Minimise Negative News

It can feel impossible to turn on the TV without being hit with stories of doom and gloom across the globe. It’s important to stay up to date with the latest news and updates however choose your media wisely.

Timing matters!

One study showed that watching even just a few minutes of negative news in the morning can negatively impact your emotional state and mood later that day. In fact, people were 27% more likely to report their day as unhappy up to 6-8 hours later.

Shawn Archer, author of Big Potential, describes this as taking a poison pill every morning that makes all your efforts, energies and interactions more toxic.

There is a large body of evidence to suggest that a negative mood impacts business outcomes and resilience. For one thing, when faced with a challenging problem-solving task, negative people tire more easily, give up easily and come up with fewer correct answers.

Also beware of sensationalised news stories or over-consuming news you find disturbing as this can create a feeling of powerlessness. Like nothing you do matters. Martin Seligman refers to this as Learned Helplessness and has been connected with low performance and higher likelihood of depression.

Consuming negative social media can have a similar effect. It turns out mood is contagious.
As first noted by The New Scientist and Animal New York, Facebook's data scientists manipulated the News Feeds of 689,003 users, removing either all of the positive posts or all of the negative posts to see how it affected their moods.

The researchers, led by data scientist Adam Kramer, found that emotions were contagious. "When positive expressions were reduced, people produced fewer positive posts and more negative posts; when negative expressions were reduced, the opposite pattern occurred," according to the paper published by the Facebook research team in the PNAS. "These results indicate that emotions expressed by others on Facebook influence our own emotions, constituting experimental evidence for massive-scale contagion via social networks."

It’s a great time to clean up your social media feed or, better still, take a break from it.