Obsessed with reading the latest in political news? It could be bad for your health!

Politics, in general, has become one of the most discussed topics, both in the traditional media and on social media. This information is followed by millions of people around the world. But what are the consequences?

Russia's invasion of Ukraine, for example, is one of the most read subjects internationally. This tendency led researchers to carry out a study to assess the consequences for those who closely follow issues related to politics.

Carried out by the University of Toronto and published in January 2023, through the American Psychological Association (APA), the study relates the constant consumption of political information with increased stress and the decline of mental health.

To carry out the research, Ford and his colleagues at the University of Toronto selected a group of 198 people in the US with diverse political preferences.

"Researchers asked these people to answer a series of questions each night about which political event they had been thinking about most that day," according to the APA.

In addition to identifying the political event they had thought about most, study participants also detected which emotions were linked to that event and whether they had felt motivated to participate in political actions.

"Politics is not just something that affects people every four years during election season. Rather, it seems to seep into our everyday lives. But we don't know much about the impact politics has on the everyday life of individuals," said Ford, quoted in the APA publication.

According to the article published by the APA, similar surveys had been done before, but most of them focused on presidential elections. Ford and his colleagues used daily political news in their study.

What particularly caught the researchers' attention was that, in general, thinking about everyday political events evoked negative emotions, even though the questionnaire did not ask participants to choose a negative political event.

To deepen the study, the researchers gathered a larger group, with 811 participants. This time they included Democrats, Republicans, as well as people affiliated with a different or non-party political party.

They then ran a more targeted experiment, in which participants watched political news clips with either a liberal or conservative bias, rather than simply reporting the policy they encountered.

The result was that participants exposed to political clips experienced more negative emotions than those who watched a neutral or non-political news clip. In addition, the group reported more motivation to participate in political causes.

Feinberg, professor of organizational behavior at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, told the APA that modern politics and its controversies impose a heavy emotional toll on the population.

"In a way, this is a compromise between individual well-being and collective well-being," said Ford, quoted by the APA. "We are working to identify strategies that protect the well-being of each individual, without incurring costs for the broader collective," he added.

Dot-Lib, a medium specializing in scientific and academic content, cited psychologist Dana Rose Garfin, who studies how crises can generate collective trauma. "According to Garfin, from the University of California, although staying informed is important, research shows that the search for news of situations such as Eastern Europe or the COVID-19 pandemic generates stress, anxiety and sadness," he told the APA, in March 2022.

According to the study, there are some strategies to relieve stress from this cause and help people manage negative emotions.

According to the APA, the idea is to acquire new habits to avoid overexposure to this type of news.

Those who usually alternate political topics with entertainment, for example, tend to be distracted from political news, increasing the feeling of well-being.

On the other hand, researchers warn that these distractions divert the reader's focus and reduce their willingness to act on the political causes that interest them.

Brett Q. Ford, one of the study's authors and an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, told the APA: "Protecting oneself from the stress of politics may help promote well-being, but it does not favor the individual to remain engaged and active in democracy".

Thus, the tip is to reduce the amount and types of content accessed. Another important factor is to look for reliable sources, without limiting yourself to social networks. In addition, access to news should be interspersed with activities that bring comfort and, when possible, support humanitarian agencies.