During the 2020 Melbourne lockdowns, the daily press conferences became a ritual of dread. Case numbers, death counts, outbreaks, restrictions. Day after day, the language of risk and death seeped into every corner of life. Staying glued to every update initially felt like a civic duty. Eventually, it was simply too much. The constant tallying of the dead and dying, the rolling coverage, the panels of experts. It all started to feel like an assault on my nervous system.
These days, the news diet looks very different. Television news is completely off the table. The internet gets only fleeting attention, just enough to catch headlines and local stories that directly affect my community. I do a check of the broad strokes of what is happening. Then comes the deliberate step back. This is not because I do not care about what is happening in the world. I do feel deep compassion and care for all humans of this •.
However, what has changed is the recognition that since 2020, my relationship with information has had to change. Through that agony, I have learned that I have no control over world events, and consuming endless disaster only floods my nervous system with cortisol I cannot metabolise.
The neuroscience supports my experience. When we scroll through distressing content, the amygdala triggers the fight-or-flight response before conscious processing. The HPA axis dumps cortisol into the bloodstream, and heart rates rise. Muscles tighten, and our body prepares for danger. Yet the danger is not here. It exists on a screen, thousands of kilometres away, filtered through editorial decisions and algorithmic curation. Human brains did not evolve to toggle between massacres, political spats, and kitten videos within seconds. Repeated exposure to traumatic content, even vicariously, activates mirror neurons, allowing us to feel the distress of others as if it were our own.
Over time, this creates vicarious trauma, including intrusive thoughts, hypervigilance, and emotional numbing. The nervous system bears the cost of witnessing suffering we cannot touch.
Psychologists describe the locus of control as the extent to which we believe we can influence life events. An external locus, where outcomes feel beyond personal influence, correlates strongly with anxiety and depression. Consuming media essentially outsources agency, flooding consciousness with crises I cannot solve, tragedies I cannot prevent, conflicts I cannot calm. News presents a curated selection of disasters, prioritised by editorial agendas, economic interests, and the reality that negative stories generate more engagement. This is not ground truth. It is a constructed narrative, shaped by ownership, funding, and attention metrics. The person on the ground experiences a reality infinitely more complex than any headline can capture.
This does not indicate a lack of compassion. The suffering of others is still felt deeply. Sleep is still lost thinking about people I will never meet, in circumstances barely imaginable. The longing to help remains, but resources, reach, and time are finite. What remains possible is stewarding my own capacity: showing up fully for people in my immediate sphere, volunteering, offering skills, voting with values, and maintaining emotional bandwidth for those in my community who need support. That is my actual sphere of influence. That is where the locus of control actually lives.
The media landscape is not reality. It is selection, magnification, and distortion. Media narratives often reflect institutional priorities rather than lived experience. Public and media agendas constantly diverge. The gaps between what is reported and what is true at ground level remain vast. We see not the world, but a particular construction of it, optimised for engagement rather than understanding.
Boundaries become necessary choices. Knowing enough to be informed, but not so much that paralysis sets in and protecting the nervous system so that showing up for what is actually mine to do remains possible. Compassion is not dependent on consumption. Empathy is not a transaction that requires a witness to every tragedy as proof of caring. The work is in the living, not the watching.
#MentalHealth #VicariousTrauma #NewsDiet #Boundaries #Melbourne #PandemicAftermath #Neurodivergent #Counselling #MediaLiteracy #SelfCare
