Claudia Hammond on coping with news overwhelm

In her new book Overwhelmed, author and academic psychologist Claudia Hammond offers a toolkit for anyone feeling burnout from everything that life in 2026 is throwing at them. One chapter is about news overload and the mental toll taken by the 24-hour news cycle, with its nonstop updates, negative headlines, push notifications and social media outrage. Delayed Gratification associate editor Matthew Lee chatted to Claudia about how to cope with news overwhelm while remaining informed

Matthew Lee: Last year we did a Delayed Gratification reader survey and the same words kept coming up when we asked people to reflect on their relationship with the news: relentless, depressing, exhausting, overwhelming. Did you hear similar things when you were researching Overwhelmed?

Claudia Hammond: Yes. Certainly a lot of people are feeling overwhelmed by the news. And there’s a feeling that while they ought to know what’s happening in the world, the mental cost of keeping informed feels quite high. According to a Reuters Institute study in 2024, four in 10 people were sometimes or often avoiding news altogether, and that figure had gone up from the previous year. It still means that most people are not avoiding the news altogether; most are still consuming news but it’s taking a toll.

ML: Some of the feedback we had in our survey was readers saying that they would like to see editors and journalists reporting on more uplifting stories, doing more to report positive news…

CH: There has been a real move towards trying to do that. There is this whole field now called ‘constructive journalism’ or ‘solutions-focused journalism’ – the idea is if you’re talking about something depressing, for example climate change, you might also focus on what some of the solutions may be so that it’s not just relentless negativity. It’s easier to do that with some stories than others – for example, you could have a story about someone in Ukraine who’s helping people, but it’s harder to find a solutions-focused angle on how to end the conflict. There are now quite a few positive news newsletters and podcasts that look around for things that have improved. But negative things are always going to have to be reported. Plenty of the things that we need to know about are not positive.

ML: It’s our job as journalists to warn people if, for example, there is an imminent danger…

CH: Yes, and this is why when people say the answer is for all the news to be positive, it really isn’t the answer because there are dangers, there are risks, there are scams, there are things we need to know about. And in order to decide how to vote, you need to know what’s going on in the world. But we need to try to find ways of looking after ourselves, staying informed while not letting the news take its toll on us.

ML: Are things worse than they used to be in terms of news overwhelm? Today we have 24-7 instant access to news on these addictive machines we keep in our pockets…

CH: I think the problem now is that the news comes at us from so many different directions and with such frequency. And particularly if you have a lot of notifications, then every time you look at the time you’re probably also seeing some bad news that’s happened. Part of the reason things feel worse, I think, is because we’re bombarded by news all the time. One of my big tips is not to turn off the news altogether, but to consume your news consciously, to decide when and how you’re going to consume it. Think about whether there is a time of day when it particularly upsets you. For some people, it will be that they can’t bear to have a litany of woe first thing in the morning. For others, it might be that at the end of the day when they’re tired, the last thing they want is to hear negative stuff. It’s a question of finding a couple of times a day when you’re going to deliberately find out what is happening. With news alerts it’s tempting to think that you need to know everything immediately because it is available to you immediately, whereas in the past you used to have to wait until the next TV or radio news bulletin. In most cases we don’t need to know the news immediately.

ML: Our motto at Delayed Gratification, of course, is ‘Last to Breaking News’. And we only publish four times a year, which gives us the opportunity to be more reflective and look at the longer-term impact of news stories. We believe that this Slow News approach helps us find the kind of solutions-based angles you’re talking about. For example a couple of years ago I went to Southport, three months after the horrific attacks there, and because a period of time had passed there was an opportunity to write about community recovery – the incredible people helping with the healing process. I don’t think a journalist would have been able to do this in the days after the attack when the various community programmes and schemes hadn’t yet been launched.

CH: This speaks to the negativity bias in the news media. Obviously Southport was a horrendous event but the community managed to do some positive things in its aftermath, and we didn’t hear about these much. When they are highlighted it makes a real difference and reminds us that most people are not evil, that they’re doing their best.

ML: Is there evidence that news consumption is contributing to people feeling stressed or overwhelmed?

CH: I think the most fascinating research on this was by Roxane Cohen Silver, a psychologist in the US. She has often studied what happened to people after particularly huge bad news events, and she did a striking study after the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing. So obviously then there was social media, but it wasn’t as widespread as it is now. And she found that the people who consumed more than six hours a day of news on the bombing, which could be on their phones or rolling news on TV or reading about it in the papers, were nine times more likely to experience acute stress than those who only watched one and a half hours of coverage a day. But the amazing thing is that she compared that with the people who were actually there, who were witnesses to the bombing. And if people consumed six or more hours a day of news, their stress response was higher on average than it was for the people who were actually present at the marathon. It seems extraordinary, but it’s because for the people who were there, there’s often a beginning, a middle and an end – they witnessed a terrible, traumatic thing, but in the end they survived. They got saved, or they helped others, and time moved on – but if you’re watching the news you’re always stuck in the middle bit because you keep seeing the worst bit of it again and again, you’re stuck in the stress of it. The other thing that we need to take care not to do is doomscroll and look for more and more negative stuff, particularly we know there’s evidence that people are more likely to doomscroll when they’re already feeling bad. You doomscroll and get into a cycle and you feel even worse.

ML: Do you have any other tips for consuming news healthily?

CH: Switch off news alerts on your phone. That is a step you can take straight away. And then you can choose very deliberately which sources of news you’re going to look at, so you can get a measured and balanced view of what’s going on. For a long time we had editors curating the news for us, finding the things that are important, but now there’s so much news available we kind of have to be news editors ourselves. It’s good to find a place you personally trust and have editors curate the news for you.
Overwhelmed by Claudia Hammond is published by Canongate

Friday, June 5th, 2026 - Delayed Gratification magazine Extras