People are checking their phones less in the morning, not from disinterest but from drowning in a 'waterfall of perpetual bad news.' The Reuters Institute's 2025 Digital News Report found that 69 percent of Canadians actively avoid news, while global avoidance hits 40 percent—the highest recorded level.

This isn't civic decline but a mismatch between ancient brain wiring and modern information overload. Our cognitive architecture evolved to prioritize threats because missing a predator meant death, while overreacting cost only minutes. This negativity bias served survival for millennia, but now we're scanning the entire globe for threats before lunch.

A Nature Human Behaviour study of 105,000 headlines viewed six million times confirmed our brains still respond: negative words drive clicks, positive words don't. Researchers now classify this as Problematic News Consumption, affecting 17 percent of American adults with severe cases. Among them, 61 percent report feeling unwell frequently.

The solution isn't avoidance—democracy needs informed citizens. Instead, time-box news consumption, choose depth over volume, and distinguish between awareness and actionable agency. Recognize rage bait for what it is: engineered provocation, not journalism. Our brains weren't built for this scale of input, but they can learn to adapt.