“I CAN’T watch the news anymore.”

I’ve heard at least a dozen people say this over the past fortnight.

And I can fully understand their sentiments. The news is particularly horrific at the moment and noone watching it can fail to be moved by the scenes being broadcast from Ukraine.

But while staying up to date on what is happening in the world is important, consuming too much of it can affect you in negative ways.

There are many studies which conclude that watching the news can take a toll on your physical, emotional, and mental health. One found that people showed an increase in anxiety after watching the TV news for less than 15 minutes.

Other pieces of research have concluded that negative news can affect mood and lead to feelings of hopelessness, anger and fear and can exacerbate worries in people’s own lives.

The images and stories being broadcast from Eastern Europe are off-the-scale shocking and of course no hardship in our lives could even remotely be compared to what those people are going through. We are extremely fortunate to be able to view such terror and destruction from our armchairs. But such scenes do affect us in other ways, and anxiety is one of them.

“It’s in the back of my mind all the time,” a neighbour in her twenties told me this week, “I have had to stop my news feed because I get so stressed.”

We have a 24-hour news culture now, where TV channels and social media sites constantly update and repeat stories. We are exposed to news daily, hourly, and even minute-by-minute.

And while we want to know what is happening, in grave situations like this, we also don’t.

I became aware, recently, that I was going to bed even more anxious than my natural, worrisome state. I was finding it hard to get to sleep and even harder to stay asleep. I put it down to the terrible scenes on the late evening news, coupled with flicking through the headlines on my phone while in bed.

For a couple of days I decided not to watch the late evening news or look at my phone and definitely felt lighter and more relaxed on going to bed.

“Try and surround yourself with positivity,” a friend said, “Don’t look at the news, and do the things that make you happy.”

But, though whatever I do makes no difference to anyone, hiding from the news feels cowardly. Even though it’s happening thousands of miles away and, other than donate towards the refugee fund, I can do nothing about it, I feel I need to know what’s going on, and not just as a journalist.

Not watching the TV news, brought to us by courageous news teams, or listening to it on the radio, feels like a betrayal of those affected. However troubled it leaves me, not knowing what’s happening is worse than knowing.

It’s not as if we have had much good news over the past couple of years. Watching the endless stream of Covid-related bulletins throughout the pandemic - which still isn’t over - hasn’t given us much to cheer about.

In fact, there hasn’t been much genuinely good news in the world for many years - any uplifting items have traditionally been tagged on the end of the TV broadcasts - the short and sweet ‘and finally’ items.

For anyone who genuinely feels the news is too dreadful to face, there’s plenty of advice online as to how to wean yourself off it: websites offering five reasons to stop watching the news, others giving seven reasons to stop watching the news and so on. Each one leads in with its impact on mental health.

We can’t control what is happening in other parts of the world. It is dreadfully upsetting and fills us with fear and foreboding, but even so we need to face up to it and see it for ourselves.