Should you stop watching the news for your mental health?

You probably don’t need to stop watching the news completely—but if it’s making you anxious, depressed, angry, numb, or compulsive, you should reduce and structure your news intake.

A good mental-health approach is:

1. Check news at set times, not continuously—e.g., once in the morning and once in the evening.
2. Avoid news right before bed.
3. Choose reliable summaries over endless live feeds or social media doomscrolling.
4. Balance bad news with local, practical, or solution-focused information.
5. Stop or take a break if you notice worse sleep, rumination, panic, hopelessness, or worsening depressive symptoms.
6. If you have depression, anxiety, PTSD, or high stress, be more cautious: negative news can intensify symptoms for some people.

So the best answer is: don’t abandon being informed; replace constant exposure with intentional, limited news use. If your mental health improves during a news break, that’s useful evidence that you need stronger boundaries.