The difference between being informed and overwhelmed

A friend said something to me yesterday that stopped me mid-conversation.

She'd been staying off social media for a while, she said. It was just too much at the moment. Too distressing. Too heavy. She wasn't quitting or doing some big digital detox experiment. She just needed to not open the app for a bit, because every time she did, she ended up somewhere she didn't want to be.

I knew exactly what she meant. And I suspect a lot of you do too.

If you've opened Instagram or TikTok lately, you'll know that it doesn't take long before you're watching footage of a bombing, a strike, or something else you weren't remotely prepared to see. No warning. No context. No editorial decision made on your behalf. Just the algorithm deciding that this was next in your feed, wedged somewhere between a friend's holiday photo and an ad for running shoes.

This isn't what it was supposed to be.

When social media first became part of everyday life, the pitch was simple: stay connected. Share what you're up to. See what the people you care about are doing. Maybe discover things you'd never have found otherwise. There was a genuine idealism to it, the idea that giving everyone a platform would make the world feel smaller and more human.

For a while, it kind of did.

But somewhere along the way, the business model shifted everything. Platforms learned that outrage, fear, and moral indignation kept people scrolling longer than warm, pleasant content ever could. The algorithm didn't set out to traumatise anyone. It just got very good at finding the content that generated the strongest emotional response, and serving more of it. Conflict footage, graphic imagery, and distressing news turned out to tick every box. High engagement. High share rates. People couldn't look away.

So the platforms kept showing it to them.

The speed of it is part of the problem.

When a conflict breaks out now, your feed fills within hours. Not with carefully reported news, but with raw, unfiltered footage that a traditional outlet would have fact-checked, verified, and made a considered editorial decision about before it ever reached a viewer. Broadcast journalism has always had its flaws, but it at least had a process. Someone decided what was appropriate to show and what wasn't. Someone thought about framing, context, and the potential impact on the audience.

Social media skips all of that entirely. It gives you the video first and the context never.

You end up watching things that, in any other era, would never have made it to your eyes at all. And because it's mixed in with everything else in your feed, your brain doesn't always register it as extraordinary. You just scroll past it, already moving on to the next thing, carrying something heavy that you haven't quite processed yet.

The research on this matters.

Studies have found that people consuming conflict through social media can experience stress and distress responses that are surprisingly similar to those felt by people much closer to the events themselves. Researchers at the University of California found that sustained daily media exposure to a traumatic event was linked to higher levels of distress than what many people physically present at that event reported.

Read that again, because it's worth sitting with.

Watching the same footage on repeat, even from the other side of the world, can take a measurable psychological toll. And the same research found that the relationship tends to be cyclical: more exposure leads to more distress, and more distress tends to drive more consumption. People caught in this loop often describe the behaviour as compulsive, a need to keep checking, to keep watching, even when it's clearly making them feel worse.

It makes a grim kind of sense when you think about it. When we feel anxious and uncertain, we look for information to resolve that feeling. But graphic social media content rarely offers resolution. It mostly just offers more anxiety, which sends you back to the feed.

There's a difference between being informed and being repeatedly exposed.

Being informed matters. Knowing what's happening in the world, caring about it, and staying engaged with it is not something I'd ever want to argue against. There is, however, a meaningful distinction between being an informed, engaged person and being someone who watches ten distressing videos in a row because the algorithm kept serving them.

One of those leaves you better equipped to understand the world. The other leaves you feeling hollowed out and vaguely helpless, without necessarily having learned anything that a single, well-written article couldn't have told you more clearly.

If things have felt heavy lately, a few things that might actually help.

Check news at set times rather than letting it bleed into your feed throughout the day. When you decide when you're consuming, rather than the platform deciding for you, it changes the experience significantly.

Seek out written reporting from sources you trust rather than video shared on social platforms. A good piece of journalism gives you context, analysis, and perspective that a raw video almost never does.

Give yourself permission to step back without feeling like you're looking away. Protecting your mental state is not the same as not caring. You can care deeply about what's happening in the world and still decide that watching graphic footage on a loop is not helping you or anyone else.

And one final thing.

If you've been feeling more anxious, heavier, or more irritable lately and can't quite figure out why, it's worth looking honestly at what you've been consuming. The content we scroll past is not neutral, even when we tell ourselves we're just staying informed.

The feed does not distinguish between the news and the noise. That job is yours. And it's okay to take it seriously.