A Neuroscientist Said Don't Watch The News. I Disagree

On the problems with black and white advice & visions of a better type of news.

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You’ve probably heard it a million times, “news is negative,” “news is exhausting,” “I don’t care it doesn’t affect me..” etc etc.

And these feelings are valid.

But why does it feel like the news is negative, exhausting and unimportant to us sometimes? (Surely some news is unimportant, but not all.)

It is my belief that keeping in touch with some of what is happening in our world is important. To avoid it entirely is irresponsible. We are stewards of the earth, this experience, and our societies. How can we steward meaningfully if we are ignorant?

This doesn’t mean we have to follow every story and painstakingly watch the news every day, it means we have to think about better ways of engaging with news content and finding the right outlets that provide a meaningful experience.

I have believed and modelled for a long time that a new way of approaching news is necessary and should be embraced by viewers and creators. This is what I’d like to talk about in this piece, and I will share the results we got from an extensive research survey we ran in 2020 that I don’t think we should ignore within the discussion of conscious media.

To News or Not To News

I recently saw a post from a neuroscientist, Dr Tara Swart, talking about why she does not watch the news. Here is what she wrote:

“This is why I, a neuroscientist (and every other neuroscientist I know!) avoids watching the news…

The human brain has a negativity bias. This means it tends to give more attention to negative experiences than positive ones.

The news often focuses on distressing and traumatic events, this can trigger this bias and cause us to release spikes of stress hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline.

This reaction was adaptive for our ancestors who needed to be on high alert for physical threats, but in the context of the modern world, this response contributes to chronic stress and anxiety.

On a neurological level, avoiding exposure to continual and repetitive, emotive stressors will help to maintain a healthier mental state.

I do look on social media obviously, and my friends and family let me know if there’s something I need to be informed of.”

Simply put, if we expose ourselves to negativity all the time we can train our brain to be negative. She’s not wrong, but she has oversimplified a very important topic, and in my view, is disempowering people even though she has loving intentions.

(This is a critique of her statement, not her work as a whole which is good from my perspective.)

With this advice we’re left with a conundrum: if we avoid crises or solutions happening in our world, we can’t do anything to meaningfully engage with them.

Knowledge is power. Not just in our personal lives but in society. The macro is a reflection of the micro.

If we ignore problems, issues, feelings, or hard experiences they just become bigger problems later. Further, if we aren’t aware of meaningful solutions to well defined problems, we can’t implement them.

What I generally feel is people are exhausted with the narratives, deception, lies and polarization that infect the news. It makes sensemaking confusing and problematic and feels like a problem we can’t tackle, so we choose to avoid it.

The real solution here is discussing a better way of going about the news, media, and societal discussion as it relates to our collective story.

As someone who has been practicing and teaching the healing arts for a long time, I am well aware of the effects constant negativity can have on rewiring our brain, causing us to feel down and unwell more often. This is why I think it’s important to discuss how news can be done differently instead of avoiding it altogether and giving up.

The Collective Evolution Philosophy On News

The hard part with news is not the stories that are easy and feel good, it’s in the stories that are tough and controversial. How can we stay grounded, solution oriented, and regulated with those?

To be clear, regulated in this case means feeling emotions but processing them effectively. In this way, we don’t avoid nor let them take over and blind us. This is a much deeper discussion and not for this article.

I could write a book on this subject because it’s so extensive. But for the purposes of this piece, I’m going to simplify the ideas and practices I have put into our work since 2009.

I don’t claim our methods were/are perfect but hope they are added as a contribution to the collective consciousness as something to build on. A great deal of love, care, and consciousness has gone into developing our methods since 2009, and I hope they are put to good use by more people and organizations out there.

How It Began

In 2009, following my passion to help birth a new story and consciousness to emerge for humanity, I created Collective Evolution (CE).

One of the elements of CE was creating conscious news and media that would tackle what was happening in our world through a conscious evolutionary lens.

This means asking: how can we examine current events to understand not only what behavior, story, or consciousness was driving these events, but how we could also see our current events as an opportunity to evolve.

(For me, this is how I define conscious media. Which may be vastly different from other definitions.)

By nature, this means tackling subjects without unnecessary layers of judgement, polarization, politicization or making fun of people who believe something different. This happens to be the tool used heavily by mainstream and alt media and YouTube stars everywhere today under the guise of “partisanship” or “comedy”.

I’m all for comedy, but when we constantly make fun of or shame people in an attempt to change their beliefs we are engaging in division and polarization whether we like it or not. It’s then ironic when these presenters turn around and say “the MSM or government are dividing and conquering us!”

On this point, from an evolutionary perspective, can’t we see how the same consciousness operates within humanity whether it be at an ‘elitist’ level or within media circles?

Back to our story, by 2014 CE had grown to become one of the top 1000 websites in the world, driving 30 million viewers to our website on a monthly basis. We covered anything from emerging solutions and technologies, to emerging consciousness science, to examining current events, to health and wellness practices and more.

CE was designed to be an ecosystem of transformation and held true to that vision no matter what subject was spoken about.

Main Drivers Of Our Work

1. The evolutionary lens is very important. When you can prompt readers with insights, expansive questions, and different framings, people think and feel differently about stories. They are brought out of the everyday consciousness around them.
   
   Problems become better defined and we can get to the core of what’s driving our collective behavior. It can become more inspiring and engaging vs. disheartening and numbing.
   
   Ex. Instead of seeing COVID as a moment of pure authoritarian agenda or a fearful crisis… what does it show us about the worldview of government and the irresponsible meddling with nature? Can we see that things like censorship, lies and deceit actually awakens others to understanding what’s broken?
   
   What if we anchor into and act from that evolutionary perspective vs. the hatred and constant disdain of the censors? What if we sought to understand the worldview of the people around us vs. fighting them solely with ‘facts’?
   (Here is another example of framing crisis’.)
   
   For this lens to be natural, content creators have to embrace and see life through an evolutionary lens. This is a challenge in a collective worldview that doesn’t teach this way of seeing things, but it’s an emerging consciousness nonetheless.
   

2. The way news is delivered matters. Language, voice, tone, and things to encourage readers to consider matters. Creating content from a settled, regulated, and expansive place means that energy goes into the work.
   
   If delivering on voice or video, the way one shows up is key. Is their presence agitating and dysregulating the viewer? If so, is that useful?
   
   What if their presence and language were settling viewers, signalling safety and creating a space for them to think more deeply?

   
   The key here is ‘settling’ not creating a lull and passivity. It’s about staying emotionally regulated and not getting caught up in a limbic hijack of panic, fear or aggression.
   
   Being careful about drama, negative and divisive language, and not consistently making fun of the other side is important. Framing news in a way that can drive toward solution is useful when possible.
   

3. The framework I developed for this is what I call embodied sensemaking. Since 2016 we have been prompting our readers to connect with their body and heart, take a moment to settle, and connect to their environment before engaging. This invites the reader to be more intentional and present while engaging and can help synchronize the heart and brain while reading. The creator can engage in this as well.
   

4. Being driven by a model of 24 hour news, hitting on every development as if it’s useful wasn’t our approach. Instead, we focused on bigger overarching ideas and stories that could provide value.
   
   We look at individual stories as a chance to expand our worldview. If we can show obvious deceit and corruption by a government, we can ask things like “What does this say about the nature of those leaders? What does it say about how our systems truly work? Do we really have a democracy if we have no say in 99% of decisions? etc”
   
   By examining all the facts, we can often see that it isn’t about one political side being more right than another either, but that there are deeper factors at play.
   

5. We can’t avoid the “shadow” of humanity. We have to look to some extent, but doing so in a way that keeps us grounded, balanced and in tune with ourselves is key. That intention can be held and there are practical ways of doing that.
   
   This has to be the culture and consciousness within the team of content creators. There’s no ideology to drive this, but instead, a grounded, settled, and expanded way of being that has to be lived.

The Survey

In 2020, after years of doing this work, we took the time to conduct a research survey to gain at least some insight into whether this was working. We knew it had to have been to some extent as we’d got 1000’s of emails over the years with positive audience experiences, but we wanted to dive deeper.

1500+ respondents answered queries from our carefully crafted survey and answered questions on a Likert scale. Participants had been following our media for as little as 6 months or as long as our founding in 2009.

First I want to say I don’t claim these results and survey to be perfect. They are a starting point, a contribution to the field of conscious media that I hope is meaningful.

I am only sharing a few of the results here to keep this piece shorter. The full results and discussion of our survey is here.

• 84% feel that CE’s work helps them make sense of what’s happening in the world.

This was the starting point because we wanted to be sure we offered something to help people make sense of the world around them. Check.

• 94% feel they are being invited to ask questions vs. just being told answers.

This question was a test of the approach of engaging curiosity and inquiry while exploring all of our content.

To me, when news and media provide some facts but avoid judgment or useless conclusions, and instead ignite curiosity, we tend to think more deeply about what to make of something and perhaps what to do about it. This comes from providing prompts in the writing or the video that can ignite that curiosity.

• 87% of our audience say they feel grounded consuming our content, and 77% feel empowered.

This was a general ask of what type of experience people had as they read our content so we could get a baseline before comparing it to other media outlets.

• 63% said that we cover tough or controversial events better, keeping them more emotionally calm and regulated, in comparison to those same events being covered by mainstream media or alternative media.

To us, this meant we were on the right track. If these results are accurate, and to be honest they match the thousands of testimonials, it means you can talk about crisis-type events and difficult or controversial subjects without negativity and making people feel like shit. Straight up.

Of course, the creator of content cannot control the reaction of another, but they can take care in increasing the chances the viewer ends up curious, served, settled and expanded.

The Sad Part?

For those who know our story, censorship caught up with us in 2016, and by 2019 we were out of most people’s social media algorithms.

This was a huge problem for us because, behaviorally we seem to engage with media based on what lands in front of us on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Google or YouTube. We rarely go to our favorite websites to read what they have to say.

In a sense, our culture has forgone a sense of autonomy in exchange for a hijacking of our consciousness through algorithms. We become unconscious of what the algorithms are feeding us, not realizing their goal is polarization and addiction not feeding good content.

Once CE was removed from algorithms between 2016 and 2019, we went away. The Pulse in 2021 was created in an attempt to get around censors. But that didn’t work too well.

To conclude, when it comes to our neuroscientist, I have a very different lens for how I see news and what can be done about it. I also think it’s worth it to ask whether news makes us feel bad quickly because we may not feel a sense of fundamental wellness. i.e. stress is high, news puts it over the top.

As we become more conscious and aware, our ability to respond must grow for us to say we are being meaningful stewards of our world. This does not mean it’s up to YOU to fix all the problems, but where is your place? What can you do? How can you engage? Who can you inspire? How? What story can you hold? What conversations are you having?

By disengaging and calling it all negative, we can become ignorant. It’s a fine line, but one not discussed enough.

Final Points

• It’s not just news style and creators here, it’s also the viewers. One must take care of their own health and well-being in order to have the capacity to engage with the outside world and news in a healthy way. Our culture needs greater awareness of how to truly be well.

• Organizations that focus only on '“positive news stories” are not tackling the problem I’m pointing to, they are doing a different service of aggregating feel good stories. This leaves our ability to understand, define and do something about the real crisis’ of our planet untouched. We still must address that.

• I think we must find a balance when it comes to watching news for now. We have to be informed, but not obsessed. We have to also consider what capacity we have at a given time to truly take in the news. Sometimes we do need a break. Perhaps in the future when conscious news is more prominent, things will be different.

• Not all news is created equally, and a lot of it is programming us in ways we may not even realize - alternative and mainstream.

• Constantly turning a blind eye to news to avoid negativity bias is like saying “I have no power.” This is bad advice in my opinion and I feel I have presented a better way.

• Really take time and be present when you listen to or read news. How do you feel? Do you feel better or worse after? Can you sense why? Can you sense how you’d like to feel? Could you or the creator have done anything different? There isn’t necessarily a right or wrong answer here, but instead, we’re inquiring about better ways of tackling this complicated subject.

I’ve envisioned one day having a visionary investor see the need and value of this work and help make it happen. Since we got censored and demonetized, it’s hard to go from having millions in resources to run a company to having just enough for a couple of employees to get by.

I’ve had to turn my attention to other things, and the media has taken more of a back seat for me.

I believe these concepts of conscious media will one day become the norm. And regardless of my story, I feel we made a deep and meaningful contribution to the world of conscious media and hope it is built upon and embraced.