Researchers at UC Irvine studied the Boston Marathon bombing and found something the news industry does not want printed. People who stood near the finish line, who felt the concussion of the blast and watched the chaos with their own eyes, reported less acute stress in the weeks after than people who never left their couch.
The couch group consumed six or more hours of bombing coverage a day. That group scored nine times higher on acute stress than people with minimal exposure.
The study ran in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2014. Lead researcher Alison Holman called the finding a surprise even to her own team. Her theory holds a hard truth.
Repeated exposure to violent footage keeps trauma alive in the body long after the actual event has ended.
This pattern repeats. Roxane Cohen Silver and her colleagues tracked the same effect after 9/11 and the Iraq War. Heavy media consumers carried physical and psychological symptoms for up to three years past the initial event.
The body cannot always tell the difference between a threat happening now and a threat replayed for the tenth time this week. It responds to both as danger.
Sit with that. An entire industry runs on footage that hurts its viewers more than the disaster hurt its survivors.
Every autoplay, every push alert, every “breaking” banner exists to keep a nervous system locked in a stress response, because a nervous system locked in a stress response keeps scrolling. This is how it’s reflecting in the business world:
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