The Anxiety-Inducing News Cycle- a Necessary Evil?
It is bad enough to live with the impending doom of imminent climate change, but the uptake in reporting it seems to be directly correlated with ‘headline stress disorder’, a phenomenon that Steven Stonsy, Ph.D. refers to as intense feelings of worry and helplessness triggered by the gruelling news cycle. The physical impact of the climate crisis is impossible to ignore, but is climate reporting doing irreversible damage to the population’s mental health?
The physical effects of climate change have greatly accelerated in the last 5 years, and naturally, so has reporting on it. As of 2021, 65% of adults get their news from a digitised source (Ofcom 2020), but with social media coming into play, even those that don’t frequent the BBC are exposed to the damaging effects of climate change on social media. The 2020 Australian bushfires, for example, garnered a huge social media response, with many high profile celebrities spreading awareness through viral photos, videos and campaigns.
Some anxiety is a good thing. It enables awareness and proactive problem-solving. It motivates you to take sensible steps to protect yourself and those around you. On a large scale, Government policies to control climate change are crystallising, such as the UK government’s target of net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 or its ban on sales of new petrol and diesel cars from 2030. On the 9th November 2020, the UK Government’s Finance Minister, Rishi Sunak, announced that climate risk reporting will become mandatory for large companies and financial institutions in the UK. But what happens when your anxiety becomes more than constructive concern? A persistent sense of worry can spiral into complete debilitation. “Around 3 in 5 Gen Z adults (61%) and millennials (60%) [say] they want to stay informed but that following the news causes them stress’. This sense of anxiety is largely based on the current and predicted future state of the environment and human-induced climate change (Huizen 2019) and an inability to create immediate change.
A paper published by Lancet Planetary Health suggests that mental health preservation during the climate crisis is an emergency that requires large scale government intervention. ‘Robust evidence is needed to mitigate the effects of climate anxiety and stress on the short-term and long-term mental health of young people. There has never been such a large population of young people globally, nor do we anticipate any reversal of the impacts of climate change. Young people are agents of change, our future leaders, and most likely to succeed in improving planetary health.’ It is suggested that making monetary investments to improve the mental health and wellbeing of young people will provide rewards now and in the future. (Wu,Snell and Samji 2020)
Waiting for action to be taken does nothing for your mental health in the short term, however. Climate change is not going anywhere, and it is more important than ever to utilise news as a vehicle for change. It is therefore important to take steps toward self preservation, whether that be limiting your own news intake to specific times of the day (it’s been suggested that checking first thing in the morning — then disconnect for the rest of the day is an effective way to be informed but not overwhelmed) or joining communities and advocating for change. The ideal is to find balance between feeling these emotions, and then using them in different ways to create meaningful change, better relationships with your family and friends, maybe even more meaningful work and activism of some kind.
Bibliography
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Cohut, M. (2020). How to cope if the news is making you anxious. [online] Available at: https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/327516 [Accessed 23 Feb. 2021].
www.clydeco.com. (n.d.). Climate reporting heats up with UK Government announcement of intention to make climate-related disclosures mandatory. [online] Available at: https://www.clydeco.com/en/insights/2020/12/climate-reporting-heats-up-with-uk-government-anno#:~:text=UK%20Government%20confirms%20intention%20to [Accessed 23 Feb. 2021].
Health.com. (n.d.). How to Manage Your Anxiety Over the Never-Ending Stream of Bad News, According to a Psychiatrist. [online] Available at: https://www.health.com/condition/stress/anxiety-bad-news [Accessed 23 Feb. 2021].
Wu, J., Snell, G. and Samji, H. (2020). Climate anxiety in young people: a call to action. The Lancet Planetary Health. Available at: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196(20)30223-0/fulltext [Accessed 23 Feb. 2021].
