There's Little in It: How News Destroys Your Decision Quality

Recently, an executive sat across from me. Successful. Respected. Responsible for several hundred employees. His sentence: "I'd prefer to withdraw. Like in the Biedermeier era. This world is destroying me."

I asked. Where does the feeling come from? Not from his company. Not from his team. Not from his numbers. It came from his morning routine. Every day 45 minutes of FAZ, Handelsblatt, Spiegel Online. Afterward: irritated, reactive, snippy toward employees. And in the evening, the feeling of living in a world that's falling apart.

The world isn't falling apart. His prefrontal cortex is.

What's Really in a News Article

I recently analyzed an average FAZ article about Iran negotiations sentence by sentence. The result was sobering.

The article contained about 35 sentences. Of these, 6 to 8 sentences described verifiable states of the world: negotiations are taking place, location is Geneva, Oman is mediating, Trump issued an ultimatum, US military deployed forces, IAEA chief is participating. The rest?

Around 50% of the text consisted of interpretation. Political motives, strategic assessments, historical context. Plausible, but not news. And around 30% consisted of emotional amplification: "decisive round," "catastrophic economic situation," "comprehensive war," "massive fleet," "largest deployment since 2003." These formulations don't convey facts. They activate your brain.

The pure news core: about 20% of the article. Could have fit in four sentences.

The rest creates the feeling that the world is in danger. And this feeling has neurological consequences that directly affect your workday.

What Happens in Your Brain While You Read

Amy Arnsten from Yale University School of Medicine published a finding in Nature Reviews Neuroscience in 2009 that deserves to be taught in every leadership program: Even mildly perceived, uncontrollable stress causes a rapid and dramatic loss of prefrontal cognitive abilities (1). Not after weeks. Immediately.

The prefrontal cortex is the brain region you need for everything you're paid for: strategic planning, complex decisions, impulse control, long-term thinking. And it's the most stress-sensitive structure in the entire brain.

Hermans and colleagues described the mechanism in detail in Trends in Neurosciences in 2014: Acute stress shifts resources from the executive control network (responsible for deliberate thinking) to the salience network (responsible for threat detection). Fear and vigilance increase at the expense of higher cognitive functions (2).

Translated into your daily life: You read news for 45 minutes in the morning. Your salience network, whose core is the amygdala, is ramped up. Your executive control network is shut down. You go to the office. And make decisions with a brain programmed for threat defense, not strategic thinking.

A study from the journal eLife (van Oort et al., 2025) recently confirmed: Individuals with increased salience network reactivity in the early stress phase also showed stronger emotional reactivity to stressors in daily life (3). Laboratory results transfer to real behavior. The morning activation doesn't stay in the kitchen.

The Mechanism: Why You Can't Simply "Read Critically"

Here comes the point where most advice fails. "Read news critically!" is neurologically naive.

Critical thinking requires the prefrontal cortex. The emotional content in the news article activates the amygdala. The amygdala suppresses the prefrontal cortex. So you need precisely the brain region that's being shut down to recognize the shutdown.

Soroka and colleagues measured psychophysiological reactions to news content across 17 countries in PNAS in 2019. The result was clear: People react physiologically more strongly to negative than to positive news. This isn't a cultural phenomenon. It's biological (4).

Negative news is shared 1.91 times more often on social media than positive news, Watson and colleagues show in Scientific Reports in 2024 based on over 95,000 articles and 579 million social media posts (5). The mechanism reinforces itself: What activates gets shared. What gets shared gets produced. What gets produced activates.

Andersen and Djerf-Pierre (2024) call this "Scary World Syndrome": Repeated exposure to negative news creates anxiety, lowers psychological well-being, and leaves people in a state of depression, disengagement, and powerlessness (6).

For an executive, this is a disaster. Because the three states that news consumption creates are the three states in which you don't make good decisions.

The Three Dead Ends: Explosion, Avoidance, and Implosion

What happens to people who chronically operate in amygdala mode? They end up in one of three dead ends. All are destructive. All are predictable.

Dead End 1: Explosion. The pressure in the kettle rises until it explodes. The executive becomes reactive, snippy, aggressive. Small triggers lead to oversized reactions. Critical feedback in a meeting becomes an existential threat. A project delay becomes a personal attack. The board member escalates conflicts that weren't conflicts and creates crises where conversations would have sufficed.

Dead End 2: Avoidance. The Biedermeier variant. Withdrawal from the world, isolation, cocooning. The executive retreats into a controlled micro-universe. No new projects, no risks, no confrontation. Functions externally, delegates everything that could be unpleasant, and builds a bubble of routine and security. Looks like sovereignty. Is avoidance.

Dead End 3: Implosion. Resignation. Internal resignation. The executive has given up but continues to function. Decisions are postponed, conflicts ignored, risks avoided. The CEO who has known for 14 months that he needs to replace his CFO and is still "waiting for the right moment." Nothing dies loudly here. Everything dies quietly.

All three dead ends have the same origin: the brain avoids unpleasant feelings. In technical terms, this is called Experiential Avoidance. The explosion avoids the feeling of powerlessness through activity. The avoidance bypasses the feeling of being overwhelmed through withdrawal. The implosion numbs the feeling of hopelessness through functioning. All three feel better in the short term. All three destroy decision quality, relationships, and companies in the long term.

Survival vs. Experience: The Fundamental Goal Conflict

Friedrich Nietzsche wrote in "The Gay Science": "Live dangerously! Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius! Send your ships into uncharted seas!" (7)

This isn't a call to recklessness. It's a description of the fundamental goal conflict that determines your decision quality.

Mode 1: Survival. The goal is security. The strategy is avoidance. The question is: "What can go wrong?" The amygdala leads. The PFC provides justifications. The result: cynicism, risk avoidance, stagnation. In Germany, this mode even has a name the world knows: German Angst. The tendency to insure against everything and still live in constant tension.

Mode 2: Experience. The goal is growth. The strategy is engagement. The question is: "What becomes possible?" The PFC leads, integrated with emotional signals from the limbic system. The result: innovation, calculated risk, market leadership.

The difference doesn't lie in intelligence. It doesn't lie in strategy. It lies in the neurophysiological operating mode.

Whoever puts their brain into survival mode for 45 minutes every morning makes survival decisions all day. Avoidance decisions. Fear decisions. And rationalizes them afterward as "cautious" or "strategic."

Critics will say: Caution ensures survival. True. Survival is the prerequisite. But disruption, innovation, and market leadership emerge in experience mode. Those who only survive remain in the status quo. Those who experience reshape it. The interesting question is: Which mode have you chosen? Or has your morning routine chosen it for you?

Why This Applies to AI Readiness, Change Management, and Leadership Simultaneously

The pattern is universal. It doesn't affect one topic but the basic structure with which executives respond to change.

AI Readiness fails due to fear. Klarna's AI chatbot produced worse results than human employees because the company acted from cost avoidance rather than clear intent (see my article on Intent Engineering). The question "What does it cost if we don't do it?" is an amygdala question. The question "What becomes possible if we do it right?" is a PFC question. Presumably, many AI strategies are decided in survival mode.

Change Management fails due to fear. Meyer and Tisch showed in 2024 in an empirical BAuA study the direct connection between techno-stressors in the workplace and burnout symptoms (8). No change process works when participants are in amygdala mode. You can have the best strategy. If the brain is programmed for survival, every change is processed as a threat.

Leadership fails due to fear. The CEO who doesn't fire his toxic CFO. The entrepreneur who doesn't raise her prices. The board member who delays the merger. In each case, the person knows what to do. In each case, they don't do it. The reason is never a lack of information. The reason is a feeling that's being avoided. And this feeling is reinforced every morning through 45 minutes of news consumption.

What Changes When You Know This

I'm not telling you to stop reading news. I'm telling you that you should understand what news does to your brain before you expose your brain to news.

The research is clear: Stress shifts neural resources from strategic thinking to threat defense (2). This effect occurs quickly and persists (3). And chronic activation leads to structural changes in the brain (1).

When you know that 80% of a news article consists of interpretation and emotional activation, you can begin to read differently. Not "more critically" in the sense of "I evaluate the content." But more consciously in the sense of "I notice what the content does to my body."

This isn't just a mindfulness exercise. This is risk management for your most important tool.

Nietzsche was right. A life oriented only toward security is not a lived life. The question isn't whether the world is dangerous. The question is whether you lead from a brain oriented toward experience, or from one that's reprogrammed for survival every morning.

There's little in it. In the news article at the breakfast table. And in a life in survival mode.

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Sources Used with URLs:

1. Arnsten, A. F. T. (2009). Stress signalling pathways that impair prefrontal cortex structure and function. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 10(6), 410-422. https://www.nature.com/articles/nrn2648

2. Hermans, E. J., Henckens, M. J. A. G., Joëls, M., & Fernández, G. (2014). Dynamic adaptation of large-scale brain networks in response to acute stressors. Trends in Neurosciences, 37(6), 304-314. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24766931/

3. van Oort, J., et al. (2025). Changes in large-scale neural networks under stress are linked to affective reactivity to stress in real life. eLife. https://elifesciences.org/reviewed-preprints/102574

4. Soroka, S., Fournier, P., & Nir, L. (2019). Cross-national evidence of a negativity bias in psychophysiological reactions to news. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116(38), 18888-18892. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1908369116

5. Watson, N., et al. (2024). Negative online news articles are shared more to social media. Scientific Reports, 14, 21455. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-71263-z

6. Andersen, K., & Djerf-Pierre, M. (2024). The Scary World Syndrome: News Orientations, Negativity Bias, and the Cultivation of Anxiety. Mass Communication and Society. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15205436.2023.2297829

7. Nietzsche, F. (1882). The Gay Science. Aphorism 283.

8. Meyer, S.-C., & Tisch, A. (2024). Technostress am Arbeitsplatz: eine empirische Studie zum Zusammenhang mit Burnout-Symptomen. sicher ist sicher, 75(5), 233-238. https://www.baua.de/DE/Angebote/Publikationen/Aufsaetze/artikel3882

9. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (2026). Bei den Verhandlungen in Genf steht heute viel auf dem Spiel. February 26, 2026. https://www.faz.net/aktuell/politik/ausland/usa-sehen-hinweise-fuer-wiederaufbau-des-iranischen-atomprogramms-accg-200575254.html