PORTLAND, OR - Like many of her friends, Charlene Jaszewski, a freelance editor living here, grabs her phone the minute she wakes up to see "what fresh hell happened" overnight.

One morning, the self-professed "digital nomad" was on her way to a coffee shop to do some work when she had what she calls "a little breakdown" in her car. She had been arguing politics that morning with people she (strongly) disagreed with, and suddenly started crying.

"I felt angry and helpless at the same time," she recalled, though she wasn't sure exactly why she was being so affected.

Glenn Garber, a retired city planner living in a small town outside Boston, says he quickly turns on CNN or MSNBC or NPR when he wakes up in the morning.

"Even though I know there's going to be news that make me crazy, I can't seem to break the habit," he explained.

"It's a low-grade nervousness that affects me every waking hour, and I know so many people who feel the same way."

It affects people across the political spectrum

While headline stress disorder may sound like a euphemism for "I don't like the current president and his policies," a version of it does cross the aisles.

According to a Pew Research Center survey released in early June, close to 7 in 10 Americans said they felt "worn out by the amount of news" that's available.

Republicans and right-leaning Americans, in fact, reported feeling being overwhelmed by news: three quarters of Republicans versus 6 in 10 Democrats.

Since 2006, the American Psychological Association (APA) has regularly surveyed Americans on stress, generally finding that money, work, and the economy were "very" or "somewhat significant" sources of stress. For the first 10 years, the surveys found stress levels were decreasing, according to "Stress in America: Coping With Change." But in the latter half of 2016 and in early 2017, that trend began to change direction.

Story Date: August 20, 2018