Your Brain on Bad News: A CBT Toolkit for Finding Calm & Taking Control

Ever find yourself scrolling through the news, and you can literally feel the stress rising in your chest? A headline pops up, a story unfolds, and suddenly your shoulders are tense, your jaw is clenched, and a wave of anxiety, anger, or sadness washes over you. It’s a perfectly normal reaction to a world that feels incredibly overwhelming right now. When this happens, it can feel like you're powerless. But the practical approach of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) shows us we have two powerful sets of choices we can make. The

first is to manage our internal reaction—how we cope with difficult emotions once they arrive. The second is to manage our external exposure—how we design boundaries to have

more control over the information we consume in the first place. Let's explore both:

Manage Your Emotional Reaction

This approach is for when you're already feeling that spike of stress. These are in-the-moment tools to help you regulate your nervous system and calm your mind. First, name what you are actually feeling. Before you can soothe an emotion, you have to know what it is. When that wave of stress hits, pause for just a moment and put a name to the feeling. Is it a sharp spike of anxiety? A deep sense of sadness? A hot flash of anger? Then, rate it on a scale of 1 (not feeling it at all) to 100 (the most you’ve ever felt it). Taking 10 seconds to identify the emotion and its intensity helps you to better assess the impact of self-regulation strategies.

Next, calm your body to calm your mind using Square Breathing. For moments of intense emotional flooding, one of the fastest ways to reset is Square Breathing, also known as Box Breathing. This technique works by directly influencing your body's "control panel," the Autonomic Nervous System (ANS). When you're stressed, your system's "gas pedal" (the fight-or-flight response) is floored. Square breathing is how you manually tap the brakes, activating the "rest and digest" system that tells your body you're safe.

How to Do It: Imagine a square and trace each side with your mind for a count of four as you inhale, pause, exhale, and pause:

1. Breathe In through your nose for 4 seconds.

2. Hold your breath gently for 4 seconds.

3. Breathe Out through your mouth for 4 seconds.

4. Hold at the end of the exhale for 4 seconds.

Repeat this cycle for one to two minutes. It’s a powerful way to reset your nervous system when you feel overwhelmed.

Here's a helpful video that explains this technique: https://youtu.be/a7uQXDkxEtM?si=VW114-CPUUIhlTaU

Manage Your External Exposure

This second option is a proactive strategy to set boundaries and gain more control over when and how you consume news content. Constantly being bombarded by stressful news facilitates a state of chronic alert. You can build a protective boundary by choosing when and how you let the world in. Here are a few tips:

Silence the Sirens (Turn Off Push Notifications): News and social media alerts are

designed to hijack your attention and activate your stress response. Disabling them puts

you back in the driver's seat. You can seek out information when you're ready for it,

rather than having it pushed on you unexpectedly.

Curb the "Doomscroll" (Set Time Limits): We've all fallen into the endless scroll of

bad news that leaves us feeling hopeless. By setting a time limit and choosing when to

expose yourself to potential news stories, you’re able to better prepare for the experience.

Be deliberate. Give yourself a specific, limited time to catch up—perhaps 15 minutes in

the morning and 15 in the evening. You could even use your phone's built-in app timers if

you need help sticking to these limits.

Train the algorithm on an alternative account: Algorithms on platforms like TikTok and Instagram weave in news stories with other types of more relaxing and fun content to maximize engagement. One way to mitigate this is to create a new account, and when news stories come up, swipe to the next video right away—don’t watch or like them. This new behavior on the alternative account will train the algorithm to deliver other types of content, and you can switch to your old account when you want to consume the news.

By combining in-the-moment coping skills with proactive boundaries, you create a

comprehensive plan to protect your mental health. Taking a minute to breathe and setting limits on your media intake won't change the world, but it will absolutely change your ability to navigate it.