Negative news are much more dangerous than you think

Whether you are scrolling social media or any mainstream news channels you come across a lot of negative news. It could be either of crime, violence, pandemic or any other unpleasant event happening in the world. All these negative news makes us realise how much the world is getting worse day by day. The more we scroll the more we realise that life is very unfair and people are bad. There is no hope left. But do you think the world is that bad. There are millions of  good things are going on in this world. There are so many people who are working selflessly for the society. But why we don't find them in the news anywhere. Is the world actually that bad or is it the media which tricking us and playing with our fears to get attention.

Negative news acts as a Clickbait

Media groups and social media handles always use negativity to grab attention. Why?  Because it triggers emotions of anger, rage and curiosity among people and they click as fast as they can. They scroll through the entire article or watch the complete video and then express their feelings in the comments.  If the news is terrible and bizarre enough people will share it to their friends and colleagues. 

We are always curios to know more

Yes we will do endless scrolling and watch as many videos as we can. We unconsciously waste lot of hours  everyday. Do you know why? Because we are curious. Our brain is always hungry for information. If we found something interesting we want to know more about it. Also if we believe something we will try to find more articles and videos as evidence to confirm our belief system. And with negative content on media this curiosity amplifies many times.

We are inherently negative bias

We are programmed to pay more attention to negative things in comparison to positive. This is because of our inherent survival instincts to spot danger. Because something negative means danger. We try to watch negative news content and apparently trying to make ourselves ready for facing similar situations in future. So with every bad news article you are consuming your survival instinct is kind of training you to handle that situation if it happens to yourself. So this is the reason we do Doom scrolling. Its a term which means consuming negative news in an endless loop.

Impact of 'Doom scrolling'

Once a wise man said 99% of things we worry about never happened. So, there are much higher probability that incident you are reading in a negative news will never happen to you. So what is the point of endless scrolling filling your mind with information which is of no use for you. More ever if you continuously expose yourself to negative news then it will make your brain more negative bias. 

You will see more negative in everything than positive. You will fear the things which will hardly occur. You feel kind of depressed thinking everything is bad. You will loose optimism for life. You will hardly trust anyone. Overall it takes a toll on your mental health and your relationships. 

How to avoid too much negative stuff consumption

Avoid too much usage of social media. And whenever you use it subscribe to pages who either share some positive things or any unbiased information.  Avoid  those pages and channels like infection who spread negativity. Also id you come across some negative news accidently like due to some random notification or by message from anyone. Then just read the main headline and then ignore it. You don't need to know too much about the entire incident. You just need to know the crux which you will get by scrolling through the heading. Remember you just need to be informed and not to be an expert on that subject.