Doomscrolling and Its Effects on the Brain

In an era when everyone is connected to online news and social media through smart phones, doomscrolling—or continuously absorbing distressing information—may seem unavoidable. However, exposure to constant negative stimuli can negatively affect your mental health. Fortunately, setting boundaries on media consumption can help you balance the need to stay informed with the need for reasonable and appropriate self-care.

If you regularly read or view content about disturbing current events, especially online, it’s natural to feel emotionally overwhelmed. Whether you’re consuming stories and perspectives on disease, natural disasters, political upheaval, or any other issue that increases your sense of anger or fear, your brain is being forced to deal with a great deal of stress.

Coined in 2018, doomscrolling describes the overconsumption of negative short-form content or news, especially on social media platforms that have an infinitely populating feed of new posts. The term became ubiquitous during the COVID-19 pandemic, when people were isolating at home and following the news online, but it remains relevant in the worldwide vernacular. Even though the lockdowns have long passed, scrolling through headlines on smart phone apps can still feel like a relentless barrage of tragedy and suffering, or outright rage bait. The experience can leave you feeling hopeless, helpless, cynical, or apathetic.

Smart phones allow you to take the news cycle with you everywhere and access it at any time, and social media platforms lend themselves perfectly to doomscrolling. Their endless and constantly repopulating feeds keep you reading or viewing post after post, satisfying a craving for novelty and danger. Then, their algorithms learn what types of content you interact with and serve up similar stories, causing even more psychological stress. These factors affect your behavior, and consumption becomes compulsion. While any addictive behavior is concerning, doomscrolling also has a cumulative negative effect on well-being.

It’s important to recognize that the problem is not your impulse to know more about the world around you. Having the curiosity to learn about current events improves your understanding of the world, helps build empathy, and can compel you to take positive actions. You should not judge yourself negatively for indulging your curiosity, nor for feeling the need to take a break from what you may feel is a responsibility to stay informed.

But obsessively reading negative news can become harmful. It’s a lot for your brain to process, and it can lead to emotional burnout, social disconnection, and despair. The key is recognizing how continually scrolling through negative news content makes you feel overwhelmed, anxious, angry, or heartbroken—and remembering that it’s okay to set limits on viewing digital content.

When a person experiences a stimulus that causes stress, it activates the brain’s limbic system, which is dominated by a structure called the amygdala. Among other functions, the amygdala serves to protect the individual from danger by sending signals to another brain structure, the hypothalamus, which acts as the command center to regulate bodily functions. When the amygdala signals danger, the hypothalamus tells the sympathetic nervous system to activate a powerful fight-or-flight response. This in turn causes the body’s adrenal glands to release stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol, which sharpen senses and prepare muscles for quick action. This function was critical to human survival and evolution, and it still serves to jolt people into behavior focused on self-preservation.

However, repeated activation of the stress response takes a toll on the body. It contributes to high blood pressure, increases the risk of developing deposits in the bloodstream that can clog arteries, and causes changes to the brain that impair cognitive abilities like concentration, decision-making, and emotional regulation. Under normal circumstances, once a stressful situation has concluded, the hypothalamus activates the parasympathetic nervous system to calm down the body, so it can go from fight or flight to “rest and digest.” Continuously engaging with negative news repeatedly engages this stress response and doesn’t give the body the chance to calm down.

For example, you might see an alarming social media post that threatens your sense of safety, security, or well-being. This concern for safety immediately puts you into a state of hypervigilance, and you may feel a need to keep scrolling to learn more. As you scroll, you encounter other related or unrelated negative news that provokes additional stress.

News media has long exploited the human stress response for the sake of grabbing and holding audience attention. If audiences are alarmed by negative news, they are likely to keep reading, viewing, and listening in hopes of a reassuring resolution, or at least some details on how to ensure their safety. This behavior is driven by anxiety—the body’s emotional response to stress and potential threats. Some people, especially those who have experienced violence or other trauma in the past, often doomscroll to try to find information that can calm their anxiety, but in the process, they sometimes find further stories that only increase their symptoms.

Doomscrolling presents mental health risks. It reinforces negative thoughts and feelings, causes significant irritability, increases anxiety and depression, and can cause panic attacks. It also leads to mental fatigue, impaired concentration, and reduced productivity, all of which can further decrease one’s sense of well-being. Studies also show that the more time people spend doomscrolling negative social media content, the more likely they are to have feelings of distress, lower self-esteem, and problems sleeping.

It can also affect the body in other ways. Stress can lead to nausea, headaches, muscle tension, neck and shoulder pain, decreased or increased appetite, and difficulty sleeping. Staring at computer or phone screens for long periods of time also tends to be an indoor sedentary activity, which deprives the body of needed physical exercise and sunlight. It also can lead to sleep procrastination, if you frequently stay up long past your bedtime, and this loss of healthy sleep affects your mood and energy levels the next day. Doomscrolling also worsens social health, as it takes time away from in-person interaction with friends and family.

Remember, doomscrolling is not just an activity, it’s a compulsive habit that negatively affects your mental and physical health. Prioritizing your own health does not make you an irresponsible citizen. Yes, you should make a concerted effort to stay informed about current events, so you can navigate a complex and ever-changing world. But spending hours at a time exposing yourself to content that causes you anxiety hurts more than it helps. The solution is not to “bury your head in the sand” or completely ignore the events that occur in the world at large. Rather, it’s to set reasonable digital media boundaries for yourself, so that your brain and body can return to a normal, unstressed state.

With some focused effort, it’s possible to break a doomscrolling habit and regain a balance, so that you can take in some news information (which might be distressing) and support your personal well-being. You can start recalibrating by being mindful of how much time you currently spend doomscrolling. To set boundaries, it might be helpful to think of the problem as an issue of time management. For example, you could establish a rule for yourself that you can read the news or scroll TikTok, but give yourself a time limit. Can you get sufficient news updates by limiting your social media time to an hour a day? What about half an hour? Then stop, and do another activity that you find fulfilling, such as a hobby, yardwork, or exercise.

It may help to ask yourself the following questions:

As a mindfulness exercise, take a moment to think about how you feel when you eventually stop scrolling. Do you tend to feel better or worse than when you started? As you’re scrolling, pause every 5 to 10 minutes to check in on your mood. If you discover that you feel worse with each check in, that’s a sign that your social media habits may be causing you too much stress.

Sometimes you might need to remind yourself that most things that happen are completely out of your control. Journaling about your feelings or channeling them into a creative project can help you process your thoughts and regulate your emotions. Sometimes, you can help others affected by tragic circumstances on a micro level through some small act of kindness or donating to charity. But often, there’s simply nothing that anyone can do, and it’s important to recognize this and have compassion for yourself as well.

When you doomscroll, you might encounter one bit of alarming news and find yourself searching for more details about it, to the point where you spend hours collecting far more information than you need to make informed decisions. This can lead you to feel helpless and frustrated, which doesn’t benefit you in any way. So, when you read or hear about a distressing event or development, take a moment to consider how much more you need to know about it. If you find you need more details immediately to feel safe, or if you think the claims are suspicious, feel free to investigate it a little further. But try to keep in mind that if you’re not directly affected, you can also read more about the incident later, on another day.

How is this habit affecting your sleep, mood, work, relationships, and physical health? Try to look at the issue objectively and consider how else you might want to spend your time.

If you’ve considered these questions, and you think your media consumption habits are consistent with doomscrolling, here are some suggestions to break the habit:

• Prune your news feed. Unfollow or mute accounts that consistently post negative content.
• Turn off notifications from apps. Each time you receive a notification about a new headline or message, whether through a sound or a message that lights up the screen, your attention is immediately drawn back to your phone. Reserve these notifications for emergencies and communications from real people you know.
• Set a time limit. Decide on a reasonable limit for how much time you spend looking at social media per day. For example, no more than 15 to 20 minutes, twice a day. Set a timer for this or use a productivity app that monitors how much time you spend on other apps and restricts access to them after a set time limit.
• Keep your phone out of easy reach during work. If there’s a safe place to put your phone that’s 10 or more feet away from where you’re working, or out of sight, such as in a desk drawer, placing the phone here can help you avoid scrolling during working hours.
• Keep your phone off your nightstand. While you might still want to have the phone in your bedroom, keeping it out of reach prevents you from grabbing it and looking at the news as soon as you wake up.
• Don’t have your phone with you at dinner. Set your phone to silent mode and keep it more than an arm’s length away during mealtime.
• Set your phone screen to grayscale. Some people have found that reducing the amount of color in the phone’s display helps make scrolling less enticing.
• Focus more on local news. In most communities, headlines for local news stories tend to be less distressing than national and international news. Shifting the balance of your news consumption to incorporate more local coverage could help offset the effects of reading more troubling stories affecting larger populations.
• Set boundaries with others. If you have friends, family members, or colleagues who regularly share depressing or disturbing news stories, it’s okay to ask these individuals not to share them with you. This is not rude; it’s simply a request to respect your preferences.
• Replace scrolling with other activities. Consider diverting time from doomscrolling to other activities such as reading books, listening to music, or spending time with friends—all of which can provide positive distractions and reduce anxiety. Going on a nature hike can be a great way to clear your head, with additional benefits for your physical health.
• Do something positive. Consider offsetting the deluge of negative headlines by engaging in activities that give you positive feelings. You might focus on altruistic efforts, such as volunteering with a charity organization, or you could sign up for a community education class to learn a new hobby.
• Talk to a professional. If you all else fails, and you find you can’t stop doomscrolling, or that it causes you extreme distress, it’s appropriate to discuss the issue with a doctor or therapist. Doomscrolling is essentially a form of internet addiction, and for a small percentage of people, it can be a serious problem. If the habit is too difficult to break on your own, it’s nothing to be ashamed of, and a doctor may be able to help or refer you to a specialist who can work with you to overcome the issue.

 

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