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The lazy brain and the bad news

By Rik Van Bruggen · 26 August 2026, at 05:31

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The lazy brain and the bad news

A couple of weeks ago, I was mulling over something that seemed like a proper contradiction to me. In earlier editorials, we have written about the fact that people seem to actively seek out negative news - the doom, the gloom, the outrage. That's well documented, and it's one of the reasons why Positron exists in the first place. But at the same time, I kept bumping into another truth that seemed to point in exactly the opposite direction: people are, let's be honest, quite lazy. We optimise for convenience and pleasure. We take the elevator, not the stairs. We order in, we swipe, we binge. Humankind is a comfort-seeking species if there ever was one.

So how do you square those two things? If we are all pleasure-seeking creatures of comfort, why on earth would we voluntarily wade into a river of misery every morning before breakfast? Surely a lazy, pleasure-seeking brain would choose the good news?

That question kept nagging at me. And here's the thing: the more I dug into it, the more I realised that the contradiction is not a contradiction at all. In fact, the second truth explains the first one. Let me try to unpack that.

First truth: we really do prefer the bad stuff

The evidence here is quite overwhelming. Stuart Soroka and his colleagues measured people's physiological reactions to news in 17 countries across 6 continents, and found that humans everywhere react more strongly to negative news than to positive news. And it's not just how we react - it's what we click on. A team of researchers analysed about 105,000 headline variations from Upworthy, covering some 370 million impressions, and found that every additional negative word in a headline increased the click-through rate by 2.3%. Positive words actually decreased clicks. Bad news sells, quite literally.

Second truth: we really are lazy

Also well documented. Psychologists call it the "law of least mental effort": when given the choice, our brains systematically pick the option that requires the least cognitive work. Wouter Kool and his colleagues showed this in a series of six experiments - people reliably avoided the more demanding tasks, and remarkably, they did so without even being aware of it. We don't decide to be lazy. We just are. Our brains are metabolic misers, always looking for the discount.

The reconciliation: negativity is the lazy option

So here is where it clicked for me. My mistake - and I suspect many people make it - was to assume that consuming negative news is somehow the "hard" choice, and that pleasure would be the "easy" one. It's exactly the other way around.

Negativity bias is not a preference in any meaningful sense. It's a reflex. Psychologists have called it "automatic vigilance": threatening information grabs our attention before we've had any chance to think about it. It's an ancient alarm system, and it runs for free. No effort required. The sabre-toothed tiger did not wait for us to finish our nuanced reflection.

Hope, on the other hand, is expensive. Nuance is expensive. Looking at a complicated world and asking "what's actually getting better here, and why?" - that requires exactly the kind of effortful, controlled thinking that our lazy brains are wired to avoid.

And there's a cruel little twist on top of that. Neuroscientists distinguish between "wanting" and "liking" - the craving circuit and the pleasure circuit are two different things in the brain. Doomscrolling is pure wanting without any liking. We don't enjoy the bad news - study after study shows that compulsive negative news consumption makes us feel demonstrably worse. We keep scrolling anyway. So no, we are not pleasure-seeking when we drown ourselves in negativity. We are being pulled along by a craving machine that never actually pays out.

Add to that what Tim Wu called the tyranny of convenience: entire industries are built on serving us the frictionless option. And the frictionless option for capturing human attention is, as we now know, fear and outrage. The media did not create our negativity bias - but they have industrialised it.

The good news about discomfort

Now, here's where it gets interesting. Because you could read all of the above and conclude that we are simply stuck - lazy brains, lazy clicks, lazy world. But there is a growing body of evidence saying that a bit of discomfort is not just tolerable. It's actually good for us.

Biologists call it hormesis: the phenomenon where a mild dose of a stressor - exercise, fasting, heat, cold - triggers repair and adaptation mechanisms that leave us stronger than before. Mark Mattson, one of the leading researchers in this field, literally titled one of his papers "Challenging Oneself Intermittently to Improve Health". Intermittent fasting, as he and Rafael de Cabo summarised in the New England Journal of Medicine, activates deep cellular stress responses that improve insulin sensitivity and resilience. Exercise - which is, let's face it, voluntary discomfort - boosts BDNF in the brain and keeps our neurons young. Our bodies were built for challenge, and they quietly deteriorate without it.

And it's not just our bodies. Kaitlin Woolley and Ayelet Fishbach ran five experiments with over 2,000 people and found that when people deliberately seek out discomfort - rather than merely tolerating it - they grow more, persist longer, and, tellingly, open themselves up more to challenging but important information. Read that last bit again. The willingness to be uncomfortable is precisely what makes us better informed.

So the comfortable option is a double trap. It hands our attention to the outrage machine, and it slowly softens our bodies and minds. A little chosen discomfort, it turns out, is one of the healthiest things we can do.

So what does that mean for us?

It means, I think, that positivity is not naive. It's effortful - and that effort is not a bug, it's the feature. Choosing to look at what goes well in the world, at progress, at solutions - that is the stairs, not the elevator. It's a deliberate act of swimming against your own neurological current. And just like the stairs, it's exactly the kind of mild, chosen discomfort that makes us stronger.

And that, to me, is quite a hopeful reconciliation. Because effort is a choice. We can't switch off our ancient alarm systems, but we can decide - consciously, deliberately, a little bit stubbornly - where to point our attention once the alarm has sounded. That is what we are trying to do here at Positron. Not feel-good news for people who want to look away, but real news for people who are willing to do a little bit of work.

The lazy brain will always click on the bad news. The question is whether we are more than our lazy brains. I'd like to think that we are.

Hope this was a useful reflection - as always, would love to hear what you think.

Cheers

Rik
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