I was inspired to write this after recently listening to one of my favourite podcasts, The Friend Zone (much recommended). One of the podcast hosts, Francesca, a True Crime fan like myself, described why she has had to dial but on her consumption of true crime content.

There are many noticeable podcasts in this area that are doing well and that I admittedly enjoy listening to weekly. To name a few, this includes; Crime Junkie, Generation Why and RedHanded.

However, when you think about what you’re actually consuming and the traumatic nature of it – kidnappings, murder, rape, assault, etc, it’s no wonder why it may start to negatively affect the mind. Sure, we hear about such things on the news, but we do so typically in a spaced-out fashion and in moderation. If you’re bingeing true crime content, that could be several hours of shut content being absorbed by the brain.

The likelihood is though, the incidents you hear about on podcasts (fraud aside) are statistically rare or happened over long periods of time. In other words, you probably need to be less worried about it than you think. For example, l listened to a podcast about a baby-swapping case the other day. If I was a pregnant woman doing so, I might suddenly start to think ‘Oh goodness’ and start to enter a state of worry. Then, because of that, I may delve into more true crime content on baby kidnappings to do ‘research’ which just exacerbates the worry, when in actual fact, statistically speaking this isn’t something to be very worried about.

Francesca talked about how the podcasts had started to affect her dreams and make her feel anxious. She, like myself, eventually resolved to stop listening to such podcasts at night for that reason. I think especially for female true crime fans, we already live in a world that is dangerous for us, so listening to such horrors can indeed create a heightened sense of fear. It may manifest itself in different ways, for example, when I would be walking home at night, I would get very paranoid and a bit scared if someone was walking behind me, even if doing so innocently. I can imagine, especially for people that live alone, you may suddenly start to feel your house isn’t secure enough, or if you hear a noise a night your heartbeat may go into overdrive. In general, it can make you less trusting in people too because, very bluntly put, everyone has the potential to be someone who wrongs you or violates that trust.

‘So why put yourself through that?’, you ask. Sure, it’s true there are plenty of more ‘positive’ podcasts around. But, I do think you learn a lot from true crime podcasts – a lot of cases from the past, probably not widely known about by many, are the reason we have certain laws in place today – e.g. Amber alerts. If you’re like me, although you can easily become disillusioned with the goodness of humanity when hearing the various ways people can be evil, you can instead choose to adopt the oppositive mindset. And that is to be more appreciative of the good people do, when it’s done, knowing they could have chosen to do worse but didn’t.

*Photo by David von Diemar on Unsplash