Everyone has done it: You pick up your phone while in a perfectly good mood, only to be inundated with notifications and social media messages bringing you up to speed on the worst news and most infuriating hot takes that humanity has to offer. You now feel terrible, but instead of putting down your phone, you dive in further, your anxiety building with every swipe and tap. This happens several times a day, and yet we all still constantly reach for our phones.
Why do we do this, and how can we stop?
The phenomenon is commonly known as doomscrolling, a term has been around since at least 2018 but it was popularized in 2020 by journalist Karen Ho amid the pandemic. That’s when Ho built built the doomscrolling bot on the site formerly known as Twitter; the bot would remind people several times a day to put down their phones and take care of themselves. (The bot, like most good things, isn’t active on Elon Musk’s X.)
“What doomscrolling does is rob future you of the energy you need to really focus on important things and also to take better care of yourself,” Ho told Scientific American in an interview back in 2021. That was true during the pandemic, and it’s true now, amid a chaotic election year and widespread global conflict.
Last month I wrote about spotting and breaking your negative loops, and I would argue that doomscrolling is exactly that: a habit that you built yourself that makes all of your days just a little bit worse. Here are some tips for spotting the triggers for your doomscrolling habit, and for replacing them with something healthier.
The science of doomscrolling
According to a paper by Bhakti Sharma et al at the University of Florida, “doomscrolling refers to a state of media use typically characterized as individuals persistently scrolling through their social media newsfeeds with an obsessive focus on distressing, depressing, or otherwise negative information.”
I think most of us can admit we do this from time to time. Whether it’s distressing political news or videos from conflict zones, we have a tendency to seek out negative news, and social media algorithms tend to boost it in kind. And there’s a reason for that. Doomscrolling is “a habit developed in response to how global and local crises unfold on unending and targeted newsfeeds,” according to Sharma et al.
That is to say, doomscrolling is a habit that emerges in part because of the way the places we get information about the world are organized. The things you interact with on services like Twitter, Tiktok, and Instagram affect the kinds of information you are likely to see in the future. This means that any horrible world event you follow closely is likely to show up more and more in your timeline. And social networks, unlike the newspapers or even blogs of the past, don’t have an end—the algorithm will keep showing you new things as long as you keep scrolling.
The perverse thing is that doomscrolling begins with good intentions: You want to keep up with the news, so you can be informed about what’s happening in the world. But a combination of human nature and algorithmic sorting can make it all too easy to focus only on the horrible things that are happening in the world, as though that’s the entire story.
The first step is to recognize when you’re engaging in this bad habit. Then you have to decide you want to stop, and come up with a strategy.
Recognize your triggers
Recognizing when your mindless social media use has transitioned into doomscrolling is important, and to do that, you’ll need to think about what compels you to pick up your phone and how you feel when you do it. Do you tend to open up X or Facebook when you’re bored and quickly descend into a well of bad feelings? Does the idea of missing out on breaking news fill you with anxiety—only for you to open your phone and absorb news that will also make you anxious? These are signs that you may be struggling with addiction to your device.
Replace your doomscrolling with something else
The next step in stopping your doomscrolling, then, is replacing your habit with something else, is key. Instead of picking up your phone and scrolling through terrible news on X and reading about awful people on Reddit, choose a stimulating activity that doesn’t make you feel bad. When you find yourself reaching for social media in a moment of downtime, play on online puzzle (or a pen-and-paper crossword) instead, or get up and move your body for a few minutes, or even watch a little TV (but maybe not the news) or play a video game.
Keep your phone out of sight
Once you’ve found something you can do instead of doomscrolling, make sure you don’t pick up your phone while you’re doing it. You can count on self-discipline, or you can force the matter by leaving it in a different room or otherwise limiting your access to it.
It’s a good idea to find an activity that discourages phone use. “I watch a lot of TV and movies with subtitles—in foreign languages—because you can’t look at your phone [during them],” Ho told Scientific American. (I recommend a Danish show called Seaside Hotel, which you can watch if you donate to your local PBS station).
Set a schedule for your news and social media use and stick to it
Another approach you can take is to adjust the way you consume news. You can do this by scheduling your news consumption—that is, committing to only reading the news at a specific time every day. I find it can also be helpful to avoid getting news from social media; instead, head directly to the homepage of a few newspapers or other news sources you trust, or even stick to paper copies of weekly newsmagazines instead. The way I see it, on-paper publications tend to cover a wide variety of topics, not just the ones the algorithm chooses for me, and they have a defined end point (when I get to the last page, I’m done.)
Focus on local news and actions that actually affect your life
If the global and national headlines tend to leave you feeling anxious about events you can’t control or affect in any way—and which may not even directly affect your life in the short-term—switch to reading more local news. The subjects covered will tend to be a lot more relevant to your life than whatever national political drama is happening, plus you’ll have a lot more power to make a difference.
Speaking of: Have you considered working to make the world a better place? A classic recipe for constantly feeling anxious is reading negative news and doing nothing in response. I recommend finding some organization you can give your time to, if possible. Volunteer at your local library, or work to get voters registered to vote, or help to provide services to and advocate for vulnerable populations—whatever helps you direct your energy toward improving things instead of only dwelling on the mess we’re all in.
Replace doomscrolling with “joyscrolling”
Finally, if you can’t seem to gt away from your devices, you can try to adjust your social media feeds so they’re not exclusively built around alerting you to all the horrible things happening all the time—that is, aim for joyscrolling instead of doomscrolling. Follow a ton of accounts that post things that delight you. If you spend too much time on an algorithmically controlled platform like X, hang out out somewhere more fun (or at least less stressful) instead (for me, that’s Mastodon). And wherever you go, take advantage of tools like blocking and the mute function (my social networks all got a lot better when I blocked all posts featuring the word “Musk”).
The bottom line
The specifics will vary from person to person, but the broad strokes of kicking a doomscrolling habit are noticing when social media is making you miserable and consciously working to stop that from happening. What you give your attention to is possibly the most important decision you can make—it shapes your consciousness. So if feeding your attention upsetting news is making you miserable, feed it something else.
