By: Maddie Schmidt
While on TikTok, you can scroll past a war update, a natural disaster and a political scandal all in the span of five minutes. By the time you’re done reading one breaking news alert, three more have already replaced it. Sometimes, it feels as though the news is following us instead of us following the news.
The 24/7 news cycle we experience keeps crises in a constant loop, and social media platforms such as TikTok and X funnel these crises into fast-moving trends that everyone feels the need to comment on.
This causes information overload and emotional burnout, also known as crisis fatigue.
Crisis fatigue isn’t simply caused by too many crises; it’s driven by how news sources and social media constantly deliver, amplify and recycle them.
It seems as though every time we turn around, we are met with “breaking news.” Since we are constantly fed a stream of news stories and events, it is difficult to actually process the crises we hear or read about before the next one hits.
This information overload makes every event feel equally important and equally impossible to do anything about. In turn, people often begin tuning out the news in an effort to avoid becoming overwhelmed.
Social media also tends to amplify news stories and put pressure on society to respond to every single crisis. Our algorithms push emotional, dramatic content, often emphasizing a narrative that encourages many people to respond online, which inevitably blows the story up even more.
Often, crises become trends that rise and fall, just like everything else on social media. People feel pressured to join in and react instantly, giving their own takes and offering either encouragement or criticism.
It’s not bad to be informed about what’s going on in the world around us or to engage with others online about the different things that are happening. However, a constant loop of crisis after crisis can cause people to feel swamped by everything going on around them.
Part of the reason why the constant stream of crises is so exhausting could be due to the shift in how America as a society responds to such events.
I recently read an article written by Thomas Beamish, a professor of sociology at the University of California. In his article, titled “Americans used to unite over tragic events – and now are divided by them,” he sought to understand society’s response to different trauma events and why public tragedies contribute to political polarization.
Beamish found that the American public’s understanding of tragic events has changed. Until about the 2000s, crises used to be understood as a result of fate, bad luck or an act of God. As a result, the blame would fall either on individuals or the tragedy would be chalked up to a simple accident.
Beamish stated that people’s primary focus nowadays is on assigning blame to societal institutions such as the government, civil society and even American culture instead of on individuals.
When some part of society is blamed, political conflict rises in response. This could be a contributing factor toward crisis fatigue, because political polarization can be exhausting and demoralizing to engage with at times.
According to Beamish, recent polls show that a lot of Americans are experiencing fear in response to incidents that are out of their control. This consequently develops an eerie sense of vulnerability, leaving Americans in a constant state of unrest and anxiety.
It helps whenever we can actively respond to crises and tragic events in real life and can successfully be a part of the solution. When a natural disaster occurs, it feels rewarding to go clean up the wreckage and help the people affected if we live close enough to do so.
However, much of the news we read, watch and listen to describe situations that we have little to no control over. The average American can’t do anything about the war that’s going on right now. The average American has no control over the economic instability that is rising to the surface. That lack of control and sense of helplessness can be suffocating if we are not given the space to breathe.
We need to find a way to step away from the crises that have overtaken our lives. We need to learn how to set boundaries with how we consume news and social media content. We should not ignore the news, and we should still find value in spreading awareness about crises that need solutions, but we should not live our lives focused on everything that’s going wrong in the world. That leads to a life filled with anxiety.
Putting down our phones and shutting off our TVs to intentionally focus on the things we can control in our day-to-day lives is important, and finding ways to appreciate the good things in life is crucial to balancing our mental load. Even a small pause from the constant influx of news can help us refocus our priorities and have a better grasp on what issues we should be spending our time worrying about.
Learning to take breaks from the news and from discourse online is important in maintaining our mental health. Breaks help us to be able to regulate, avoiding the possibility of becoming overwhelmed and turning numb to the tragedies we see happening around us.
Crisis fatigue does not mean we don’t care about the struggles of others; it means that our ability to care is being exhausted.
