It clocked in with you

This one started with a researcher noticing something about himself.

Ian Hughes, now at Texas A&M, described the moment plainly: in the summer of 2023 he was talking to someone in his life about how constant exposure to political news was landing on him emotionally. “It was all I seemed able to think about some days,” he said. Even mid-task at work, he’d find himself dwelling on something he’d read the night before, reaching for his phone to scroll a little further into it. And then the thought that turns a private annoyance into a study: surely this can’t just be me.

So he and four colleagues went and checked.

What they actually did

Between mid-January and mid-March 2024, the researchers tracked full-time American workers across nine consecutive weeks. Every weekend, participants answered a short set of questions: how much positive and how much negative political content had they taken in during their non-work hours, how hopeful or anxious had they felt that week, and how had they been at work — engaged or flat, helpful or heads-down, saying what they thought or carefully not.

308 people stayed the whole nine weeks, which comes to 2,772 weekly reports. The findings were reported last week by PsyPost, from a study in Computers in Human Behavior.

The design matters more than it sounds. Because everyone answered the same questions week after week, the researchers could compare each person to themselves — not to an average stranger. Was this a heavier week than your own normal? And if so, what did your week look like?

What they found

The week-to-week pattern was fairly clean.

In weeks when someone took in more negative political content than their own usual amount, they reported feeling more anxious. That heightened anxiety was, in turn, linked to being less engaged at work — less energetic, less absorbed — and to a greater tendency to self-censor around colleagues.

In weeks when someone took in more positive content than their usual, they reported more hope. And hope tracked with the opposite pattern: more engagement, and more willingness to help a colleague who was drowning in work.

Then comes the part the lead author says surprised him. If you know anything about psychology, you’d expect the negative side to be the strong one. Negativity bias — our tendency to attend harder to threat than to good news — is one of the most durable ideas in the field, and it’s the reason headlines are written the way they are. Hughes made this point himself: media companies know the bias exists, and know it drives clicks.

But in this data, it was the positive content that did most of the work. It was the more robust predictor of how people felt and how their week went. And people who chronically consumed a lot of negative news weren’t reliably more anxious than their peers overall — the effect showed up in the shift from a person’s own baseline, not in their absolute level.

Which is a quietly humane finding. It suggests the question isn’t “am I someone who reads too much bad news.” It’s “was this week heavier than my normal, and did I notice?”

Why this sits close to how we think about Nagi

Two things here are worth holding onto.

The first is that boundary. Most of us carry an unspoken assumption that our evenings are sealed off — that whatever we do between finishing work and going to sleep is neutral, private, self-contained. This study is one more piece of evidence that it isn’t. What you took in on Tuesday night is still faintly in the room on Wednesday morning. Not dramatically. Not deterministically. But measurably enough that 308 people’s weekends showed up in their working weeks.

The second is the shape of the measurement, which is the bit we find genuinely interesting. This is a within-person study. Its power came from asking the same small questions of the same people, over and over, until each person’s own baseline emerged and deviations from it became visible. Nobody in that study could have told you on week one what their normal was. It only existed after several weeks of showing up.

That’s the entire logic behind a check-in. Not to produce a score. Not to tell you anything about yourself you haven’t lived. Just to build up enough of your own ordinary weeks that an unusual one stands out — because from inside a heavy Wednesday, you have almost no way of knowing whether it’s a heavy Wednesday or just Wednesday. Nagi’s four taps exist for that, and nothing more ambitious than that.

The honest caveats

This is correlational. The researchers say so directly: it’s entirely possible that feeling anxious drives people towards grim news rather than the other way round, and this design can’t separate the two. Everything is self-reported. Hope and anxiety were each captured with a single question, which is a thin instrument for a wide feeling. And because the analysis rests on those who lasted all nine weeks, who left matters: younger workers, women and Black participants dropped out at higher rates, so the final sample doesn’t represent everyone. Hughes describes the work as descriptive rather than prescriptive. One study in a longer line of them.

We’d add the obvious: this isn’t an argument for reading only things that make you feel good. Hughes was blunt about that too — calling it a “faulty line of thinking,” because understanding anything complicated means sitting with perspectives you don’t already hold. His suggested question is a better one, and it’s about intent rather than content: is this trying to inform me, or trying to capitalise on my attention?

Where that leaves the evening

You don’t need to overhaul how you read the news. That’s not what a nine-week diary study licenses anyone to tell you.

But there’s something worth doing with a finding like this, and it’s smaller than a resolution. Just notice, once, what a heavier week feels like the next morning. Notice whether the flatness you’re blaming on work started somewhere else the night before. You can only see that from a distance, across a few weeks — never from inside a single tired Tuesday.

Which is, in the end, the same thing the researchers had to do. They couldn’t see the pattern in one week either. They had to keep asking.

If you want a private place to start noticing your own patterns, Nagi is on Google Play and the App Store — or in your browser at app.nagiandme.app. The first 15 messages are free. No name, no email. Just you, checking in.

— The Nagi team

Source: Doomscrolling political news during your downtime predicts reduced engagement at work, PsyPost, 16 August 2026. Underlying study: Hughes, I. M., Bowling, N. A., Keith, M. G., Brossoit, R. M., & Bazzoli, A., “The work-related consequences of employees’ media-based political information consumption: A nine-wave weekly study during the 2024 U.S. presidential primary season,” Computers in Human Behavior. Nine-wave weekly diary study, 19 January – 15 March 2024; 308 full-time US employees recruited via Prolific completed all nine waves, yielding 2,772 weekly reports; average age ~43, ~60% male, 72% white; baseline political ideology controlled for. Limitations stated by the researchers: the design is correlational and cannot establish direction of cause, all measures are self-reported, hope and anxiety were each assessed with a single item, and attrition was uneven — younger workers, women and Black participants dropped out at higher rates — so the findings may not generalise to the wider working population.

Nagi & Me is a mental health companion app, not a medical device, and nothing here is medical advice. If you’re struggling, please reach out to a professional or someone you trust.