Avoiding outrage fatigue while staying informed

Living in Poland ruled by trumpists for 8 years I have these experiences:

- Get subscription of high value newspaper or magazine. Professionals work there, so you will get real facts, worthy opinions and less emotions.

- It is better to not use social media. You never know if you are discussing with normal person, a political party troll, or Russian troll.

- It is not worth discussing with „switched-on” people. They are getting high doses of emotional content, they are made to feel like victims, facts does not matter at all. Political beliefs are intermingled with religious beliefs.

- emotional content is being treated with higher priority by brain, so it is better to stay away from it, or it will ruin your evening.

- people are getting addicted to emotions and victimization, so after public broadcaster has been freed from it, around 5% people switched to private tv station to get their daily doses.

- social media feels like a new kind of virus, we all need to get sick and develop some immunity to it.

- in the end, there are more reasonable people, but democracies needs to develop better constitutional/law systems, with very short feedback loop. It is very important to have fast reaction on breaking the law by ruling regime.

You nailed it. For ages, we've known that we can be hacked by anything that solicits an emotional response from us. People who set their sights on abusing that power have only gotten better at doing it, so much so that often the victim of the manipulation has no idea they've been manipulated.

There is still an alarming number of people out there who do not seem aware that this is even possible, let alone actively being done on almost all media fronts.

I think acknowledging this makes my outrage fatigue worse, because I am also forced to admit that it can (and does) happen to me, despite being aware of it. This renders me automatically suspicious of any news being reported from any source, regardless of liberal or conservative bias. So, on top of being outraged, there's layers of paranoia which is tiring in and of itself, especially now that it seems more justified.

That’s also an alarm bell right there. If the answer to the question “Does this article/headline want me to feel anything?” is Yes, than it’s emotional bait. If its “boring” than it’s probably more neutral.

Emotional reactivity is the psychological name I believe. High reactivity means more anxiety, stress and sometimes sign of a disorder.