Henry David Thoreau used to make fun of people like us.

“Hardly a man takes a half hour’s nap after dinner,” the poet snarked in 1854, “but when he wakes he holds up his head and asks, ‘What’s the news?’ as if the rest of mankind had stood his sentinels.”

No disrespect to the bard of Walden Pond, but he didn’t have to live through 1 a.m. tweets from the president of the United States announcing he caught a deadly virus during a global pandemic. . . .

Turn on CNN or Fox News, and there’s a helicopter taking President Trump to the hospital. Refresh Twitter, and nearly all of the Joint Chiefs of Staff are in quarantine. Check your news apps and see another firestorm in the West, another hurricane in the East, another unarmed Black man shot by police, another update to our national coronavirus death toll.

Sleep? At a time like this? No way. So we stay up late, doomscrolling on our phones until our eyes dry out. During the day, we let television sets roar while we juggle jobs (if we are lucky enough to have them), children, dishes. We want to shut the news off, but we can’t get enough. . . .

Our news media ecosystem has been building to meet this crazy moment. Forty years ago saw the birth of cable news with CNN, the conceit of which was basically “let’s train our cameras on what’s happening and let it unfold, so that the viewer never wants to turn it off,” says Lisa Napoli, author of “Up All Night: Ted Turner, CNN, and the Birth of 24-hour News.”. . .

The problem, now, of course, is that there’s no end in sight. We’re in the middle of a presidential election, a sudden Supreme Court vacancy, the aforementioned global pandemic, natural disasters and the biggest social protest movement in decades. And each new development is more unbelievable than the last.

“It’s like a plot keeps churning, twist after twist, and they just keep the character arc going up and up and up, and you’re just waiting for that last third of the book where the protagonist gets their revenge or it comes to a nice happily-ever-after — and it just doesn’t seem like it’s going to happen,” says Elisa Nader of Ashburn, Va. She tries to tune it out with “The Great British Baking Show” at night, and walks outside during the day. “But I get back on my phone because it’s like, you’re afraid to miss something, even if it doesn’t matter if I miss something. . . .

News consumption jumped dramatically at the start of the pandemic in March, when several news outlets reported spikes in Web traffic. Digital readership has since leveled off some, but for many sites, it’s still higher than pre-pandemic times. Over the summer, cable outlets like Fox News and the evening newscasts of the three big networks attracted some of the biggest audiences they’ve had in years.

But the news cycle has gotten out of hand in recent weeks, and many of us have the horrifying screen-time reports to show for it. . . .

“The clear message of research from the last 20 years is that there is no psychological benefit to repeated exposure to bad news,” says Roxane Cohen Silver, a professor of psychological science, medicine and public health at the University of California at Irvine. . . .

“One of the ways people respond to their anxieties about a particular crisis is to monitor the media about that crisis,” she says. “But that serves to amplify the distress, which leads to increased concerns, which leads to media consumption.”. . .

It’s a cycle that’s very difficult to escape.

“I’m not in any way advocating people put their head in the sand or censorship,” Silver says. “I’m just saying, make news consumption a more conscious decision.”. . .

Karen Ho, a finance and economics reporter for Quartz, has become the “Doomscrolling Reminder Lady” on Twitter, where she tweets tips on how to unwind and reminds her followers every night that it’s okay to put their phones down and go to bed. . . .
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Elahe Izadi writes about media and pop culture for The Washington Post. Prior to joining The Post in 2014 as a general assignment reporter, she covered Congress, demographics and local news.