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A NEW STUDY has found that watching, listening or reading the news could be having a negative impact on your stress levels.
The study, carried out in America by NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard School of Public Health found that one in four Americans felt they had a “great deal” of stress in their lives. The survey asked 2,500 people and found the media was a major source of day-to-day stress (not that TheJournal.ie has anything to do with that).
One of the findings in the study related to the coverage of the Boston bombings. It found that people who were exposed to six or more hours of media a day experienced more acute stress symptoms than those who were at the site of the bombings when they occurred.
Mary McNaughton-Cassill is an expert in the area of stress and media coverage and a psychologist with the University of Texas. Speaking to NPR, she said:
Certain kinds of news can push your own buttons and make you very anxious…there is so much more news available, and so many different channels that are competing, that they’re trying harder to be sensational.
It was found that amongst the recipients of the survey, the most popular way of relieving stress was spending time with family. Other popular methods were meditation or prayer, spending time outdoors and eating healthily.
And just in case you’re feeling the weight of all the Garth Brooks speculation, here are a couple of bits of good news:
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Ah here, have you ever watched a news programme in the US? They are DESIGNED to scare the crap out of the people watching, they’re ridiculous!
“In News at 11, the everyday object in your home that could be KILLING you! We’ll give you all the details to stay safe.”
It’s no wonder they’re stressed. I watched a news report that used a plastic knife to stab a piece of meat to demonstrate how “terrorists could smuggle weapons on planes”.
Idiots!
And they put selected words in all-caps to make it even more dramatic,
I take a news blackout for a week every few weeks, I highly recommend it, not only does it make for less stressful living, but you will see just how irrelevant to your life most of what happens in the news actually is.
We have no real choices in politics, maybe it’s because of the special interest money and position in politics but we have all the major parties all supporting the same policies. They’ve been the same for a long time now, FF-FG-Lab have a circle jerk over conventional wisdom, in the tiger era that conventional wisdom was deregulation and tax cuts, which was portrayed as a magic formula that = prosperity. Now it’s been replaced by an even dumber wisdom, the idea that you can kick start an economy by sucking consumer spending money out of it and treating a growth problem like an accounting problem.
If you had not read or heard any news since 2011 would you know there was a FG-Lab government? Think about it, they continued FF economic policy, tax cuts and deregulation is something they wanna go back to incredibly considering how it ended up last time, they didn’t do a stimulus as promised, and you’d never know there was a party that called themselves democratic socialists in government, there are no centre-left policies being implemented.
It’s really depressing when you think about it, no matter who we elect it stays the same
Probably all those Garth Brooks articles on theJournal.ie that have people stressing out!
Probably the comments or when people green thumb the thick comments!
Might that not have something to do with the quality of the “news” they are exposed to? There must be a difference between listening to the measured tones of NPR’s Morning Edition and watching Bill O’Reilly for six hours!
I don’t understand why radio stations are required to have hourly news bulletins. the same usually negative hourly dose of news. when I am having a gripe about it, horse racing results hourly with the news, how many really want to hear it ???
I used to listen and watch every bit of news that I could. It was more out of concern that I might miss something important which would impact on my circumstances , like tax changes in a budget , or motoring law changes , etc. But for a while last year I had so much going on that I wasn’t able to keep abreast of every little thing that was on the news, and it had no significant impact at all. Now when I hear or see something on the news that I think may put a bit of a downer on things for me I just change channel. All round it’s definitely been better for me doing that.
Roughly half of the American population think the Earth was formed 6,000 years ago exactly as described in the OT. The other half are OTT!
I enjoy reading the news to know what’s happening specially at home, but it does on some level stress me out for my family and the for my in laws who are traveling home with me! Don’t get me wrong they love Ireland but I hope they only ever experience the beauty and the good! From what I read Ireland comes across dangerous and not very appealing!
Yeah when all you see is Garth brooks
Also, I don’t think a study like this can “find” people feel a great deal of stress. It can only indicate or suggest at best.
I saw the tweet. Scarleh for ya.
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