Breaking news and breaking down

As a fedgling journalist in her twenties, India Sturgis revelled in the excitement of working for national newspapers despite the long hours, stress and pressure to perform.

She recalls: “Even if I was feeling anxious and struggling to sleep, I still absolutely loved the job.”

But the pressure gradually took a toll in 2019 after having a baby, when she experienced a period of extreme insomnia and intrusive thoughts. This culminated in an admittance to the Priory, a private mental health hospital in London, where she was diagnosed with generalised anxiety disorder (GAD).

“How my anxiety felt to me was a tendency to slip into the seventh gear very quickly,” explains Sturgis, a Magazine MA alumna, who has written for the Telegraph and Daily Mail. “It would often feel like the fght or fight response triggered more easily, so you are working with a lot of adrenaline, which actually – like athletes before a race – can pull your concentration in and get the results you need quickly.”

Sturgis learnt how to deal with her anxiety through the cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) she did in those crucial weeks as a patient. Now, working on a book about anxiety, she describes it as a brick in the wall of her personality rather than something that defnes her.

Despite this, there are moments where striking a balance between working as a journalist and caring for her mental health remains a problem. “What I notice is that in certain situations I might be slightly more predisposed to feelings of overwhelm or adrenaline in a situation that doesn’t warrant feeling like that or having such a strong reaction,” she says.

“I’ll be sitting there, and I have three cups in front of me, I haven’t eaten properly and I haven’t really slept, or I got up at fve in the morning to do something. It’s now 8pm and I haven’t really stopped and you’re like, ‘what am I doing’?”

As journalists are expected to work increasingly longer hours, acting as a source of information for the public, Sturgis is not the only one whose burnout and stress has become anxiety. A 2021 survey into the mental health of Canadian journalists by the Canadian Press found that 69 per cent of respondents reported that they had anxiety, while 80 per cent claimed they had experienced burnout from reporting on death, injury and suffering.

A 2021 study from Middlesex University found that journalists often attribute their stress and burnout to going beyond their pay grade in terms of hours and emotional labour. The responsibility of reporting information during the pandemic exacerbated journalists’ already existing anxiety and, in the case of Pippa Crerar, provoked feelings of extreme anxiety in response to backlash for their work for the frst time.

Crerar, Political Editor of The Guardian, explains how the response she received from breaking a series of major exclusives about the Partygate scandal impacted her mental health. “I got a fair amount of negative attention, particularly on Twitter, during the Dominic Cummings, Barnard Castle, Boris Johnson Partygate stories. Some of that was very personal,” she says.

“The advice I got from Laura Kuenssberg, when she was BBC’s Political Editor, is to turn off your notifcations. It does unfortunately mean that you miss interactions that you would otherwise have seen. But the beneft of it is that I’m not checking my phone in the middle of the night to see what time it is, and having 40 abusive comments, which was really quite detrimental to my mental health.”

Sturgis concurs that she has had her notifcations turned off for years to help her focus on deadlines.

“defending themselves against their own anxiety and helplessness”.

Consistently put in situations out of their control, journalists are subject to abnormally high expectations of their mental resilience towards situations they experience on the job that wouldn’t apply to those outside of the feld. “There’s a lot of bravado isn the job, a lot of omnipotent fantasy that ‘I can handle anything,’” says Mortimer, whose father was killed while reporting in El Salvador when she was 19. Having anxiety, or what Mortimer calls being “hyper vigilant”, can make you more likely to put yourself in chaotic situations, so that your external world matches your inner.

It’s, therefore, unsurprising that people with anxiety pursue journalism as a career. Aarron Fleming, an education reporter at the Daily Memphian in Memphis, Tennessee, has dealt with anxiety his whole life. Starting a career in journalism seven months ago has helped him to overcome aspects of his anxiety. Even though he is reluctant to call people or even go out and talk to them, his sense of duty to report fairly and accurately on racial and economic injustice, which are rife in his designated school district (the largest in the state), compel him to go out and do it.

“The words ‘trial by fre’ are something I totally live by with anxiety in general,” says Fleming. “I just kind of have to go and do it, and then once you do, you realise it’s not as bad as you thought.”

“I hated dealing with them and found them unnecessary, stressful and disruptive. It’s all about slowing down the unnecessary barrage of information from your phone and, really, the world more generally, in ways that make sense for you and your job.”

If that information is preventing you from doing your job, or more importantly dealing with your personal life, that’s when your mental health becomes threatened. While journalists might experience highly stressful situations, it’s often the lack of balance between their work and personal lives that has the most impact on them.

Struggling with this balance comes up regularly when talking to journalists who seek help for their anxiety, Anna Mortimer, a therapist and journalist, has found. “I spoke to someone who had seen severed heads on spikes [while working] and not minding that much, but weeping because his girlfriend had a miscarriage and he wasn’t there,” says Mortimer, who co-founded The Mind Field, an online therapy service for journalists reporting on confict.

While journalists might feel their long working hours make them miss out on intimate personal moments, Mortimer explains that this is symptomatic of defecting personal issues they might face.

“The idea that [journalists] should be more immune to what’s going on around them,” explains Mortimer, often comes with them

While still at college, he was asked to cover a school shooting and asked to cold call someone’s apartment to interview them about the shooting. “Nobody teaches you how to do that and I think, even if they did, it’s kind of theoretical but I had to get over myself and go do it,” he says.

Fleming understands the benefts that anxiety can bring to interviewing and building contacts. “I’m not so bold that I’m just callous and don’t really care about people’s feelings. I am a lot more, probably to a fault, careful with questions I ask or how I go about things,” Fleming explains.

Building relationships with editors throughout her career has helped Sturgis to cope with anxiety.

“When you’ve got really strong relationships with editors, they know your work and what you do. If 95 per cent of the time you hit those deadlines, if you’re not able to, they understand there will be a reason,” she explains.

According to Crerar, relationships with other journalists are equally important. Over the years, she says, people have increasingly been willing to talk about anxiety. She ensures her team knows they can do the same with her. “We can talk through them, think about ways of alleviating that pressure, or dealing with negativity that surrounds them and making them ultimately feel good about themselves, because my view very strongly is that if my team is happy, they’re going to be the best journalists that they can be and that works in everyone’s interests.”