There are smiles that speak louder than words.
Like that of Elizabeth, 35, confident that she "feels so much better" since living without the news.
Like many others, she made this decision in 2020, at the dawn of the pandemic period.
The young woman then found herself confined, alone, unemployed, without horizons.
"On the news, we only talked about Covid-19. I was then invaded by a huge anxiety attack. To stop it, I understood that I had to cut myself off from the information. “Elizabeth has never felt the desire to return to the media since then.
This feeling of oppression, exhaustion and anxiety in the face of a flood of too distressing information has a name: information fatigue.
According to a 2022 survey conducted by L'ObSoCo, Arte and the Jean-Jaurès Foundation
,
this malaise now affects one in two French people.
Among its synonyms, "infobesity".
This food analogy sums up the mechanism: like the excess of fatty mass that the body cannot metabolize into energy, the excess of information means that the brain can no longer transform it into knowledge.
Too much info, too much anxiety
In 1970, Alvin Toffler, a famous American futurologist, published "The Shock of the Future".
One might wonder if this man hasn't boarded Marty McFly's DeLorean: the sociologist predicted that humanity would be dragged into a chain of transformations so rapid that they would cause people to "disconnect from the world ", to protect themselves from a "destructive disorientation".
Fifty-three years later, Geneviève Beaulieu-Pelletier, a clinical psychologist in Montreal, gives her diagnosis of this 21st century disease: not only has information invaded our lives, but with social networks and smartphones, it is also penetrating our privacy.
"Even when we are not looking for it, we receive more information than it is possible for us to process, which is very anxiety-provoking," she explains.
And the news does not help, between a pandemic whose page has not yet been turned, a world that burns and drowns at the mercy of ever more violent climate change, or a war unleashed at the gates of Europe.
Exhausted, the old "infobeses" are especially anxious.
"Fear": this is the first word that comes to mind for Ève Allemand, a psychologist in a peaceful village in Switzerland, when we approach the subject of infobesity with her.
This torrent of bad news, Eve doesn't want any more.
If she turned off her television set in the spring of 2020, it was to "preserve her joie de vivre", but also "continue to radiate happiness".
Through rose-colored glasses
The "infobeses" often criticize journalists for their editorial choices.
"Why don't they talk about the great initiatives that are happening everywhere, every day?" regrets, like others, Marianne, 30, senior education adviser.
"Because that's how it is," grumbles a fellow journalist: "If we only report bad news, it's because trains that arrive on time don't interest anyone."
The antiphon is as old as the profession, but does not prevent talking about trains arriving early.
Following the path traced by the online media Positivr, the anxieties of confinement gave birth to the Positive Media, the "good thread" of Le Monde, or even the "Comfort break" proposed by Slate: the desire to see life in (a little more) pink has spread due to health concerns.
"This aspiration is emblematic of youth", explains Caroline Sauvajol-Rialland, journalist, specialist in infobesity, who believes that young people now gauge the
Powerless in the face of a global picture that has become gloomy, some end up radically cutting themselves off from the news, driven by reasoning of this ilk: "What's the point of getting informed if it's just to learn that we're going to die in a disaster climatic or under the guns of Putin?
Psychologist Geneviève Beaulieu-Pelletier notes that this discouragement is all the greater the younger you are, because the uncertainties of the future are multiplied by the years still ahead of you.
Consequently, the rejection of current events corresponds to an adaptation strategy: that of avoidance.
"This attitude can reduce the level of anxiety on the spot. But in the long term, an external factor - a person, a situation - will inevitably bring the anxiety back", warns the Quebec psychologist.
The prescription she prescribes to the info-exhausted is simple: find personal balance in the quantity of information consumed, sort, and above all, eliminate certain sources according to their quality.
The key to serenity
Beyond psychologists, the rejection of information also concerns political scientists and journalists.
"A well-informed man is a citizen, one who is badly or uninformed is a subject", abounds Caroline Sauvajol-Rialland.
Are they therefore less informed, these former "junkies" of the info?
No, say several witnesses interviewed.
Rather "differently informed", says Paul Maakad.
Until 2014, the year he said goodbye to the Parisian journalistic scene, the Franco-Lebanese felt like "addicted to the news": "I couldn't get rid of it without feeling a lack. And then I started to identify the subjects that interested me, to dig into them. I then understood that I could free myself from the turpitudes of the immediate news without denying my curiosity towards life".
Faced with a multiplication of the media, carried out at the expense of their quality, "we must become our own directors of information", urges Caroline Sauvajol-Rialland.
The journalist wonders: "Basically, what is the use of learning about the death of children in a bus accident in Spain, if we do not try to understand the intelligences that have made it possible to reduce the number of deaths on the roads ?"
This feeling is in tune with the unanimous diagnosis of psychologists: faced with the tenfold increase in raw information, "what soothes us is understanding the world".
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