laine Ducharme, a psy-
chologist in Glastonbury,
Conn., is accustomed to pa-
tients talking about how stress-
ful it is to follow the news. The
topic is so routine, she even
has a list of meditation apps
she recommends to counter the effects of troubling
headlines and the 24/7 breaking-news cycle.
Yet Ducharme was taken aback recently when a
patient brought up the subject, mostly because he
did not fit the profile. He wasn’t partisan. He wasn’t
on Twitter. In fact, he was not yet in second grade.
“The news was on in his house all the time, and it
was scaring the hell out of him,” says Ducharme,
who spoke to the parents. “They weren’t aware it
was bothering the child.”
That the country’s youngest citizens are feeling
stressed by the news may have been inevitable. After
all, grade-schoolers inherit all kinds of adult bag-
gage, from bad eating habits to social prejudices.
But the fact that little kids too are upset by weighty
issues does not bode well for the national psyche.
Today, more than half of Americans say the news
causes them stress and many report feelings of anx-
iety, fatigue or sleep loss because of it, according to
a 2017 survey by the American Psychological Asso-
ciation (APA). Therapists such as Ducharme report
that between 85% and 90% of their patients discuss
the stress of the news cycle during their counsel-
ing sessions. A handful of businesses have banned
cable news shows from televisions on their premises.
Colleges are posting notices on their websites advis-
ing students on how to wean themselves from news
coverage. Vogue magazine recently steered readers
to Botox injections to relieve the jaw clenching that
accompanies “headline stress disorder.”
The situation is on track to get even worse. Nearly
1 in 10 Americans report they check the news hourly.
Twenty percent say they constantly monitor their
social-media feeds, which expose them to headlines
whether they like it or not. The constant pinging of
breaking-news alerts causes anxiety, as do efforts to
reduce or ignore them. It’s a self-perpetuating pat-
tern in which wanting to know what will happen
next reinforces the uncertainty that fuels anxiety,
says Vaile Wright, the APA’s director of research and
special projects. Americans today are not only re-
porting more symptoms of stress, such as headaches
and irritability; they are doing so with growing frus-
tration. “[Uncertainty] prevents us from being able
to plan,” Wright says. “So we do things to mitigate.
We hit refresh, and it raises stress and anxiety again.”
The reasons for the rising stress levels from news
are hardly surprising. The news cycle is an around-
the-clock affair. Updates are generated not just by
journalists but by anyone with a social-media ac-
count, from friends to fundraisers to trolls. The
bulletins are delivered nonstop, “breaking into our
kitchens and bedrooms, places that are considered
safe,” says Graham Davey, the author of The Anxi-
ety Epidemic. What’s more, they often arrive with a
heavy dose of attitude or bile. When a reader com-
ments digitally on a news development, she or he
risks starting a Twitter war with an anonymous army
of opinionated, fast-fingered and vindictive holders
of the opposite point of view.
As might be expected with Donald Trump in the
White House, more Democrats than Republicans
report they are stressed out by the national politi-
cal conversation. The left blames Trump for mak-
ing ruinous policy decisions, polarizing the country
and kicking civility to the curb. Some Democrats
say they even get irritated just hearing Trump’s
voice. But it turns out that political stress is actu-
ally a pretty bipartisan affair. Almost half of Repub-
licans also characterize talks with people across the
aisle as stressful, according a 2018 Pew Research
Center survey, and nearly two thirds of Americans
of all political stripes say the future of the nation is
a source of stress. Consumers on the left and right
worry about the impact of the tariff war and how
it might affect their household budgets, just as the
prospect of war with Iran unsettles Democrats, Re-
publicans and Independents.
“It’s not just because of Donald Trump. It’s every-
thing. It’s watching politicians unable to do anything
and yelling and setting the tone that anything goes,”
says Ducharme, who specializes in collaborative di-
vorce counseling. She compares cable news cover-
age to couples in therapy sessions. “They often are
screaming at each other. They aren’t listening. They
just go back and forth.”“Headline stress disorder” seems to have
first bubbled up during the presidency of George W.
Bush. In 2003, when Bush was in his second year in
office, conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer
noted that Bush’s most ardent critics—“otherwise
normal people,” in the journalist’s words—were