We reached out to integrative medicine physician at Harvard Medical School Aditi Nerurkar, M.D., MPH, who explains why people are so compelled to read the news right now, as well as her top tips for limiting COVID-19 news consumption. Staying up-to-date is important, but when you’ve started looking at the news for three or more hours per day, it becomes maladaptive, meaning, what started out as beneficial, suddenly becomes harmful. “Think of it like exercise,” Nerurkar says. “It’s good for you, right? But if you do it for hours on end, it becomes unhealthy.” Right now, you’re probably already in heightened states of stress, according to Nerurkar. Therefore, consuming COVID-19 news in excess—whatever your definition of that is—will only heighten your stress response. “Keeping your media use in check helps to keep your stress in check,” she says. “If people are engaging in the news for three to five hours right now, their mental health is probably not optimized.” To help break up your news consumption, Nerurkar recommends two different techniques; one is time-based and the other is source-based: “There are many ways we can protect our health right now. Talking with friends about something other than the pandemic, laughing, exercising,” Nerurkar says, “and add to that, limiting—not cutting off—news exposure.”
