Habit News

[Dionisio Sechser]

SomeNIH-funded research is exploring whether certain medications can help to disrupt hard-wired automatic behaviors in the brain and make it easier to form new memories and behaviors. Other scientific teams are searching for genes that might allow some people to easily form and others to readily suppress habits.

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Most Americans say they often or sometimes get local political news, but only a quarter of them are highly satisfied with the quality of coverage. And fewer than half of U.S. adults say it is easy to find the information they need to make voting decisions in local elections.

Thousands of guests appeared on the top-ranked podcasts in 2022, but a relatively small number accounted for a majority of appearances. 76% of top-ranked podcasts brought on at least one guest in 2022, and 27% almost always or regularly featured guests.

Black Americans see a range of problems with how Black people are covered in the news. Almost two-thirds of Black adults (63%) say news about Black people is often more negative than news about other racial and ethnic groups. And while few are optimistic that will change in the foreseeable future, many see ways in which that coverage could be improved.

Why is this happening? Most often, younger audiences (under 35) say the news has a negative effect on their mood (34%) and, most recently, that there is too much news coverage of topics like politics or Coronavirus (39%). In particular, the longstanding criticism of the depressing or overwhelming nature of news persists among young people. For instance, in the UK, two-thirds (64%) of news avoiders under 35 say the news brings down their mood. Our qualitative research participants described forming habits of avoiding this negativity.

This year, we also asked about why people personally choose to keep up with the news. All age groups see the news as equally important for learning new things, but news users under 35 are slightly more motivated than older groups by how entertaining the news is and how sharable it is, and they are slightly less motivated than older groups by a sense of duty to stay informed of news or by its personal usefulness to them.

After Menendez was charged last year with corruption, he explained that for 30 years he withdrew thousands of dollars each month from his personal savings account in case of emergencies. The "old-fashioned" habit, he said, had roots in his family's experience in Cuba.

A psychiatrist who evaluated Menendez would be expected to testify at trial that he "suffered intergenerational trauma stemming from his family's experience as refugees, who had their funds confiscated by the Cuban government and were left with only a small amount of cash that they had stashed away in their home," the senator's lawyers said last month in a letter to prosecutors.

The psychiatrist, Karen Rosenbaum, would also be expected to testify that he "experienced trauma when his father, a compulsive gambler, died by suicide after Senator Menendez eventually decided to discontinue paying off his father's gambling debts."

The condition and "lack of treatment resulted in a fear of scarcity for the senator and the development of a longstanding coping mechanism of routinely withdrawing and storing cash in his home," it said.

Prosecutors, objecting to the proposed testimony, included the letter in a legal filing on Wednesday and asked the judge to prevent the psychiatrist from testifying. They asserted the psychiatrist's conclusion "does not appear to be the product of any reliable scientific principle or method" and is an attempt to gain sympathy from the jury.

The former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was indicted in September 2023 on charges alleging he and his wife, Nadine, accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of bribes. Prosecutors said they used his power and influence to enrich and protect three New Jersey businessmen and benefit the government of Egypt.

In the following months, superseding indictments alleged Menendez and his wife conspired to act as a foreign agent for Egypt, accepted expensive gifts in exchange for favorable comments about Qatar and obstructed the investigation into the alleged years-long corruption scheme.

In a court filing last month, prosecutors said at least 10 envelopes containing more than $80,000 in cash had the fingerprints or DNA of one of the New Jersey businessmen, while all of the gold bars can be linked to two of them.

Menendez recently indicated he might incriminate his wife, who will be tried separately this summer because of "serious medical condition" that requires surgery. Menendez's lawyers said in a legal brief that the senator might testify about communications with his wife that will demonstrate "the ways in which she withheld information" from her husband "or otherwise led him to believe that nothing unlawful was taking place."

Why do some people maintain a news habit while others avoid news altogether? To explore that question, we put findings from an interview-based study of news avoiders in the UK and Spain into dialogue with past research on factors found to shape news consumption. We found that news avoiders saw news as having limited informational benefits and high costs in terms of time, emotional energy, and mental effort. They also did not see consuming news as a civic duty to be pursued despite the costs, nor did they have strong ties to communities that highly valued news consumption. This meant they had few social incentives to return to news habitually and that connections between distant-seeming topics in the news and immediate concerns were rarely reinforced. We conclude that group-level social factors play an understudied but important role in shaping news avoidance.

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Previous work by Graybiel and her colleagues discovered clear beginning and ending signals in the brain when habits are performed. These signals appear in the striatum, a part of the brain that, among other things, coordinates body movements; the signals have been observed in mice, rats, and monkeys that have been trained to perform specific tasks.

A few years ago, Graybiel and Theresa Desrochers, then a doctoral student in her lab, decided to let two monkeys learn a habit on their own, without training, as a way to mimic real-life learning. They also recorded the activity of 1,600 neurons in the striatum during the learning period.

In addition, these habitual eye-scanning patterns became more efficient. The monkeys shortened the paths they used to visit the dots the same way a traveling salesman might improve his sales route. Graybiel and Desrochers published these findings about behavior in 2010.

To link the firing of these neurons to habit formation, the team compared the changes in neural activity with changes in behavior, finding that the two changed in parallel. The changes in firing of some neurons tracked with cost, measured in terms of the length of the path of the eye movements during a trial, while others correlated with reward.

In addition, Graybiel is interested in understanding the role these signals might play in neuropsychiatric disorders. A first step will include identifying cells that represent cost and reward in mouse models of human neuropsychiatric disorders that have symptoms that involve repetitive behavior.

If an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, here's a strategy that may help boost your mental health: Spend the next week observing your daily habits. You can jot them down in a journal to keep track.

Researchers also analyzed markers of inflammation, including C-reactive protein, which is linked to depression, and found that a healthy lifestyle is linked to better scores. C-reactive protein concentrations rise in response to inflammation.

Of course, serious depression needs to be treated, and medications and therapy help many people feel better. But in recent years, as science has evolved, it has become clear that depression is not just a chemical imbalance. It's much more complex, and increasingly, a body of evidence points to the importance of habits and behaviors to prevent or alleviate symptoms of depression.

For people living with depression and using medication or other treatments, it's worth trying to integrate lifestyle changes as well, says Douglas Noordsy, a psychiatrist with the Stanford Lifestyle Medicine Program. "There are many people who really want agency in this process," he says, and physicians can support that by helping them identify what helps.

At the top of the list is a good night's rest. Sleeping seven to nine hours per night, on average, reduced the risk of depression by about 22% in the study. "A lot of us think of sleep as a kind of a passive process, but it's an incredibly active process," Sahakian says.

Not only does sleep enable us to consolidate memories, helping us remember what we've learned during the day, but research shows it plays a key role in keeping our immune systems strong. For instance, a well-rested person is better at fending off the common cold. And though dreaming is still a bit of a mystery, the idea that dreams may help us regulate our emotions goes back decades.

There's a solid body of evidence linking physical activity to improved moods. A previous study, based on data from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention surveys, found that people who exercise regularly report fewer days of bad mental health.

And a recent meta-analysis found that physical activity was more effective than medications in reducing symptoms of depression. Antidepressant medicines tend to be faster in treating an episode of depression, says Stanford's Noordsy. "But physical exercise has more durable effects than an antidepressant does," he says.

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