359. Q&A: Is the 24/7 news cycle harming your mental health?

Dr. Sarah (00:02):

Ever wonder what psychologists moms talk about when we get together, whether we’re consulting one another about a challenging case or one of our own kids, or just leaning on each other when parenting feels hard, because trust me, even when we do this for a living, it’s still hard. Joining me each week in these special Thursday shows are two of my closest friends, both moms, both psychologists, they’re the people I call when I need a sounding board. These are our unfiltered answers to your parenting questions. We’re letting you in on the conversations the three of us usually have behind closed doors. This is Securely Attached: Beyond the Sessions.

(00:41):

Hello. Welcome to the Beyond the Session segment of the Securely Attached podcast. We have Dr. Emily Upshur and Dr. Rebecca Hershberg here. Hello.

Dr. Emily (00:53):

Hey.

Dr. Rebecca (00:53):

Hello.

Dr. Sarah (00:53):

So we’re going to do something a little different this week. Instead of answering a listener question, which is what we usually do on the segment of the podcast, I wanted to talk about a piece of research that recently kind of caught my attention. So I was scrolling through Instagram and there was a video about a study that they had conducted back in 2013, but I was very struck by how relevant that study still is today. So I wanted to chat with you ladies about it on this episode.

Dr. Emily (01:23):

Let’s do it.

Dr. Sarah (01:24):

Great. Okay. So the study is called Media’s Role in Broadcasting Acute Stress Following the Boston Marathon Bombings. And I’ll link it in the show notes if anyone wants to check it out. But the findings were honestly very fascinating and a little unsettling. So the researchers discovered that people who were repeatedly exposed to media coverage of the Boston Marathon bombing actually showed higher acute stress responses than some of the people who are there in person during the event. Now, I want to be really clear, this doesn’t minimize what the people at the marathon the bombing went through, but what it does highlight is how powerful indirect exposure to trauma can be. How simply watching distressing events over and over can really impact our stress response and even impact how safe we feel in the world around us. And I think that’s really worth talking about because we are living in this 24/7 news cycle where we are constantly surrounded by stories of tragedy and violence and crisis, and it raises some really important questions. So how do we stay informed without becoming overwhelmed or desensitized or really fearful all the time? And also as parents, how do we protect our kids from absorbing that anxiety, our anxiety, or protect them from believing the world is a dangerous place, while at the same time still helping them understand what’s going on around them. So Rebecca, let’s start with you. What was your first reaction when you looked into this study?

Dr. Rebecca (03:08):

Well, one thing that always stands out to me in this research that I think is interesting is the extent to which past trauma exposure. I forget if it moderated it or mediated it, but essentially they also asked, it was not only exposure to the media on, well, the Boston Marathon, but it was also then they asked if these people had been involved in a school shooting or I think direct exposure to nine 11, whatever it was, it matters. And I often talk about that with my clients, and we talk about that on the podcast, is the extent to which our nervous systems are impacted by trauma cumulatively having done with that word. And so as we think about not just the general research finding, but who are we and what’s our trauma history and how sensitive are we individually to all of the impacts that you just outlined? I don’t know if I’m making sense.

Dr. Emily (04:12):

No, yes, no, that totally makes sense. I keep thinking like priming. You’re a little bit primed to be more vulnerable for…

Dr. Rebecca (04:19):

And you get sucked in to let, I remember when I did my somatic experiencing training several years ago, they talked about the trauma vortex and how you get sort of, because we’re wired to detect threat in order to survive as a species, we get sucked in over and over again to thinking about threat, to thinking about danger because that’s again, going to keep us as a species more relevant than thinking about things that are awesome and happy and joyful. And so again, that’s really helpful on a species level, but less so on an individual level. I just had a client actually, whose child had been through something quite traumatic, and this mom was very shaken up, not surprisingly and understandably. And the work was about let’s just keep shifting our brain to focus on the moment when you knew she was safe. Let’s focus on the moment you knew she was safe. And none of what we’re exposing ourselves to in the media does that, right? It’s all click bait, it’s all, oh my God, this could happen and that could happen. And regardless of whether it’s true, it’s keeping our brains in this constant scanning for threat mode, which then keeps us tremendously hypervigilant and not settled. And we know that the impact of that on parenting is not to, is dysregulating for kids. And so I think it is very relevant.

Dr. Emily (05:55):

I think also the thing that you were saying that reminded me of the article was the study was also that, to that exact point, I think when you go through the study really said actually people who were in the Boston Marathon had less of a traumatic effect than people who watched lots of media about this traumatic event. And I think that to your point, Rebecca, if you personally were in the Boston Marathon and you’re going through that, you actually instinctively try to orient to safety in your personal experience. You try to make sense of it, you try to orient if you can, and depending on your priming as we’ve been discussing, but you orient a safety, the event is over and that’s what you hold onto hopefully the most. But then it makes sense to me that people who are then watching this and watching this, even if they didn’t have it, to your point, Rebecca, I think that was really well said. It’s never orienting to safety all of that media, that media is always alarmist. It’s really always getting our nervous system on high alert. So I think that that was what stood out to me so much in that study was people who had the actual lived version of the trauma were even less impacted than people who watched it to a great extent on the media.

Dr. Sarah (07:21):

And I feel like that’s so why I feel like it’s so relevant to, obviously the study was looking at the Boston Marathon as a specific example to try to gather this data, but you could really apply this, these findings and the logic behind it to a lot of things that are happening now, how much pervasive news and media coverage there is around distressing content and how we also, we do live in a culture, especially right now where I think there’s a lot of exposure to media. We don’t even log as happening. We might think to ourselves, oh, I just put the kids to bed. I’m going to decompress and scroll on Instagram and chill out and watch some go look up fun recipes or things I enjoy in my Instagram feed. And not really even think about the fact that that 30 minutes of scrolling also exposed me to 5, 6, 20, 30 pits of something that activated my nervous system, put me into a state of threat.

(08:36):

And it’s not even just one specific theme. When there’s a specific crisis, yes, we tend to watch media coverage about it all over and over and over and over and over again, but there’s this diffuse exposure to a wide range of traumatic content hitting us all the time. And that’s almost even, it takes Rebecca, what you were saying of, because it’s once removed from the event, we don’t always think to orient to safety. This is four or 5, 6, 10 times removed from these events and we don’t even notice it’s happening. So it doesn’t even occur to us, oh, I just saw something upsetting, triggering, activating, stressful. Let me just take a minute reset because we’re so desensitized to it coming at us.

Dr. Rebecca (09:25):

Do you guys know, I don’t mean to put anybody on the spot, so I’ll say off the bat that I don’t, do you guys know there’s all those various research studies that I think we learned about maybe in social psychology in college where whatever they’re called, those images that they subconsciously put in. And you remember there were studies of if you insert if there was a gun and you…

Dr. Sarah (09:51):

Like subliminal.

Dr. Rebecca (09:54):

Right. That stuff matters. So it can literally be complete. And again, what I was saying is I don’t remember the impact on outcomes if then you end up being more afraid or less afraid. I don’t remember the measured outcomes, but I do remember that even subliminal messaging, as we know, and certainly anybody involved in advertising and media and trying to get clicks and make money knows that matters. And so what you’re saying is, yeah, if you’re scrolling through Instagram, you may not even realize that you’re seeing violent images, but they are everywhere. So I think it comes down to if we’re looking for like, okay, well then what’s actionable? It’s sort of like, okay, we we got to limit our doom scrolling, which is nothing new. But I think maybe this is just a different window into why.

Dr. Sarah (10:52):

But to just bring it back to what you were saying before, which I thought was a very important way to kick off this conversation was what is absent from these secondary or tertiary traumatic exposures is that cue to orient to safety. Whereas if we know we’ve been through something objectively and very clearly traumatizing, we are going to instinctively or try to orient to safety and other people around us are going to remind us to do that, right? Everyone is in agreement, this has happened and this is what we do. We orient safety afterwards. If it’s this sort of ambiguous exposure or chronic diffuse exposure, well one, we can try to limit that, but we also want to bring in what is typically absent, which is that cue to say, oh wait, let me just check in. How am I feeling? Can I just take a minute? Am I noticing that my shoulders are up by my ears and my jaw is clenched after I’ve just watched the news or bit on my phone? Can I take a breath, feel the floor, look around the room, connect with my husband or my friend or my kids, or just reorient to that safe, connected, more resourced place? Because I agree totally and I’m trying my best to do this myself, limiting air exposure to this, but then adding also that layer of awareness and regulation.

Dr. Emily (12:44):

I think perhaps I’m going to age myself, but the equivalent to me is having the TV on in the background of a lot of households. I don’t know how much that happens as much anymore. You guys are talking a little bit about our own personal adult or parenting regulatory systems. And I do think that a lot of people who might have younger children, they potentially don’t have devices or have that kind of exposure and they have exposure to us, which is duly noted. And I think you guys are addressing really well. But I do think that sometimes we take for granted if we have the TV running in the background on CNN, we’re M-S-N-B-C because that’s what you’ve been watching. And it’s okay because usually that’s just the news. But then to your point, our families are exposed to this messaging and sort of this tenor, even if it’s only a couple of blips of it amongst the weather and everything else that’s going on, that that’s happening as well. So it makes me think of what might be happening for kids and families in a broader sense as well.

Dr. Sarah (13:55):

No, that makes sense.

Dr. Rebecca (13:56):

Absolutely. And I think print media, once our kids can read, it’s a whole new world in a good way, obviously. But also you can’t leave the front page of the New York Times lying around for anybody who’s still speaking of dating oneself in actual newspaper or they come read over your shoulder or they come, my kids sometimes in the car if they’re DJing as you do, they’re holding our phones and we get those news alerts.

(14:30):

And so that happened, I think one of my kids was holding the phone with the, thank God, not the video, but the announcement of the Charlie Kirk shooting. And then we had to sort of say what happened in a way that we wouldn’t have. The timing certainly would not have been that, right. And again, it’s like when I hand my kid the phone because he says, can I cue some songs on Spotify? I’m not thinking like, oh gosh, what if there’s a tragedy that happens in these next few minutes and it pops onto my screen, which I guess might be a sign that I’m oriented to safety.

Dr. Sarah (15:08):

Or maybe that we also can think about. It just made me occur to me like, oh my gosh, do I want even regardless, not just to protect my kid from having it exposed to them unintentionally, but do I want to have the New York Times notification set on my phone? What does it do to even my own nervous system if I’m glancing at my phone and I’m getting notifications of breaking news, traumatic, tricky stuff all the time? And let’s be honest, that’s most of the headlines in these notifications. I am not probably going to be living under a rock if I turn those off. I’ll probably still find all the information I need to have about what’s going on in the world throughout the day and other ways. But maybe I don’t need those notifications on my phone for my own wellness.

Dr. Rebecca (15:59):

I remember when those started. We could call this sub, we could subtitle this episode, aging ourselves. But I remember, and it was right after 9/11, those didn’t exist before 9/11. And right after 9/11, I was in Virginia, I was in grad school. It was a horrible time, and I lost someone I was very close to. And I remember they started and I thought about, do I want this? Because I mean, it was like a complete jolt every time they came through. And I remember I stopped them on my phone again, this was years ago, but I stopped them on my phone when there was one that came through that was like, I think George Bush Junior, who was president at the time, had almost choked on a pretzel. It was breaking news. George Butcher almost choked on a pretzel at this diplomatic dinner. And I remember thinking to myself, I didn’t need my nervous system to jolt when that came in. That was information I didn’t need.

Dr. Sarah (16:57):

Interesting. So your nervous system actually got primed by the previous notifications to be queued up for danger just by the notification, like alert itself, not the content, because I’m assuming that you did not find a threat response to that content.

Dr. Rebecca (17:14):

Right. That’s my point. It was right after nine 11, which I had an awful personal experience just losing a friend. And so in the weeks and months, and someone could look up when that pretzel incident was, but that followed. Yeah, the buzz would go on. It was like the buzz or the whatever it was. Absolutely. It didn’t matter what the content was because at the time, and this is where times changed, that was the first example of one that actually wasn’t, to my mind, a crisis Again, he hadn’t choked on the, almost choked on the pretzel, but realizing, yeah, exactly. That it’s the mod. It’s just, oh gosh, there’s breaking news. That in and of itself is one level of trauma before you even know what it’s about. And now it’s like breaking news, potentially some actor you’ve never heard of has died thousands of miles away breaking news. There’s become a lower and lower threshold, I think, because someone’s making money off it somewhere of what that is. But I think to your point, Sarah, it’s a long winding way of saying that. Yeah, adjusting our settings and thinking about what deserves the disruption not only to our day, but to our nervous systems is important.

Dr. Emily (18:30):

I’m having the same elderly experience of feeling. But I think I was like, why is this important? It’s important because it is so normalized, our exposure to media now. It is so part of everyday life. But I too remember Rebecca when the Iraq war started, and it was the first war that was covered, I believe. Don’t quote me on this, but I believe it was one of the first that was covered with that amount of news all the time.

Dr. Sarah (19:00):

Oh, I have that. You just reminded me of something. I was in kindergarten during the Iraq war, and I know this for a fact because I have a very significant memory of being on the school bus and hearing about it on the school bus driver’s radio and being scared. And then I had these nightmares that there was this dangerous thing happening, and the school bus driver was scary and was coming to get me. But to this day, I am like 35 years later, I remember this. And this is, I think just an example of how a little kid.

Dr. Emily (19:42):

It wasn’t the Iraq war though, because that doesn’t make sense, but…

Dr. Sarah (19:45):

When was it?

Dr. Emily (19:47):

It was in 2003.

Dr. Sarah (19:50):

Oh, you’re talking about the Gulf War when I was in kindergarten, but this was still that, whatever my point was being, this is an example of a five-year-old hearing something, not knowing how to make sense of it, and then really holding it in a way that I still remember.

Dr. Rebecca (20:10):

Yeah. Oh, I remember there was mean, this must have been in the early eighties, early to mid eighties, there was a major drought. I mean, now it’s like, yeah, welcome to just being a person. But there was a major drought in New York City, and I remember my parents talking about how we had to save water. We had to make sure to turn off the water when we were brushing our teeth and whatever it was. And I was panicked, and I wrote my parents a letter, why do we keep talking? What are we going to do? What are we going to do? And again, they’re seemingly and to them kind of casual talk about we need to start saving water. There’s a drought, whatever it was, they weren’t portraying their own panic. But again, if you’ve got a sensitive kid and perhaps a kid who tends toward anxiety, and I’m happy to disclose myself there, they are going to take in that information and put it through the threat filter, and it was suddenly, oh my God, we’re going to run out of water. Or Oh my gosh. Certainly also at the time, there’s going to be nuclear war or you know.

Dr. Emily (21:23):

I think that’s exactly, because I don’t think I was even as a young adult particularly concerned about our homeland, even though nine 11 in the context of all of that. But I just remember my nervous system being with all the news. I just had this memory. I was in grad school and the news was just so intense or frequent that I was like, this is very uncomfortable. I don’t remember experiencing a war like this before. Even in my own sort of very safe life, I remember distinctly feeling more impacted by that because of the news coverage and thinking like, Ooh, I feel really uncomfortable physically with this. My body’s nervous system is really uncomfortable.

Dr. Sarah (22:16):

Yeah. And I’m just trying to think too of like, okay, so we’ve covered a lot about why, and this is obviously clearly to your point, this is an age old and increasingly more so of an issue of how much exposure we have to this content constantly. And it’s only gotten more frequent intense, pervasive, invasive. It’s not just when I turn on the radio or watch the television, it’s coming at me way outside of my conscious efforts to be exposed to it. And the tech is making it even more intrusive in our lives. So from an adult standpoint, we’re just like, we are constantly bombarded and we can see how that can impact our own nervous systems. And we have talked a little bit about ways to become aware of that, make sense of it, reduce it when possible and sort of regulate if we can’t reduce it.

(23:14):

But to bring it to the parent piece, this also affects our kids. And it might be affecting our kids because of their direct exposure, but it could also be affecting our kids because of their exposure through this sort of ambient stuff that we might be bringing into the space and not realizing or thinking about it, or they’re just being exposed to it indirectly because of our own anxiety or stress that we bring. But I think, Rebecca, your point that made me think of kind of tying this loop together was kids, when you were interpreting the drought as a child, you did what most little kids do, which is catastrophize have somewhat magical thinking. You’re going to make sense of it in a developmentally kind of matched way. You don’t have the luxury of this sort of context that adults have that you can’t gather more information to reassure yourself or make sense of something.

(24:23):

So they have this little tiny piece of information or fragment or collection of fragments of information, and they’re trying to thread it all together to make sense of it. And the story they come up with is terrifying. And the parents don’t quite think that they need to check in about that because why would, it’s like, oh, this is not a big deal. Okay. So I just think it’s a good reminder as parents to remember, we might read a situation and say, oh, okay, that’s not great, but I can handle this and assume our kid is kind of following suit and they’re turning it into something very different in their mind. So I guess it’s like have a low threshold for checking in and seeing what your kid understood or what stories they told themselves or so that you can make sure you’re correcting the narrative as necessary. Because we could assume our kids think like us, especially if they aren’t showing us that they’re in distress, but if our kids are exposed to something, I think it’s really helpful to go back and be like, I noticed that you saw that alert, or you heard me listening to the news this morning. What did you hear? Do you have any questions? Or how did that make you feel? We might find in actually probing that they heard something totally different and that we might want to correct that or help them process what they experienced.

Dr. Emily (25:54):

Yeah, I love that. I love circling back and really checking in and being curious without imbuing more anxiety. I love the idea of bringing it to conscious awareness and really talking about it in a way that feels safe and grounded in, we always talk about on here from a parent’s fully developed brain. It’s always the best place to get that information.

Dr. Rebecca (26:21):

I think that’s absolutely right. I totally agree. And we talk about how, I mean, I think we’ve done episodes on sharing difficult things in the news or difficult things with kids, and we always start with what have you heard? What have you heard about such and such wishes? In part a factual question, what have you heard? But obviously implicit in that is what’s your narrative? So it’s not just that it’s rechecking it, it’s sort of like, okay, not only what have you heard about, let’s say the war in the Middle East or whatever it is, but then a few days later, weeks, whatever, Hey, have you been thinking, I know we talked about this a couple of weeks ago. Is there anything you’ve been thinking about it or heard anything else? Just this idea of rechecking, because I think as parents, these conversations can be so unpleasant that we like to think of them as one and done, but things often stay with our kids as we know.

Dr. Sarah (27:20):

Yeah.

Dr. Rebecca (27:20):

That’s a great point.

Dr. Sarah (27:22):

Well, thank you guys. I hope you all liked this sort of impromptu shift in the format. And if you like this idea of us unpacking some of the research, let me know. Let us know. Send us an email or drop us a line. You could find us on the website at drsarahbren.com/question and let us know if this is something you’d want to see more of or if there are some research that you’ve come across that you’d love us to unpack or make sense of. We’re geeks. We love doing that. I’ll see you guys soon. Thank you.

Dr. Emily (28:02):

All right, bye.

Dr. Rebecca (28:03):

Absolutely. So long.

Dr. Sarah (28:03):

Thank you so much for listening. As you can hear, parenting is not one size fits all. It’s nuanced and it’s complicated. So I really hope that this series where we’re answering your questions really helps you to cut through some of the noise and find out what works best for you and your unique child. If you have a burning parenting question, something you’re struggling to navigate or a topic you really want us to shed light on or share research about, we want to know, go to drsarahbren.com/question to send in anything that you want, Rebecca, Emily, and me to answer in Securely Attached: Beyond the Sessions. That’s drsarahbren.com/question. And check back for a brand new securely attached next Tuesday. And until then, don’t be a stranger.