Political news is ruining your mental health.
What were you reading right before this article? Probably some news, most likely about the war in Iran, which is dominating coverage, and ancillary topics such as the effect on the economy and markets. Along the way, you most likely encountered and felt compelled to consume some political news and opinions. I don’t mean humdrum policy stuff: what Congress voted on today, or the like. Instead, I mean horse-race politics and lightning-rod punditry.
And this lowered your well-being.
My confidence that you read about politics owes to the fact that political dilettantism—closely following who’s up, who’s down, who created the latest outrage—is a national obsession. We can’t get enough of “monitoring the situation.” In a 2023 survey of American adults, about a third said they follow national politics “very closely.” Meanwhile, 62 percent of Americans consume news about politics and government “often” or “extremely often,” which is 30 percentage points above the next highest area of news interest.
Fine, you might say: It’s natural and healthy to form strong opinions about the president or his opponents and talk about them with friends; to watch political TV shows or listen to politics podcasts; to read or watch political punditry several times a day; to track politics closely on social media. This surely is evidence of good and informed citizenship, right?
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Actually, no. As the political scientist Eitan Hersh has argued persuasively, in the age of modern communications, the obsessive consumption of political news and commentary has for millions of people replaced the kind of participation that characterizes healthy democratic activity. Freaking out to your Facebook followers about whatever Donald Trump said yesterday is not what the great author of Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville, had in mind when he wrote in 1835: “A nation may establish a system of free government, but without the spirit of municipal institutions it cannot have the spirit of liberty.” By municipal institutions, he meant the building blocks of participatory democracy, not rage-tweeting from your couch.
Hersh would call this spectatorship a form of “hobbyism”—digestion of politics for emotional entertainment. Unfortunately, hobbyism dominates news cycles today: Pundits are like color commentators in sports, raising the emotional involvement of passive spectators. This is entirely different from a political system to which you might actively contribute. In the 19th century, Tocqueville witnessed citizens who felt real duty toward political participation—say, by attending local meetings and speaking with their townsfolk, in real life—which made them better, more informed citizens.
If politics is for you a hobby, and less an active and local duty, you are probably trapped in an abusive parasocial relationship with politicians and political media. You are being psychologically manipulated with emotional ups and downs in a way that makes you easier to control, for partisan or economic reasons. And this is probably also harming your mental health.
Here’s why I say this—and how you can free yourself.
In sales, a classic technique to coax a customer to spend more money is emotional instability. Researchers have shown by experiment that when negotiators create emotional fluctuations in participants, alternating between anger and happiness, these subjects make more concessions. You have probably experienced this yourself: Perhaps you have been through the home-buying experience and noticed that you were zigzagging from excitement at the prospect of a new home (“This is the perfect home to raise your family”) to fear of losing the purchase (“I’m not allowed to give you more details, but another offer is coming in later today”) to anger at delays and obstacles (“The seller is being stubborn”). As this process took you on an emotional roller coaster, the maximum price you were willing to pay for the house probably crept up—maybe by a lot.
This manipulation is effective but horrible for your mental health—especially if it becomes a semipermanent feature of your life, because emotional instability (not negative emotion per se) drives neuroticism. Psychologists have shown in multiple studies that variability in mood predicts clinical depression even better than consistent emotional negativity. One hypothesis to explain this finding is that frequent ups and downs, especially for people prone to depression, dysregulate the amygdala, a crucial part of your brain’s limbic system that regulates emotional processing, in a way that biases a person to overreact to negative stimuli and underreact to positive ones.
You might be exposed to this phenomenon if you have a moody spouse or partner. They may or may not be consciously manipulating you with their unpredictable emotions—Will she be cheerful when I get home or in a rage?—but it will work all the same to put you in a weaker position. Worse, it will lower your relationship satisfaction and well-being; and, according to research following couples over a decade, it might just kill your marriage. Similarly, a volatile boss may well create timid, pliant employees—but they will almost certainly be unhappy ones eager to work elsewhere.
This brings us back to the political psychodrama we see today. In a new paper published in the journal Emotion, four psychologists at Brown University showed that engagement in politics, especially for strong partisans, triggers frequent, large fluctuations in mood, which leads to higher levels of anxiety. People with strong political views are guided by emotive language from politicians, activists, and political media that delivers high highs (evil will be vanquished if our party wins) and low lows (this is the last free election if we lose).
All of this communication increases engagement: money, votes, clicks, and eyeballs for them, but addiction and misery for you.
You don’t have to live this way. What powers the Outrage Industrial Complex is your attention, which you can voluntarily withdraw. If you’re not sure about this, try a little test: For a week or so, read, watch, and listen to no political punditry at all. Read the news, sure—but keep political news to a bare minimum and completely avoid your favorite talking heads offering their takes on why the latest story really does signify the end of the world or a new golden age. If you need to, remove the social media apps from your phone, so the pundits can’t find you in your weak moments. If you observe Lent and are still keen to find something to give up, here you go.
Before you protest, let me repeat that I am not saying you should fast from news entirely, or just throttle back on politics in general and away from political commentary entirely. The stuff to cut out is punchy, hobbyist content that whipsaws your emotions, but over which you have no control.
If you try this, I predict four things will happen, because I have seen them many times. First, you will quickly realize how addicted you were to the emotional turmoil it had provoked in you. Second, you will be happier and at greater peace. Third, you will start to think and talk about deeper, more important matters than political opinions, such as your familial or spiritual life. Finally, you will realize that you didn’t miss anything more important than if you had skipped half a dozen episodes of your favorite soap opera. That is evidence that the affective cycle of highs and lows was only ever providing empty calories designed to keep you hooked on the telenovela of politics.
If you decide to return to consuming political information, be mindful of the emotional valence of headlines before you read or watch in more detail. Articles aiming to hijack your primitive limbic system are generally those that are framed as a promise or a complaint, inviting you to be ebullient or angry over something you hadn’t even thought about. And if you do return to the habit, make a rule for yourself to consume political information for one short period in the day—say, 15 minutes in the morning, and nothing more.
Does this modicum of abstinence mean you will be bereft of political opinions? Not at all. It just means you’re no longer willing to turn the management of your emotions over to professionals. Instead, you can insist on thinking critically for yourself about whether, and when, to have a strong opinion about something.
What do we call that kind of person? Free. And happier, to boot.
