharing stories about the progress that humankind is making in many areas — stories backed up by the kind of big data for which Rosling advocated.
The goal is to 'balance out this strongly negative viewpoint (in) the mainstream media' and 'help show people there is progress actually happening,' says Emma Varvaloucas, the network's executive director. This is a vital task because many people are not aware of this progress.
Take climate change. Anxiety levels would likely not be so high, says Varvaloucas, if more people knew 'that the truly apocalyptic levels of warming that were possible even 10 years ago are widely seen as implausible now. So the really scary scenarios that (a United Nations panel) outlined for 7, 8, 9 degrees of warming, we're done with them. We avoided them already.'
We're still faced with a very serious situation trying to avert the possibility of 3 degrees of warming and hopefully keep warming under 2 degrees, she says, but progress is happening toward this goal.
Stories about progress provide the information and the motivation necessary to drive engagement with crucial problems — to let people know that it's worth it to get involved.
'What we're doing already has worked,' says Varvaloucas. 'I really wish that a lot of climate coverage in the U.S. would mention that emissions … are down almost 20 percent already from 2005 levels. … People think that the world is about to blow up in 10 years … and that (scenario) is just not the case anymore.'
That lack of awareness of crucial facts can have serious consequences. One is the uptick of anxiety that negative misperceptions can cause. Another is the way that anxiety can prevent engagement.
For the past 10 years, the narrative around climate change has simply been one of urgency and alarm. There was good reason for this strategy in the past, but Varvaloucas contends that it has become counterproductive as the distress it creates has possibly prevented people from engaging with the issue as much as they could and engaging with it in a healthy way.
Varvaloucas was one of those people. 'I was really turned off by the whole climate change discussion for a long time because I just felt there weren't any entry points. It was just like, 'Hey, we have this problem. No one's solving it. The end.' And I was like, 'OK, well, what do you want me to do about that?''
This is where stories about progress can help. They provide the information and the motivation necessary to drive engagement with crucial problems — to let people know that it's worth it to get involved.
'If you are aware that progress has happened, it leads to a completely different set of decisions,' says Varvaloucas. When people have access to the data on where progress is happening and what's driving it, they can invest in strategies that have actually worked to improve people's lives.
For example, Ritchie wrote on her Substack newsletter, 'Every month I donate a share of my income to global health charities. The money goes toward the most cost-effective ways to save lives and improve health: malarial bed nets; nutritional supplements for low-income kids. … I only donate because I know that it's effective and I know it works.'
Contrary to what some critics say, stories that focus on progress don't tend to cause complacency, Ritchie says; they inspire action. 'When we can see real results coming through, we tend to lean in, not out.'
Public health is just one area where the Progress Network documents significant advancements over the past decades: reductions in new HIV infections and deaths from AIDS; positive developments in vaccines for diseases like malaria and RSV (not to mention Covid-19); huge drops in child mortality; and declines in severe poverty.
To learn about the positive changes that are happening and how to help sustain them, you can start with the Progress Network's website and weekly newsletter, and the Solutions Story Tracker at SolutionsJournalism.org.
To improve your understanding of global trends, including trends for the better, you can check out Gapminder. Co-founded by Rosling, the site uses clear, reliable data to expand understanding and correct misconceptions about global issues. Our World in Data is also dedicated to using data to make progress on the world's biggest problems — and to share news about the progress that has been made.
Today, Ritchie is deputy editor and science outreach lead at Our World in Data. After almost giving up on a career in the environmental field, she has now spent nearly a decade researching, writing about and sharing the news on environmental issues. A key part of her work is letting the world know about the problems we still face and the magnitude of those problems. But, she notes, she couldn't have embarked on this vital work at all without an escape from doomsday thinking.
'Our impending doom leaves us feeling paralyzed,' she writes in her book. 'I recognize this from my own dark period when I nearly walked away from the field entirely. I can assure you that after reframing how I saw the world, I have had a much, much bigger impact on changing things.'
Maria McNair is a writer and podcast producer based in St. Louis, Missouri. This essay is an adaptation of an episode of 'Article 13,' a Faith Matters podcast she researched and co-produced.
This story appears in the June 2025 issue of Deseret Magazine. Learn more about how to subscribe.