Many of the people I see this spring begin with the same apology. Nothing is wrong in their own life, they say, not really. And yet they are sleeping badly and cannot stop checking the news.
If that sounds familiar, you are in large company. This month the American Psychiatric Association’s annual poll found that half of adults feel more anxious than they did a year ago, and 62% named current events as a cause, level with paying the bills. This is not a personal weakness. It is a normal response to an abnormal amount of bad news.
Why the news gets under the skin
Our nervous system was built for threats we could see and act on: a rustle in the grass, a raised voice. The news brings threats we can neither see nor act on, delivered many times a day to a device we keep beside the bed.
Researchers who study this point to uncertainty as the real culprit. The news is frightening, but more than that, it never resolves. Each story opens a question and leaves it hanging, and the mind keeps circling back to close it. Checking feels as though it should help. Usually it does the opposite.
Women often carry an extra layer. When the world feels unsafe, many of us start quietly scanning for risks to everyone we love, from a child’s journey home to an elderly parent living alone. That vigilance is exhausting, and it rarely switches off at night.
Signs it has gone too far
You reach for your phone before you are fully awake. You feel worse after reading but read on anyway. Conversations with friends keep circling back to the same frightening subjects. Your sleep or your patience has changed, although nothing in your own life has.
Something you can do this week
Choose your times. Pick one or two moments a day to catch up on the news and keep the rest of the day clear. Twenty minutes in the morning is enough to stay informed.
Turn off the alerts. Breaking news notifications are designed to startle you. Very little that happens in the world needs your attention within the minute.
Keep the bedroom free of it. Charge your phone in another room. The last thing you read before sleep tends to stay with you through the night.
Notice what you can influence. Write two lists: what worries you, and what you can actually do. Put your energy into the second list, however short it is. Calling a friend who lives somewhere affected counts.
Let yourself feel it, then put it down. Fear and grief about the world are reasonable, and you do not have to argue yourself out of them. But you can choose not to carry them every hour of the day.
When to talk to someone
If worry about the world has started to shape your days, if you are avoiding things you used to enjoy or lying awake most nights, it is worth talking it through. Learning to live with uncertainty is a skill, and therapy is one of the places it can be learned.
I normally see clients online, but face to face meetings are possible in all my locations, depending on my travel schedule; please ask.
Katya Thain
Source: American Psychiatric Association, Healthy Minds annual poll, May 2026.