Transcript
This week on Viewpoint, there’s so much scramble for content that all of this, where we know everything about everything. When staying informed turns toxic, then. I’m in my 60s and most of my peers are like, okay, let’s start talking about retirement and how we can relax and how we can do less.
And this happened to be just a pivotal turning point in my career to a whole nother career. It’s never too late to try something new. I’m Marty Peterson.
And I’m Gary Price. These stories in depth this week on your public affairs magazine, Viewpoints. It’s me, Ole Indulgent Moisture Body Wash.
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And all that noise? It’s doing more than cluttering your brain. Mental health experts now have a name for this modern day overload. Headline Stress Disorder.
And it’s more than just a catchy label. Researchers at the Mayo Clinic say this condition has real impacts on your mental health. It’s sometimes called Headline Stress Disorder.
Some people call it news anxiety. It’s basically the psychological and physical effects of consuming too much distressing news content. And it can look a lot of ways.
It can manifest anxiety. It can cause higher stress levels. And it can even just suddenly your heart starts beating faster.
You start to feel a little upset stomach. It can trigger a lot of body responses, of course. That’s Don Grant, a media psychologist and national advisor of healthy device management for Newport HealthCare.
Along with the symptoms he describes, the stress from constantly consuming news can trigger headaches, GI issues, and back pain. So how do you protect yourself while still staying informed? Where’s the line? Ryan McLaughlin, associate professor in the department of advertising at Texas Tech University, says there are some clear red flags that can signal you’re in too deep. We classify problematic news consumption based on five criteria.
First is transportation, which is the tendency to kind of get really drawn in when you’re consuming the news. You kind of really all your focus and attention is there. You’re kind of not paying attention to things around you.
You’re just kind of focused on that news, getting really absorbed in it. The second is preoccupation. The tendency to kind of continue thinking about the news, even when you’re done consuming.
So you kind of find your mind drifting back and kind of thinking about what’s happening, what’s going on, getting concerned about it. Third is misregulation. It’s this tendency to kind of consume news, thinking that maybe it’ll help you feel better, but ultimately it makes you feel worse or trying to figure out what’s going on.
That again, makes you feel worse. The fourth is under-regulation, which is kind of this compulsive habits, that inability to stop doing it. Just kind of always finding yourself kind of daily developing these habits where you’re just consistently doing it, potentially as a consequence of that.
The fifth is interference, which is when news starts kind of interfering with our day-to-day lives, that we can’t focus at work. We’re having trouble sleeping just because we’re either consuming the news or thinking about it so much that we’re having a hard time going about our daily lives. In 2022, McLaughlin published a study in the scientific journal Health Communication that found that a growing number of Americans are consuming the news in unhealthy ways, even describing it as a form of addiction.
According to his research, more than 16% of people surveyed showed signs of being severely problematic news consumers. Of this group, most reported physical and mental health ailments, along with trouble focusing on work, school, and family. While experts have worried about this overload since the 24-hour news cycle kicked off in the 1980s, social media has turned it into a harder habit to break.
Always on, always in your pocket. It can definitely make it worse. And a lot of it’s just the accessibility of it.
I mean, it’s always there. One, I mean, with, you know, smartphones and things like that, you can just always get to it. But then there’s also just kind of a never-ending stream with social media.
You can always find another TikTok video or another tweet to kind of go through. So for people that do get drawn into Doomscroll, it’s always available, never ending, well, that you can kind of keep going back to. So it certainly has the opportunity to kind of make the problem worse and keep it prolonged.
Grant also points to the invention of the iPhone as a driver of headline stress disorder. Before smartphones, people got their news at set times during the day from print newspapers, TV, and radio. Now news can be consumed from anywhere at any time.
Combine this with smart social media algorithms designed to pull you down a rabbit hole, and it’s easy to develop a screen addiction that feels impossible to kick. To make matters worse, with the flood of misinformation, disinformation, and AI-generated content online, Grant says he’s seen people get worked up over false news. It used to be that if we saw something in a newspaper or on a news broadcast or on the radio, we could pretty much assume it had been vetted, and it was believable, and the veracity of it was good.
Now with mis-mouthed disinformation, fake news, anyone can write anything. And we’ve seen this where people just write. I’ve seen that suddenly, you know, the Leaning Tower of Pisa fell, and there’s an AI-generated image of it, and it’s clickbait.
Because I’m like, oh my goodness, the Leaning Tower of Pisa fell, but it’s a clickbait. So we also have to be careful. And now today, all users and all consumers of anything that’s digital, that’s content, need to be very aware.
One piece of wrong information that can be very stressful, the Leaning Tower of Pisa fell with an image, can get spread so quickly through these echo chambers on social media that it can cause so much collective stress overwhelm. Fake news comes in all forms, but headlines about death and disaster hit the hardest and can quickly gain speed, like the viral claim about the Leaning Tower of Pisa toppling over. Whether the story is fake or real, research shows that news about terror attacks, mass shootings, and other extreme events trigger more anxiety than almost any other kind of coverage.
And while this kind of reporting can rattle anyone, Grant says it’s especially tough on one group in particular. I work with kids in Newport, that’s our population, adolescents and young adults, and I talked to them about this. It is, everything now is news.
So things that we would never know about, things that, you know, I call it being overexposed and underdeveloped for the kids, they can’t handle it. So things that we would never have heard about that are concerning, but that happen in other countries or that happen, you know, things that are more localized or regionalized, something would happen, you know, in another state or now there’s so much scramble for content that all of this, we know everything about everything. Staying informed is important, but it’s easy to overdo it.
For instance, stories about murders or assaults get a lot of coverage, but violent crimes in the U.S. have actually gone down significantly since the 90s. Yet most people think it’s getting worse. Why? Because when we’re bombarded with bad news, even from far away, our brains start seeing threats everywhere.
McLaughlin says it can be helpful to ask, is this news keeping me aware or stuck in fight or flight? We don’t think that people should stop consuming the news because there’s a lot of important information in the news. A lot of it comes down to just kind of developing a better relationship with the news. And the first step is developing an understanding of what your relationship to the news is.
Right. And so a lot of people have these compulsive habits, but they’re not really paying attention to them until the point they get to like a breaking point. Right.
And then they feel like the stress is overwhelming and they just stop. So just starting by paying more attention to it’s helpful. We found that mindfulness is negatively related to problematic news consumption.
So people that have more mindfulness in general who are capable of kind of taking a step away from the news and focusing on what’s going around them in the here and now and having that kind of break from the news is really important for mental health. The next step, set some boundaries like scanning the news only over your morning coffee or after dinner. Also stick to a few trusted sources that are fact-based and direct.
Grant says that even small changes like these can make a big difference in headline stress disorder symptoms and can boost overall happiness. Pick two, one or two news sources that you really trust that have proven to you that they’re really giving you correct information. And just check them maybe in the morning and maybe at night, but not before you go to bed in case you see something distressing that’s happened in the world.
So my suggestion would be bookend or just only have a couple of times when you check the news. Set a timer if you have to. Do not be on social media or these news platforms for more than 15 minutes.
When you’re with other people or when you’re in real life and you’re in commitment, you have commitments or you’re doing other things, turn off your phone or turn off the alerts and the sounds so you don’t get these constant barrage of alerts of these so-called breaking news. Have tech-free periods in your home. Never have them at meals.
And before you go to bed, certainly, because what’s going to happen is if you see something that’s distressing or dysregulating or causes you anxiety, some news story before you go to bed, it’s going to possibly cause you to have disruptive or not really good sleep. To find out more about Don Grant, Brian McLaughlin, and all our featured guests, visit ViewpointsRadio.org. This segment was written and produced by Grace Galanti and Omira Zaveri. Our studio manager is Jason Dickey.
I’m Gary Price. Coming up, how a Detroit DJ turned a spark of inspiration into a feature film when Viewpoints returns. Summer is calling and guess what? Macy’s has the answers for every adventure with new swim trends and sandals to take you from the beach to the beach bar.
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Exclusions apply. At Charmin, we heard you shouldn’t talk about going to the bathroom in public, so we decided to sing about it. Did you know that Julia Child, the famous American chef and author, didn’t publish her first cookbook until the age of 49? She spent nine years testing and perfecting recipes in her Cambridge, Massachusetts kitchen.
It wasn’t until age 51 that she hard-launched her public TV show, The French Chef. Travel down south to Kentucky and Colonel Harland Sanders, the founder of the Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant chain, also found late success for his brand. He held several odd jobs for much of his life before selling his now-famous fried chicken out of a roadside restaurant during the Great Depression.
He faced many setbacks while trying to franchise the concept and didn’t open the first official KFC until he was 62 years old. These are just two examples out of many illustrating that age is just a number. Whether you’re still searching for your true calling or just want to try something new, it’s never too late.
For Gerald McBride, a long-time Detroit radio host and producer, the idea behind his passion project first took shape 15 years ago after he went to a collegiate ice hockey game. He was finishing up a work meeting when a client asked if he wanted to join. He asked, hey, you know, listen, I have to go to University of Michigan to a hockey game.
I’m like, really? He says, yeah, my son is playing for UMass. He’s from Connecticut. He says, my son is playing for UMass.
Would you mind taking me to University of Michigan and joining me at this hockey game? I said, sure, why not? Let’s go. I had never been to a hockey game. We get there, it sold out 10,000 seats at University of Michigan as they played UMass.
Of course, his son was playing for UMass. I’m just really enjoying the game. But as I looked around, I was the only African American in the entire arena.
I was really just amazed at this sport, but just wondering where all the black people were in this game. It just had such a huge impact on me. I left that game and I immediately got the idea for this movie.
I really believe it was just a God-given idea. McBride didn’t let his lack of experience in screenwriting and filmmaking hinder his vision. He felt a drive to bring to life this story of a young black hockey player and the challenges of playing in a predominantly white sport.
I just had this idea in my head about this story, about this black hockey player. I just began to write on notepads and not really having any of the formal training for writing a screenplay or the right software or anything. But I just kept writing and writing because it’s almost like when you get an idea for a story, you just got to get it out.
I just kept writing and writing and writing and finally graduated from the notepad to investing in the software or final draft and started taking some classes on screenwriting and that’s how it all began. The process of crafting and editing the script took longer than you might expect. For 12 years, he was a radio personality and producer by day and an aspiring screenwriter by night.
One person who understands this hustle and persistence is Sheila Nielsen, a longtime career consultant. She’s an expert in helping people explore side interests and skills that could turn into something more. You play to your strengths and what are those strengths? You sit down and think about what is it that comes easily to you and maybe it’s harder for other people.
There are people who are really good at, for example, math. There are people who are good at problem solving. What kind of problem solving are you good at? So we’re looking for aptitudes and then we’re looking for interests.
What are the strong interests? What gets you up in the morning and makes you excited to think about it, to do it, to problem solve in this particular area? Nielsen is the owner of Nielsen Career Consulting in Chicago. She says every interest starts off as something small and requires time, energy, and commitment to grow. She often uses this analogy.
Most of my clients have climbed up, they’ve climbed up like Mount Everest and they’ve gotten to a certain point. And then they look over at K2, this other mountain, they go, oh, I’d really like to be over there on that mountain. Well, very often you have to go down to come up again.
It’s not like there’s necessarily a direct link. You can cross over, you can’t take an airplane from one mountain to the other. Nielsen says that in some cases, the skills you’ve already cultivated can help you in your next endeavor.
For McBride, working in media meant that he had a leg up in certain aspects of the writing, communication, and creative direction of the film. However, he says that making the movie was far from easy, and he found himself back at square one several times. After I got the script to a place where I thought it was presentable, I do have some friends in Hollywood who do movies and I would send it to them and they would critique it and they would mark it up like a bad report card.
Hey, we think you got a good idea, but you got a lot of work to do here. And I would get their critiques back and kind of just, a lot of times I was just really discouraged. Like, okay, maybe this isn’t for me.
You know how you just ball up the idea, just throw it in the trash, but then I’d get it back out and I just continue to write and write and write and take the constructive criticism and take the ideas that they were giving me and add them to the script. And this process just went on for years and years. Finally, I got it to a point where they thought that I had something worth pitching.
And there were some production companies who were interested in it and talking about putting the money up for the movie. And I was like, okay, wow, this is great. We’re getting close.
And then COVID hits. The initial deal fell through and for years, the pandemic led to a standstill in film production. But McBride held out hope.
In 2022, he took a risk and decided to finance the movie himself. He also secured a small business loan and got to work on production. Not only was I the director, the executive producer, the writer, I also had to do transportation.
I had to do wardrobe. I had to do, I mean, I had to wear all these different hats. I mean, a lot of times it was just me on the set with my crew.
I did everything but run the camera. I didn’t do any audio or anything like that, but I had to learn all of these different positions. And it was great stretching this out over a year period of time so that I could really take my time and understand these positions well.
I’m in my sixties and most of my peers are like, okay, let’s start talking about retirement and how we can relax and how we can do less. And this happened to be just a pivotal turning point in my career to a whole nother career. So this will be the first of more movies that I’ll be doing.
In a world that often celebrates youth and speed, McBride’s story is a reminder that some journeys, the most meaningful ones, are built over decades, setbacks, and second acts. A 17-year adventure of making this movie and a work of faith. And like I said, in the movie, the theme is don’t be afraid, just believe.
And I’m walking that out as I continue to just kind of stand on faith and not be afraid and make this movie. McBride’s new film, Black Ice, The Rhythm, is now streaming on Amazon, Prime Video, Apple TV, and Google Play. To find out more about Gerald McBride, Sheila Nielsen, and all of our guests, visit viewpointsradio.org. This segment was written by our executive producer, Amira Zaveri.
Our studio manager is Jason Dickey. I’m Marty Peterson. Viewpoints returns in just a moment.
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This is Viewpoints Explained. I’m Ebony McMorris. Earlier this month, President Donald Trump vowed to reopen the infamous Alcatraz Federal Prison.
In a post on Truth Social, he said that the updated site will house the most ruthless and While the structure of Alcatraz still exists, it’s currently a museum and National Historic Landmark, drawing more than a million visitors each year. To reopen it as a modern operating prison would require extensive repairs amounting to several hundreds of millions of dollars. So how realistic is Trump’s goal to bring it back? The island lockup first opened in 1934 and held gangsters like Al Capone and George Machine Gun Kelly.
It closed less than 30 years later in 1963 because operating costs were through the roof, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons. Since Alcatraz sits on a remote island in the Bay of San Francisco, everything from food to fuel to water had to be hauled in. If the prison did reopen, this would likely be the case again.
So far, the current administration hasn’t released any specific plans or timelines, but reviving Alcatraz would require more than just a presidential decree. The federal government would have to take back control and navigate several environmental and legal obstacles. Due to climate change, the island is facing rising sea levels and potential coastal erosion.
There’s currently no running water either. Some critics are calling Trump’s idea a distraction and just another political stunt, while others are saying it fits into his harsh immigration rhetoric. Regardless, if you’re planning to visit the landmark, you may want to book that trip to San Francisco sooner rather than later.
That’s Viewpoints explained more in a moment. Welcome to Culture Crash, where we examine what’s new and old in entertainment. There’s always a list around Hollywood of directors who can seemingly get movies made on their name alone.
Think of that Steven Spielberg, Christopher Nolan, and Jordan Peele tier of brand name director. After Sinners, I think it’s safe to say Ryan Coogler has added his name to that list. The writer and director first burst onto the scene in 2013 with his Sundance winner Fruitvale Station, then went mainstream with his 2015 Rocky franchise reinvention Creed.
He followed that up in 2018 with Black Panther, which went on to gross more than $1.3 billion worldwide. But it’s Sinners, the first wholly original film on Coogler’s resume, that really cemented his place among the leading directors working today. The film, his fifth collaboration with actor Michael B. Jordan, follows the story of Smoke and Stack, twins in the 1930s Mississippi Delta dead set on opening a juke joint in one night.
What follows is an R-rated supernatural musical horror drama that has entranced audiences and managed to rack up more than $120 million in the U.S. alone, chock full of awesome performances, a stunning score from Ludwig Göransson, incredible guitar solos from Miles Keaton and Buddy Guy, and with Ryan Coogler’s creative stamp all over it, Sinners is both a creative masterpiece and a genuine theatrical sensation at a time when those are rarer than ever. And like with the Nolan movie, Coogler has inspired the obsessives to seek out his movie in its 70 millimeter IMAX glory. The bigger and louder you see Sinners, the better.
And if you’re anything like me, you’ll probably want to head back a second time to see it again. I’m Evan Rook. Summer is calling, and guess what? Macy’s has the answers for every adventure, with new swim trends and sandals to take you from the beach to the beach bar, plus linen suits from Tommy Hilfiger and Michael Kors, and dresses from CeCe to take you from brunch to the dinner party.
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Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram to learn more about upcoming shows, and find a library of past programs on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, and Spotify. Plus, you’ll always find previous segments and more information about our guests at viewpointsradio.org. Join us again next week for another edition of Viewpoints. See you then.
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