511 - Protecting Your Relationship from the News
Negativity bias in media and relationships
Recent research (within the last two years or so) has shown that news headlines that evoke anger and fear have increased within the last two decades, reinforcing the idea that negativity drives online media consumption.
A wide variety of researchers and therapists agree that consuming negative news can lead to:
Increased distress, anxiety and depression, even when the news is relatively mundane.
Acute stress reactions and symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.
Worsening of personal worries and concerns.
Development of fears and phobias about rare but horrible events like plane crashes or terrorist attacks.
Feelings of helplessness, hopelessness, and despair.
Heightened baseline stress levels.
Activation of the sympathetic nervous system, causing physiological stress responses.
Increased levels of cortisol (the body's main stress hormone).
Physical symptoms like muscle tension, chest pain, and digestive issues.
Clearly, negative media has an impact on us. Therefore, it must also have an impact on our relationships. There’s research showing that it can contribute to stress and unhappiness in our partnerships in a few key areas:
Increased Stress and Anxiety
More conflict between partners.
Decreased emotional availability.
Reduced relationship satisfaction.
Decreased Quality Time
Overconsumption of negative media, especially on social media platforms, can lead to:
Less quality time spent together as a couple.
Phubbing behaviors (snubbing one's partner by focusing on a smartphone).
Lower relationship satisfaction and increased conflict.
Cognitive distraction. Giving your partner “cognitive room” is an important aspect of showing care and building intimacy, but that is harder if we’re distracted by our worries from what we read/watch.
Negative Mood Contamination
The negative emotions elicited by fearful news consumption can transfer to interactions with one's partner, resulting in:
More negative communication patterns.
Lower relationship satisfaction.
Displacement of Relationship Activities
Time spent consuming negative media may displace time that could be spent on relationship-building activities.
The “urgency” created by negative news causes it to be more addicting and for us to over-value our consumption of it.
So how do we combat it?
There are a few ways we can be conscious of our media consumption and start to decrease its affect on our lives and relationships to foster better partnerships and healthier lives
Monitor your media diet:
If watching news is your kryptonite, try limiting yourself to only reading.
Set aside specific times for news consumption and avoid it all other times.
Switch up your news sources.
Before you click on anything, first look at the headlines and see if you can spot the negative spin and how much it makes you want to click on it.
Jase uses Ground News, which has helped his consumption some.
2. Make your own positive activities:
Engaging in joint family activities away from screens
There was research during the pandemic that showed specifically families or couples who did regular activities together (walks, movie night, games, exercise, etc) had higher levels of relationships satisfaction compared to families who did not do that regularly, and had higher levels of anxiety and fear.
There have been many studies that have studied the ratio of positive to negative interactions in couples and in workplaces, and it has been pretty universal that a ratio of 3:1 positive to negative interactions shows better satisfaction AND better performance than teams with less than that.
The Gottmans suggest even higher ratios for romantic couples to have healthy, happy relationships.
If the media you consume is negatively affecting that, then this is something you urgently need to change.
3. Look for inspiration to balance it out!
Look for positive shared experiences within your relationships.
If there is a cause you find particularly important, try to look for things that have been successful for changing it (and also notice what people are doing that isn’t actually productive, even though it may feel like it).
Check out Fix The News for a weekly dose of positive news that acknowledges problems but showcases the areas where there is hope and where we are making progress.
Transcript
This document may contain small transcription errors. If you find one please let us know at info@multiamory.com and we will fix it ASAP.
Jase: On this episode of the Multiamory Podcast, we're talking about the negativity bias, how it has affected our media landscape, how that affects our wellbeing, and specifically how it can damage our relationships as well as our health if we aren't aware of it. This is a topic near and dear to my heart that I've been thinking about a lot recently, and I'm excited for us to dive into this and look at what some of the research says, what we've seen in relationships, as well as what we've observed in our communities and the larger online community in general.
If you're interested in learning about some of our fundamental communication tools that we reference on this show, check out our book, Multiamory: Essential Tools for Modern Relationships. You can get information about that at multiamory.com/book or wherever you get your books. Okay. Welcome Dedeker and Emily to this storytime.
Emily: Thank you. Happy to hear.
Dedeker: Actually, can I have question time first before storytime?
Emily: Of course.
Jase: Okay. Sure, sure.
Dedeker: Jase, why do you hate being an informed citizen?
Jase: Oh, boy. Hmm. Okay. Now this is interesting.
Emily: Exactly.
Jase: I think we can get into this a little bit here-
Emily: Very interesting.
Jase: -because that's not true. I don't hate that . Let me tell you the story here and then you can ask your question again if you think it's still unanswered. The thing that inspired this episode is I was listening to an interview with the guy who started this site called Fix The News. In it he was talking about a couple interesting statistics, and I looked this up on their site and looked up the papers that they referenced and things like that. Let me just start by giving you a quick rundown of this information, and then we'll look at how this is relevant to relationships.
First is from a 2022 paper by Rozado, Hughes, and Halberstadt. This was a study of 23 million headlines from 47 popular news outlets in the United States. They looked at the headlines of these 23 million headlines from 2002 to 2022, so for two decades. They found that the share of headlines that denoted anger increased by 104%.
Emily: Over those two decades?
Jase: Over those two decades, and that the share evoking fear surged 150%, so a massive increase in both of these in terms of the number of headlines that have to do with anger or fear. Now, another study from 2023 from Robertson et al, the title says it all, Negativity Drives Online News Consumption. For this one, they looked at over a hundred thousand different variations of news story headlines from upworthy.com, if you remember Upworthy?
Dedeker: Oh boy, those were the days, and you'll never guess what number seven is and you will cry, and then you see what this child gave to his mom. I was shocked, and I was speechless when I saw number three, how I can keep going, shall I?
Jase: No, you're nailing it. You're crushing it. . Specifically what they were doing here was about news stories, and they were looking at news stories on there where it would be the same story, but on average there would be like four point-something different headlines for that same news story that would get put on there. They looked at the click-through rates of the different headlines for the same story so they could do analysis based on the sentiment of it, the topic of the news story, things like that. When they looked at that, they found, this is a quote directly from the study, "For a headline of average length, each additional negative word increased the click-through rate by 2.3%, and a larger proportion of positive words resulted in fewer clicks."
Emily: So like if you have the words anger, sadness, betrayal, fearful, like all of those things in one headline than you are more-
Jase: No, no more subtle than that. More that you're saying like, we should be disgraced at this choice we've made, or this will be the decade we regret the most. Those types of negative words.
Dedeker: Wait, were those headlines on up? I thought it was all feel-good stuff.
Jase: Yes. They are 100,000 of them were apparently according to this. Basically they found this very clear correlation where more negative got more clicks than more positive. I think that's worth noting because how algorithms work is something that gets talked about a fair amount. I think there's this thing of people saying, "Oh, it's this like malicious algorithm. It's being designed to control us or make us angry or keep us addicted or whatever."
I think this is a clear example of where a relatively innocent algorithm can have really negative results. I think that's actually what we've seen with a lot of the algorithms that cause problems online, that cause our interactions to be more negative. If you imagine you wrote a super simple algorithm that was just articles that get more clicks will feature more so that we get more clicks on our site, right?
That simple, but this negativity bias, which is a well-known psychological phenomenon with humans where we're more likely to focus on a negative thing than a positive one. You put those two things together, you get a pretty bad thing. Another piece of this, too, they looked at how that related to the topic, and specifically, they found that if the article was about government and economy, LGBT, parenting and school, or people, they received even more clicks per negative word than other topics did. They found that headlines relating to LGBT life, parenting in school, and people especially received fewer clicks when they contained a large share of positive words.
My theory here is that these are more like personal feeling topics, and I saw some other research which I didn't include in this episode, but found some other research that suggested the more personal a topic is the stronger this desire is, and also the more significant the effect is on our own wellbeing, which makes sense. Right?
Dedeker: Personal topics as in stuff that feels like it's relevant to our own lives.
Jase: It feels relevant to you personally.
Dedeker: Sure.
Jase: Exactly. Looking at all of this, there's a huge variety of papers and articles from therapists and researchers that consuming negative news and also consuming negative social media leads to increased distress, anxiety, and depression, even when the news is relatively mundane, that it can trigger acute stress reactions and even symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. That it is correlated with worsening of personal worries and concerns, development of fears and phobias about rare yet horrible events like plane crashes is a good example of news can make you terrified to fly on a plane even though statistically it's safer than any other mode of transportation.
Emily: I hate flying, and all of those fricking Twitter things that have come out recently of really terrible turbulence not helping.
Jase: Right, but that's a great example of, that's a negative thing, it invokes fear, and that gets the clicks, it gets your attention, and it gets a reaction from you.
Emily: Absolutely.
Jase: That's exactly what we're talking about here.
Emily: A large reaction.
Jase: Yes. It also increases feelings of helplessness, hopelessness, and despair, which are some key ones that we'll come back to, I think, in terms of how it affects our relationships, increases heightened baseline stress levels. It activates the sympathetic nervous system, which is cortisol and adrenaline and those things for when we're in an emergency-type situation, but having those in our body all the time can cause physiological problems and stress responses there. It increases cortisol, and can lead to symptoms like muscle tension, chest pain, digestive issues.
I wanted to end this section with the quote from Fix The News on their About page, where basically they're saying, it's not just you, the news really has become more negative. It's making us feel grim about the present and hopeless about the future. Pessimism is so deeply ingrained in our media culture that it's become the default frame imposed on all of our realities.
I was listening to this while I was washing dishes and was thinking, "That all makes a lot of sense. I've definitely have some felt experience of all of that in my own life. I've seen it how it affects other people and online communities in general I've seen really change based on headlines and news cycles." It got me thinking, "How does all this affect our relationships with our loved ones and our families?"
That's what I want to get into in this episode. I'm just curious, after hearing what we just covered, does anything come to mind for you? Is there anything you're like, "Oh, shit." Is this an oh, shit moment? Or is this like, yes, yes, Jase, get over it. You got to read the horrible news. That's the only way you'll know how to be prepared."
Emily: I did think yet again about what Dedeker asked at the beginning of the episode, which is, do you just not want to be informed? Because I do think that a lot of people might go there when they look at something like this, that it is super important to be informed, to be understanding of all of the things that are going on in the life that we have around us in our personal communities, but also things that are happening across the world, for instance, many, many atrocities as well. It's difficult because there can be like a big sense of hopelessness with all of that and a questioning of what can I actually do?
I think if you couple that sense of hopelessness with a constant consumption of negative media, that ultimately is what gets you really, really down, and it probably causes you to just feel like, "What am I even doing here? I can't help or do anything, but I still feel like I should be informed." I guess it's finding that balance between what are the things that you can personally do? What amount of media is going to be necessary for you to feel like you are an informed citizen, but then also, how can you continue to save yourself from all of the harm that that knowledge can potentially give you?
Dedeker: I rescind my earlier question. I don't want to ask, why do you hate staying informed? I want to ask, why do you hate me? Why are you calling me out with this episode?
Emily: Oh, I see why you asked.
Jase: It's a little more personal than you thought.
Dedeker: It's a little more closer to home. Buckle in because here I'm going to spew a lot of stuff. First of all, to let our listeners know, we are currently recording this while still in the election cycle. The election itself has not happened, and I do feel like this is a very particular moment in a bigger, more meta news cycle where the feelings of like, both this desperate, oh my God, I need to keep tabs on everything that is happening and the time when it's probably going to be, may be the most upsetting and not very helpful and not very conducive to good mental health. I feel like both of those things are at its peak with the exception of when some really, truly horrible disaster happens.
Jase: Sure. Though I will make a bold prediction right now that even though you, the listener, are probably listening to this several months after we've recorded this because we're doing this one in advance, I bet if you look at your news, every single thing we say here is going to hold true there. May not be about the election specifically, although who knows? There's going to be horrible stuff, and the headlines are going to be filled with fear and sadness. The statistics show that's been increasing over the last 20 years, and I don't see any reason why that's going to change because that's what makes social media companies and news companies money but now please continue.
Dedeker: Oh, okay. Thank you. I'll keep spewing. I think that I started to feel into this after the 2016 election specifically. That was maybe my first turning point into like, "Oh my God, I really need to figure out my dosage of not just social media but of the news cycle in general." I do feel like collectively we're still figuring out how to handle a 24-hour news cycle. That's still relatively new to us. Some of my attempts at this have involved the same app that blocks all my social media apps and only allows me on them for a couple of hours a day. I also have it block most news apps, actually all the news apps, including my preferred news app. Here's a confession time. Jase and I actually have a paper newspaper subscription on Sundays.
Emily: It's very cute.
Dedeker: I think for a while I figured, if it was good enough for my grandparents, it's good enough for me to maybe just have that be my diet of like-- I think that unfortunately print news, of course, is eventually one day going to be completely extinct, but it's still here with us. I think print news is not necessarily immune from this.
Jase: Not at all.
Dedeker: Because they're just syndicating the stuff that goes online at this point.
Jase: It's all the same story, same headline.
Dedeker: At least when I'm holding a newspaper, I can know that it's not going to serve me up more news stories once I get to the end of the page or the end of the newspaper, and I can throw it to the side of me on the couch and look at a plant, and it's a little easier.
Jase: I have seen you do that.
Dedeker: It's a little easier to do that than when I'm reading news on my phone. I don't know if any of this is helpful. I'm literally just spewing because I feel so called out right now.
Jase: Wow. I honestly did not expect you to have such a big reaction to this, but I'm excited about it.
Dedeker: I agree with you. I think I agree with you.
Emily: I also listen to The Daily every single day and tech podcasts that also talk about the news at large, so I feel you, Dedeker. I just may not do it every single day. I try to maybe do it four times a week or maybe every weekday but not every weekend day.
Jase: I do want to point out, too, that while this research I've been talking about is about the news, we've seen this same thing play out in algorithms on social media, too, where there's this favoritism in the algorithm for something that gets big reactions from people, which also tends to be upsetting things. Also the hyper-idealized things, which we've talked about on other episodes in terms of self-image and self-esteem and stuff like that, but that there, too, in terms of blogs or social media posts or even YouTube videos or whatever, there's still going to be this same psychological draw toward the more negative leaning things, especially fear and sadness. Those were the ones that were shown to be the most clickbaity. Interestingly, anger, not as much. Anger did not correlate as much with an increased click through as specifically fear and sadness did, which was interesting.
Dedeker: The whole point is talking about the effect that this has on our relationships. Do you think this affects our relationship? Does this affect how you feel about me? Does this affect things? Am I ruining our relationships secretly this entire time?
Jase: I would say, how you feel about me. That's the case to make here, is that that the media we consume does affect how we think and it also affects how we act in big and small ways. That's what I want to get into in the second part of this episode, is looking at what are the ways that affects us? I just want to say one other thing to what you mentioned, Emily, about being important to stay informed about what's going on in your community or the world at large or atrocities or whatever.
I think that we're in this interesting place. Again, like Dedeker mentioned, we as humans, the idea of 24-hour access to news has happened in the last millisecond when we're looking at this from the whole scope of humans existing and being social creatures. That's new to us. The online nature of anyone can be a purveyor of news, and so many people is all change too. I think there's a couple important factors there. One is, yes, understanding what's going on is important, but the constant availability of that is so great.
Two, that I would bet most of the news and articles and videos most people read are covering the same things over and over again, just expressing slightly different opinions about them or maybe some tiny update, but actually the whole article is just rehashing the same stuff over and over again. I think there's a little bit of an illusion that constantly reading news actually keeps you that much more informed. Then third, and this one I think is key to where it affects our relationships, our interpersonal relationships, is the distinction between what affects my community and what doesn't, or what's further removed gets blurred online.
Where if people are posting about terrible things happening in your larger community, like the non-monogamy community or the queer community or something like that, for example, it feels really personal. I personally feel more connected to those people than to your average person because I'm in an in-group with them, and yet, I'm exposed to many, many, many more thousands of people's stories and suffering and upset than I would be ever in human history before.
I think our brains are just not really set up to handle that very well. We can react in as if, oh my God, within my community of 150 people, every single person has something horrible happening to them. This must be a disaster on an extinction level scale. I should be freaking out and paralyzed and maybe running away, maybe shutting myself in a cave. All of these reactions that when you're reading some online are not healthy reactions, and they're not conducive to your physical health or your mental health which then, in turn, affects how you put stuff back into your community which then affects all of this, right? It's this whole thing hits this amplifying spiral.
I guess what I'm trying to say is I don't want to say bury your head in the sand and ignore all the news but to acknowledge how serious a problem this actually is and how it's not even necessarily a problem that anybody has done intentionally. Just our negativity bias and this massive availability of information, and then the reinforcement of things that get reactions being the things more people see, that combination of things has caused a really problematic situation. If we're not aware of it and not doing things about it for at least our own lives, then we're in big trouble. There's a lot of research backing that up. There was especially a lot done during the pandemic.
Dedeker: Sure.
Jase: Because I think that's when things really kicked into overdrive in terms of the effects on health. Now, let's get into some of the specifics about how does this affect our relationships, and this is relationships in terms of our family, our loved ones, our friends, I would say even our closer community, possibly even our wider online communities. I think that's what we can discuss a little bit as we get into all of this.
When it comes to these ways that this affects our own lives and our interpersonal relationships, there were a very large number of different studies that cover one, like how social media affects our relationships. There were, like I mentioned before the break, several studies about specifically news consumption and anxiety during the pandemic and how that affected people's family lives and their satisfaction within their marriages or their partnerships. There's also something that a lot of therapists have written blogs about online and written articles about, and then also, there's a lot of research about how increased anxiety and increased fear affects our relationship.
This list was put together from lots of those different sources, and I see these more as starting discussion prompts rather than trying to treat this one super scientifically of like, "Oh, well, this study says XYZ," and more trying to look at that effect as a whole as well as just what we've observed.
Emily: I think it's definitely safe to say that if you are consuming a lot of this type of media, there's the potential for a huge amount of stress and anxiety to come into your life from just the constant barrage of negativity that's coming your way from headlines. All of us I feel like have parents who keep the news on at all times. When you enter the house, it's just on basically.
Dedeker: It feels like a Boomer generational thing.
Emily: For sure.
Jase: I think it's more Boomer. For sure.
Dedeker: Okay. We're not any better. Us and younger generations aren't any better because we have a device that's on all the freaking time.
Jase: That's true.
Emily: Where we have our face in it at all times as well.
Dedeker: Yes. It's the same, I think.
Emily: Yes, but in a very acceptable way.
Jase: This is one that's not just potentially, but there's very clear evidence in many studies that this does increase our stress and anxiety when we consume these things. That's specifically when we feel like we're under threat personally, our brain's ability to filter out the news even if we are someone who's not so predisposed, turns off. In states of a heightened sense of emergency like a pandemic or maybe an election or a terrorist attack or something like that, we're even more susceptible to this.
Emily: If you have that, you're probably going to have more conflicts between yourself and your partners. You might have decreased emotional availability because your emotions are being taken up by all of the negativity that's happening. It's very difficult to be able to go to your partner when they're in need and be able to give that to them if you are so preoccupied with the things that are going on within your brain and heart. There is a potential for reduced relationship satisfaction as well.
Dedeker: I know also that so much of relationship success can also be chalked up to how well do the people in the relationship manage external stress. External stress can be these day-to-day things like work stress or raising children or caring for somebody who's ill or somebody who's aging or dealing with, I don't know, the car broke down again or whatever, but I also do think that of course, our bigger circumstances that tend to be reflected back to us in the news, I would categorize under external stress.
That is yet another source of external stress that has to be managed. When we're in a state of maybe in an almost addicted fashion like seeking out to add more of that external stress, like it is going to call on and put pressure on the resources that are in the relationship for managing that.
Jase: Yes, absolutely.
Emily: We talked, Dedeker, about the fact that during an election cycle, people going out and consuming and buying products, for example, that goes down. When I have been working at the restaurant in New York City, it feels like during this time not as many people are going out and wanting to go out to eat, for instance. I do wonder if that is just simply because their emotional bandwidth, or just the worry that something might explode in some way is a reasoning behind why they choose not to consume in the same way that they would.
Jase: I think that that base level of stress and anxiety that we mentioned earlier that that study looked at an increasing base level anxiety, base level stress. I think that combined with fear, that being higher, now, this is just me speculating here, I'm curious what you think, that it leads to more of a shutdown response.
Whereas I think sometimes people can consume that thinking, "Oh, I need to know so that I can know what needs fixing in the world and how I can make it a better place," but an overexposure to that, and particularly, I did find some research that said, "A prolonged exposure to negativity has the opposite effect," it's more likely to make you shut down and actually be less affected and less likely to actually go out and do something versus if it's just, "Oh, suddenly something came up," it's like, "Oh, yes. I'm going to go do something about that.
Emily: Yes. That makes sense. Just that overall if you're super preoccupied with something, you're going to have less bandwidth to go out and do something fun like you usually would just because, well, I'd rather stay in and deal with this by myself instead of trying to go out and change the behavior or change my mindset and have a fun time, for instance, with a loved one.
Jase: Have you ever had that experience where, I think it's like that thing when you're sad or you're upset and it's like, "I don't actually want to cheer up right now. I want to dwell in this"
Emily: Wallow in it.
Jase: Like, "I'm going to listen to sad music for a bit." That I think can be helpful. I do it sometimes, too, but I do feel there's a little bit of an inertia or something of like, once you're in a mental state, it's not so easy to just say, "Oh, let me try to change that by doing something that'll make me happy." I think all of this is not conscious at all. We're not really thinking, "Oh, I'm worried, so I'm going to stay in." It's all this subconscious stuff affecting our behavior.
Dedeker: As we covered a little bit in the attention episode that this can also lead to a decrease in quality of time with the people that you care about. In that episode, we talked a lot about what the researchers call fubbing behaviors as in snubbing one's partner by focusing on a phone that this can lead to lower relationship satisfaction, increased conflict, and just straight-up cognitive distraction.
Giving your partner cognitive room is an important aspect of showing care and building intimacy, but of course, it's harder if we're distracted by our worries from what we're reading or what we're watching. Jase made an interesting point of like, "Is this episode going to count as some negative media? Are we being too negative? Are we being too fearmongering? Are we being too sadness-producing? Are we a part of the problem?"-
Emily: That's a good question.
Dedeker: -is what I'm trying--
Jase: How are we a part of the problem?
Dedeker: I know overall on Multiamory, the meta-view of Multiamory, I think we try to be generally pretty positive and encouraging, but are we also making it worse?
Emily: Are we a part of the problem right now? Maybe.
Jase: No, I know. I have given this a lot of thought in putting this episode together of that because you read that study of more negative words gets more clicks. Then, part of my brain goes, "We need to change all of our episode titles to be way more fear and sadness-focused.
Emily: Oh, yikes.
Jase: Right? Because it's like that would be a good "good business decision."
Dedeker: Sure.
Jase: It would be a bad ethical decision, in my opinion, even if making that choice hurts our business some. It is an interesting dilemma from that point of view. Think about news sites and social media sites, they're in that same thing where for them it's even worse because they're technically legally required to make decisions that benefit their shareholders if they have shareholders, and then they're in this extra bind of even if we wanted to, could we justify doing something that's better for the world?
It's a big question. I like to think that this episode bringing awareness to this, that we tend to approach it from a hopefulness and what you can do and how you can improve your life rather than where a lot of news stories leave us is this horrible thing happened, some horrible things are probably going to continue to happen, bye. That's where they leave you.
Dedeker: Sure.
Emily: They probably justify it by saying that, while we're keeping the person informed, we are alerting them to the fact, and therefore this is a good thing, that we're letting everyone out there know this could happen. Be prepared, be aware.
Jason: I would argue that it's more that coming up with things you could actually do to improve something is a lot harder than complaining about something that's bad.
Emily: For sure.
Dedeker: That's fair.
Jason: Or pointing it out, right? That's just a lot easier to do. There's something to bring it back quickly to the Fix the News site that kicked this whole thing off for me is part of what they bring up is that we'll hear news stories about important things, like global warming or world hunger or HIV/AIDS or various things like that. We'll hear about how bad a problem these are, and maybe headlines will be like, "We need to do something to fix this. We need to help. We need to change policy, whatever it is."
Then when there are successes in that, those don't get covered because they're not negative news, and so there's just not an incentive to cover those. That's part of what they try to do there also is to give a little perspective on like, "Hey, global warming is still a problem, but for the first year ever, China's carbon emissions went down this last year," for example.
That's a real headline. For the first time ever, their carbon emissions went down. Obviously, still large. They are the largest carbon producer in the world. The fact that that actually decreased, it's like we might be at that inflection point where we are finally starting to turn this around.
That can be really encouraging to keep doing these things versus just, "Oh, well, I've been hearing about this problem now for 20 years. Great. It seems hopeless then." There's no use, right? I think when we think about even things within our communities, we can fall into that as well.
Emily: That's the global warming thing, too, where they're essentially saying, "We've passed the point of no return." That feels extremely dire from a very large existential standpoint as well and makes you be like, "Well, I'm probably not going to be here anyways. What's the point? I'm sorry for everyone who is going to be here." Yes, that's a really unfortunate place to be in.
Jason: Right. They try to cover those stories to balance the news, to be this antidote to the fact that we miss a lot of important breakthroughs and a lot of important information, like a new HIV/AIDS drug that has a 100% effective rate in all the trials they've done at preventing transmission. Stuff like that. That it's like, we don't hear about those things because that's less interesting than a problem starting.
Dedeker: Okay, but, Jason, I can already hear six billion criticisms of this episode-
Jason: I love it.
Dedeker: -already playing through my head. One of them being like, "How do we even talk about this topic without sliding into, hey, positive vibes only, man, or sliding into, oh, it's all a big conspiracy. The mainstream news media is just trying to keep us down, man, and they won't even share with us the good thing." Like, I can see a slippery slope here, or maybe I can see some of the stones that are paving that pathway to hell, those good intention stones, the ones.
Jason: Sure. That's a great point. I think that's why it's important to look at those statistics we looked at earlier about the prevalence of negativity in headlines. Because I agree, if we were really going for a good vibes only, stick your head in the sand, then we'd probably be recording an episode about how problematic that is, and how that's negatively affecting our relationships. Instead, it's like we're living in a world where we're so far biased to the other side that bringing this awareness to it is really important.
I do want that to be clear for people. I'm not saying go live in a bubble where you only consume headlines on Fix The News. Although, I would say even there, they're pretty good about acknowledging like, "Hey, this thing's still a problem, but look, there's some progress being made here, or look at in the big picture, we seem to be going in a better direction now, even though this is still a big problem." I think there's a balance there. I think that reductive thinking of saying that being concerned about the negativity equals positive vibes only also falls into that like easy sound bites get propagated better than a more nuanced conversation.
Dedeker: Well, why are we doing this?
Jason: Why are we even doing this?
Dedeker: We made such a terrible business decision.
Jason: I know we really did.
Dedeker: Doing long format discussions.
Jason: Long format discussions that are not just complaining about all the horrible things going on in the world. Dang it.
Emily: Because we want to help people, and that's genuine.
Jason: Yes. The next one to point out here is negative mood contamination is the term for this. This one, when I read it, I was like, "Oh, shit." If you're consuming negative things and watching other people speak in harsher ways, more upset ways, using more negative language, that that basically can contaminate our own behavior and make us more likely to lash out or be negative in the way we communicate something to someone else, even that has nothing to do with that topic. Here's a little thought exercise for you.
Have you ever been on the phone with customer support and been really frustrated about the total lack of support in that customer support and getting the run around, you're getting really frustrated and angry.
Emily: That was literally my morning.
Jason: Yes. This is why it was on my mind . That was your morning.
Emily: Yes, I have.
Jason: Then after that, you're around your partner or friend or a family member, and you snap at them. You get short with them. You look at them in a real grumpy way. You're giving them the cold shoulder.
Emily: I think that was literally your morning.
Jason: This was my morning .
Emily: For me.
Jason: Yes, exactly.
Emily: Awkward.
Jason: Yes, but I was also thinking of times where I've been writing a stern, upset email for work, being like, "I'm upset about this thing." I'll be in the middle of writing it, and you'll come into my office and ask me a question, and I'll get huffy with and you're like, "Whoa." I'm like, "I'm sorry. I'm writing an angry email right now, and that leaked out." Can you relate to that, Emily? Have you ever experienced this?
Emily: Oh, God, yes. Especially when my ex-partner was working, that would happen a lot, where you were just referring to.
Jason: Oh, he would snap.
Emily: Yes, because he had a big deal job, and I guess had a lot on his plate. It definitely would happen that I would be on the receiving end of probably the anger that he couldn't show to his employees. I would get it instead. That was difficult. I've absolutely done that. I love that I live alone now because I don't have somebody to come to me right after those situations when I'm on the phone with someone in an angry way. I can regulate more easily and then hopefully a few hours later come to a partner and be able to be like, "Hi, this was rough today, but I'm not going to lash out at you because you weren't right in front of me after it happened."
Jason: That's such a great point. When I think about this one, and I think about it in terms of news and headlines and social media, I think we'll often see this, too, where we read something that's upsetting, especially when we're inundated with a lot of this upsetting stuff. That gives us that feeling of, ah panic, right? I want to do something about this. I'm upset about this. I'm mad about this, or I'm scared about this, or whatever it is, and that we want to direct that somewhere, like you just said, Emily.
If someone's there, bam, easy target, right? It gets thrown at them. If they're not, I feel like this is also part of what leads to a lot of infighting within communities of people who mostly agree with each other. Because I don't feel empowered that I could go out and fix the horrible wrongs going on in the world or the terrible stuff I think I see happening politically. This small thing in my community, I'm empowered to fix that, but all that anger and upset that I have from the bigger issue, I'm going to direct toward this person who otherwise would be my ally, who otherwise we would be pretty much on the same side about most things.
They're closer to me, metaphorically speaking. I can actually reach them and affect them in a way that I can't to these other people who I perceive as farther away from me. Also, I feel like I can actually do something. I can actually hurt that person. Maybe we don't think of it cognitively like hurting them, but that's a lot of times the main thing that away from those sorts of online conflicts is just, I want to hurt somebody for doing something that I think is bad. I think a lot of times that's because we don't feel empowered to actually do that where we want to.
Not that I think really hurting people over that's the right way no matter what, but still, that principle applies. If we think about our interpersonal close relationships, prime for that. Prime for that lashing out and letting this contaminate our mood and our interactions.
Emily: Like we talked about before, there's the potential for a displacement of relationship activities. Instead of going out and having a fun time with your partner, going out to dinner at the restaurant I work at, you're instead-
Dedeker: That's the only fun activity that is on the plate.
Emily: No, that's one of many to do in this amazing city, and maybe the amazing city in which you live. You're spending time consuming negative media, and that might displace time that could be spent on relationship-building activities. Even if that's playing a video game together or going on a nice walk with one another without a phone, without listening to a podcast, anything along those lines, doing something that is lovely with your partner. We talk about it a lot, but we see people on the phone at a restaurant or at a café sitting across from their partner or their friend, and it's like, "Okay, are you texting? Are you looking at the news? What's going on there?"
That also, I think, is just as bad if you are still spending time consuming media while you're out with a partner, trying to do something that could bring the two of you closer together. The urgency created by negative news causes it to be way more addicting for us to overvalue our consumption of it. It's dopamine. It probably still maybe a negative dopamine hit.
Jase: Sure.
Emily: I don't know. It somehow it still is causing us to be addicted to the feeling that we receive when we do the thing.
Dedeker: There's some evo psych research and theories floating around that we have maybe a gossip drive as human beings.
Emily: A lot of gossiping.
Jase: My sister was an anthropology major, and this was something that she was gossiping to me about something, and I was like, "I don't want to participate in gossip too much." She's like, "Gossip is essential for humans. It's how we got where we are."
She jumped right to that.
Dedeker: Yes. It makes sense, that before you have something like a 24-hour news cycle or being able to instantly communicate that this is the way that we spread information among a large group of people is through gossip.
Emily: Water cooler talk or whatever.
Dedeker: Yes. It's the water cooler talk. I will say that when I'm reading the news and that when I'm deciding whether or not to click on an article, because sometimes I'll click on an article, and I will catch myself halfway through being like, "Why did I click on this? This isn't relevant to my life at all. This isn't quite relevant to my interest," and I do have to check myself. Is it just because I'm interested in gossip? Is that all? Because sometimes that's what it is. Oh, I just want to know what the gossip is with this soup manufacturer or whatever who is not treating their employees well or something like that. I don't know. I'm just making stuff up.
Jase: Yes, absolutely. That sense of urgency, like if you're talking with someone and you receive a text, and I stop paying attention to you and instead I look at that text I got. I've noticed myself, and I've seen other people do this as well with news headline alerts, because all our apps want to alert us about that.
Emily: Yes. It's on my watch.
Jase: Yes.
Emily: I'm like, "Oh what's happening?"
Jase: Turn that shit off.
Emily: This person just died. Yes.
Jase: It's like, yes, cool, I would like to know that, but I don't need to know that right now while I'm in the middle of dinner. That's not actually urgent or helpful but that notification makes it feel like it is--
Emily: Sorry, this just reminded me, I was waiting on a couple, a gay couple, and this was before Joe Biden announced that he was not going to continue running for president, and somebody sent one of the gentlemen a news headline that said Joe Biden has decided to not run for president anymore. He clicked on it, and it was a dick pic. When it came up I ran over, he was like, "Oh my god, it's going to happen." I ran over and I was like, "Did it happen?" Then he clicked on it and all of us saw the dick pic.
He was mortified. I was cracking on. It was amazing. Proceed with caution, everyone.
Dedeker: I hope that's still funny even after the election.
Emily: Oh God, me, too.
Dedeker: I hope it's funny to you future listener.
Emily: I hope future listener you're cracking up and not crying right now.
Jase: Oh boy. Yes.
Dedeker: We're here to talk about what the heck do we do about all of this. Now, we've already teased quite a bit this idea of being more mindful about your media consumption, and we're not here to tell anybody necessarily what exactly the right amount of consumption is. You know yourself, you know what sucks you in, you know what's compulsive. You can run some experiments. Was it a failed experiment to do the paper newspaper? Only a half-failed experiment because I do still sometimes get sucked into certain app-based news products and services.
Jase: I would say more than just sometimes, but--
Dedeker: Okay. Well.
Emily: Oof. Sorry. Oh gosh.
Dedeker: All right. Well, you can go have your own separate fights in your relationships about this.
Emily: You'll just hear this one on your podcast player.
Dedeker: Okay. Sorry. I keep coming back to experimentation with what works for you. If you want to support your local print newspaper, I say go for it, and if you can afford it, because it actually has become a nice ritual on a Sunday morning, and it does feel quaint and nice and helps remind me that yes, sometimes reading something on paper is just so nice for your eyes and for your heart, and to not be engaging in an endless scroll algorithm is nice. You could do things like setting aside specific times for news consumption.
Personally, I use the app called Freedom that allows you to block certain apps for particular amounts of time, and you have options as far as how easy it is to bypass it or not. You can set it up to be much harder to bypass. You can switch up your news sources. Before you decide to click on anything, you can do the Dedeker move of asking yourself, "Am I clicking on this just because I want to know the gossip, and is it actually important for me to know the gossip or not?" Or you can see if you can spot the negative spin and see how much it makes you want to actually click on it.
Jase has been using this app recently called Ground News. We're not sponsored by them yet. I'm sure some of you consume media, YouTube videos or stuff like that where people are sponsored by Ground News that according to Jase it has helped with his news consumption in particular.
Jase: Yes, I think just as like the Cliff Notes version for those who haven't seen it advertised on other YouTube channels or whatever. Ground News is this site that aggregates news from a bunch of different sources but also breaks down the bias between the right and the left. Also lets you see of the news places that cover it, who owns them. Are they owned by a media conglomerate? Are they privately owned? What's that particular publication's reputation for how factual versus how opinionated their articles are as well as their political leaning? It's been really interesting because I can see a headline but then see different variations of it as well as different variations in the coverage.
I found that it's helped me not get sucked into reading sources that I agree with all the time but those ones often get me upset because they know how to push my buttons because they know the things I worry about and the things that I find upsetting because we're aligned that way. Or if you just try to do a media diet of only reading stuff on the opposite end of the political spectrum from you, that can also be really upsetting in its own way. This I've found, has been a more interesting way to give myself a little distance from both actually, but still to stay up to date on what's going on.
I think with the headline thing, too, something I've been thinking about is that those negative headlines make us more likely to click on it, but also if everyone is more likely to do that because it gets them more clicks, it also means even when you don't click that the only thing you're consuming is that negative headline. That's definitely something I've found. I bet if you think about recent interactions you've had talking with people, maybe you've done this yourself or you've heard other people do it where a certain topic comes up and you go, "Oh yes, I heard that such and such bad thing."
When you try to come up with the details of the bad thing, they're not there. It's most likely because you encountered a headline or a number of headlines about that but you didn't actually read more than maybe the first paragraph if any of the articles. It gets that bias in your head. I've even found because of this, sometimes you'll click on a really negative-sounding headline and the article itself is actually quite neutral or even positive sometimes, but they know that's what gets clicks. If you're only consuming the headline, I actually think this problem can end up even worse sometimes.
Emily: Fascinating.
Jase: Another tactic here besides just being mindful of our media diet is to look at how can we have more positive activities in our lives. Like Emily was saying about having some buffer time to reset before interacting with your loved ones after reading something upsetting. Also just having other activities in your life that you prioritize to the point of not stopping them to check your phone or to check a headline or to check the news or something. One is engaging in joint family activities and that could just be with a partner or that could be with a larger family.
This one actually came from a research study during the pandemic that was looking at how people's anxiety about COVID affected their family life, affected their relationships. Basically, they found a number of things, that higher levels of COVID anxiety led to less relationship satisfaction and more anxiety and all the things we would expect. One interesting thing they found is that families who had regular activities together, such as going for walks, movie nights, playing games, doing exercise together, any number of things, that just had some kind of regular activity together, their relationship satisfaction was higher than families who did not do that regularly.
The families that didn't do that had higher levels of anxiety and fear than the ones that did participate in those activities. It's just that importance of human connection and engaging in something that's active instead of just passively consuming. I think there's a lot of evidence there for that being really helpful. This is also something that I was looking into for this episode.
There's a lot of different studies that look at the ratio of positive to negative interactions between people. We've talked before about the Gottman's and how within conflict they say that healthy relationships have at least a five to one, I think ratio of positive to negative interactions within a conflict. Then outside of conflict, I think it's even higher. It's like 90% of turning toward your partner when they make a bid. There's much more of an emphasis on that. I found some other studies that have looked at these ratios of positive to negative interactions, not only in couples, but also in groups like in workplaces.
The ratio that I found comes up a lot there is three to one, so three positive interactions to one negative interaction. What I think is interesting about looking at it in a workplace is that's an area where constructive criticism generally is a fairly important part of that dynamic of, like you do need people to redirect. Often you're kind of onboarding or training juniors to do better work. It's like an area where you need to have some negative interactions, I guess in a way but that even there, you need to have at least this 2.9, actually,
2.9 to 1 ratio of positive to negative not only shows the best wellbeing, but also actual performance in the workplace.
Think about this, if you're doing something like a radar, and if you're just focused too much on the negatives, you might actually find, you could even lower results with it. Making sure you have that balance of positive interactions, like celebrating your victories, celebrating the things that are going well and doing that appreciation round. For those of you that don't know what I'm talking about, check out multiamory.com/radar for our monthly check-in formula. Keeping in mind, "What can I do to increase the amount of positive interactions in my life, partly to get me out of this negative spiral that passive consumption wants to pull me into?"
Emily: I've seen that recently on probably Instagram when I was consuming Instagram. It talked about the fact that if you have a partner, you want to make sure that you're not just coming to your partner with a bunch of negativity, with this thing happen in my day and it sucked and I'm so upset about it. You're just making your partner the person that you vent to constantly, but instead that you are doing things like celebrating wins with them. I have tried to really take that to heart, especially since it's been a big year of change for me. There are sometimes things that are really challenging that are going on, but it's super important to share even the little celebration times with your partner, because then they associate you also with somebody who is positive and not just coming to them with a bunch of negativity.
Jase: That's a great example of thinking of additively, where it's not like, stop saying the negative things. It's try to balance it with also celebrating some positive things. I think that's maybe a key theme to think about for this whole episode, really.
Emily: Exactly. You find the middle path. We're trying to be well-rounded individuals here, and there absolutely are going to be times when we have negativity and when we have to talk about that because it's meaningful and it's important too. Also, if you can balance it with all of the wonderful things that might be happening in your life, I think it's easier to find those things, to look for them and to celebrate them, especially with people who matter to you. If there's a cause that you find particularly important, try to look for things that have been successful for changing it. This is one of the reasons why I'm vegan, honestly, because I hear those statistics about carbon emission, et cetera, et cetera. To me, it might not be a huge change, but I know that I'm making an impact in my personal footprint by eating the way that I do, for instance.
Jase has talked a lot about Fix The News. Check that out for a weekly dose of positive news that acknowledges problems, but showcases the areas where there is hope and where we are making progress because we are. Something that my ex did well was he constantly said to me, we are at a bigger, better level of humanity than we ever have been. We are accelerating as a species and doing better things and doing cooler things. Yes, there's a lot to be upset about in this world. I'm upset every day at the state of the world, but we can also look to the positive because there are a lot of things to be thankful for and excited about too.
Jase: Something that was stated in that interview that got me thinking about this was finding this balance of, yes, there are terrible things, really, truly horrible things happening in the world, all the time, but there are not terrible, horrible things happening everywhere all the time. When we just look at the news, it's easy to lose perspective of that. It's easy to just get so overwhelmed that we just start to shut down or we have to numb ourselves or lash out at the wrong places to try to fix it.
I hope that this episode, this is a good discussion to give some thought and perspective to this, and to give you some time to reflect, like the three of us have been on how is this actually showing up in our lives? How might this be affecting our lives? What are some things that we could be doing to improve that? What's nice about it is it is a win-win, actually. I know making change can be hard, but it's like not only are you doing things that there's a very good likelihood and a lot of evidence to back it up will improve your own mental and even physical wellbeing, as well as your relationships, as well as even your larger communities.
I think that's a pretty cool, hopeful thing. That's the message I want us to end on here. It's not negativity but seeing how we actually can be making a positive change. Without that, adding more negativity to our life to make a positive change in the world, we can actually do something that makes it positive all around for everybody.
Dedeker: I guess I'll come to the conclusion that you don't hate being an informed person, and that you don't hate me and just want to call me up.