- Doomscrolling is compulsively scrolling through negative news and posts. Bhakti Sharma, Susanna Lee and Benjamin Johnson (Technology, Mind, and Behavior, 2022) built a scale to measure it and found it was more common in men and younger people and linked to fear of missing out and constant smartphone connection.
- Heavy exposure to distressing news can raise stress more than being there. After the Boston Marathon bombings, E. Alison Holman, Dana Rose Garfin and Roxane Cohen Silver (PNAS, 2014) found six or more daily hours of bombing-related media was associated with higher acute stress than direct exposure.
- Negativity pulls attention. Across tens of thousands of headline experiments, Claire Robertson and colleagues (Nature Human Behaviour, 2023) found each additional negative word in an average-length headline increased click-through by 2.3%.
- Phone use after lights out is linked to worse sleep. Liese Exelmans and Jan Van den Bulck (Social Science and Medicine, 2016) found bedtime phone use in 844 adults predicted longer time to fall asleep and more insomnia symptoms, although the study was cross-sectional.
- Willpower is a weak tool here. Changing defaults works better: charge the phone outside the bedroom, set a news window, keep one analog off-ramp by the bed, and use a slow, long exhale, which Melis Yilmaz Balban and colleagues (Cell Reports Medicine, 2023) found improved mood in a daily five-minute practice.
In This Article
Doomscrolling is the habit of compulsively scrolling through negative news and posts, usually long after it has stopped telling you anything new. It is hard to stop because it keeps your nervous system in threat-monitoring mode, and a brain on threat duty does not want to look away, least of all at bedtime, when you most need it to stand down.
You have probably done it tonight, or will. A war update, then a layoff thread, then a video of a flood, then back to the war. Your thumb keeps going. You do not feel informed. You feel worse, and slightly more awake.
This essay is about what that loop does to your body and your sleep. If your concern is the effect of short-form video on attention, read Brain Rot Isn't a Joke. If you are wondering whether to step away from the news altogether, News Avoidance covers that. Here, the question is narrower: why does bad news hold us so tightly, and what does it cost?
What is doomscrolling, exactly?
The word spread during 2020, but it took a little longer for researchers to measure it. Bhakti Sharma, Susanna Lee and Benjamin Johnson at the University of Florida developed and validated a doomscrolling scale (Technology, Mind, and Behavior, 2022). Their conclusion was that doomscrolling is a distinct behavior, not just a dramatic name for staying informed.
A few findings stand out. Doomscrolling was more common among men and younger people. It was associated with fear of missing out and with being constantly connected through a smartphone. And the authors were careful about direction: anxiety may drive doomscrolling, doomscrolling may drive anxiety, and the two may feed each other. The study could not say which comes first.
Other work has filled in the picture. Seydi Ahmet Satici and colleagues (Applied Research in Quality of Life, 2022) built a separate doomscrolling scale across three studies. In the third, with 460 participants, the relationship between doomscrolling and wellbeing measures such as life satisfaction ran through psychological distress. Again, these are correlations. But they are consistent ones.
What does doomscrolling do to your nervous system?
Here is a finding that should change how you think about the news. Watching can be worse than being there.
After the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings, E. Alison Holman, Dana Rose Garfin and Roxane Cohen Silver surveyed representative samples in Boston, New York and the rest of the US (PNAS, 2014). After adjusting for people's mental health before the bombings, six or more hours a day of bombing-related media exposure in the following week was associated with higher acute stress than direct exposure to the bombings themselves. The media studied was mostly television, radio and online coverage, not modern feeds. But the mechanism carries over: repeated, vivid exposure to threat keeps the stress response running long after the event.
Matthew Price and colleagues tracked people daily for 30 days during the COVID-19 pandemic (Psychological Trauma, 2022). More pandemic-related social media exposure was associated with increases in depression and PTSD symptoms, and the link was stronger for those with more severe histories of childhood maltreatment. Interestingly, the same pattern did not show up for traditional media.
Put simply, your body does not file a scrolled disaster under "elsewhere." The threat system responds to what you attend to, not to your postcode. Each alarming post is a small request for vigilance, and a long scroll is hundreds of them. That is one route to the state we describe in Tired But Wired: exhausted, yet unable to switch off.
Why is doomscrolling so hard to stop?
If it feels bad, why keep doing it? Because at least three ancient mechanisms are being pulled at once, on platforms that profit from all three.
Negativity grabs attention. Claire Robertson, Jay Van Bavel, Stefan Feuerriegel and colleagues analyzed tens of thousands of randomized headline experiments run on Upworthy, covering more than 370 million impressions (Nature Human Behaviour, 2023). Negative words increased clicks, and positive words decreased them. For a headline of average length, each additional negative word raised the click-through rate by 2.3 percent. Feeds learn from those clicks.
Unpredictable rewards keep you going. Most of what you scroll is filler. Occasionally you find something gripping, useful or funny. That uneven payoff resembles what Charles Ferster and B. F. Skinner called variable reinforcement in Schedules of Reinforcement (1957), a pattern known for sustaining persistent behavior. You are not scrolling for the average post. You are scrolling for the next good one.
Uncertainty demands more information. Dan Grupe and Jack Nitschke (Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 2013) describe how uncertainty about a possible future threat disrupts our ability to prepare for it, and how that drives anxiety. Scrolling feels like preparation. Surely the next update will tell you how bad it really is. It rarely does, because most unfolding crises cannot be resolved by refreshing.
| Mechanism | What it feels like | What the feed does with it | |---|---|---| | Negativity bias | "I need to see this." | Ranks alarming content higher | | Variable reward | "Just one more." | Mixes rare gems with endless filler | | Uncertainty | "I need to know how bad it is." | Never delivers a final answer | | Social threat | "Everyone's talking about this." | Surfaces what is trending now |
None of this is a character flaw. It is a mismatch between a threat system built for a small, local world and an information supply with no bottom.
Doomscrolling before bed: why it costs you sleep
Night is when doomscrolling is most common and most expensive.
Liese Exelmans and Jan Van den Bulck surveyed 844 Flemish adults about their media habits and sleep (Social Science and Medicine, 2016). Six in ten took their phone into the bedroom. Sending or receiving messages and calls after lights out predicted worse overall sleep quality, including longer time to fall asleep, more sleep disturbance and more daytime dysfunction, along with higher insomnia scores and more fatigue. The study was cross-sectional, so it cannot prove the phone caused the poor sleep. Restless sleepers may reach for their phones more. But the association held across a broad adult sample.
Now add the content. Sleep requires the nervous system to downshift, to decide that the environment is safe enough to stop scanning. Doomscrolling sends the opposite signal, one alarming post at a time, right before you ask your body to let go. If bed already feels like the place where worry starts, Sleep Anxiety explains how that association forms. If you stay up scrolling because it is the only time that feels like yours, Revenge Bedtime Procrastination is the essay for you.
How to stop doomscrolling without a purge
The common advice is to delete the apps and quit. It sometimes works for a week. Then a crisis breaks, the apps return, and you add guilt to the loop. A better approach treats doomscrolling as a problem of decision architecture, not willpower. Change what is easy at the moment the pull arrives.
Let the phone sleep somewhere else. Charge it outside the bedroom and use a cheap alarm clock. This single change removes the most expensive hour of doomscrolling without requiring any decision at 11:40 PM, when you are tired and least inclined to make one.
Turn off breaking-news alerts. Push notifications are the feed coming to find you. Very little news requires you to know it within the minute, and almost none of it requires you to know it in bed. Keep alerts for the people in your life, and let the headlines wait for your window.
Ask one question before you open the app. "What am I looking for?" If there is an answer, such as the result of a vote or whether a road is closed, find it and close the app. If there is no answer, you are not looking for information. You are looking for relief, and the feed is a poor place to find it.
Set a news window. Choose one or two fixed times, earlier in the day, to catch up properly. Outside those windows, the news can wait. You are not ignoring the world. You are refusing to let it set your nervous system's schedule.
Build one analog off-ramp. Put a book, a notebook or a crossword by the bed, so there is something to reach for besides the phone. A habit is easier to replace than to delete.
Curate an intentional media diet. One small cultural counter-trend is worth noticing: people publicly logging the books, films and long-form pieces they deliberately chose, as an alternative to the endless feed. Whatever the label, the principle is sound. Chosen media has an end. Feeds do not.
Exhale longer than you inhale. When you notice the pull, put the phone face down and breathe slowly, with the out-breath longer than the in-breath. Melis Yilmaz Balban, David Spiegel, Andrew Huberman and colleagues at Stanford (Cell Reports Medicine, 2023) found that five minutes a day of cyclic sighing, which emphasizes long exhales, improved mood and lowered respiratory rate more than mindfulness meditation over a month. It will not solve the news. It may help you stand down from it. Breathing Techniques for Anxiety compares the main options.
The point is not to stop caring
Some people worry that cutting back on bad news is a kind of moral abdication. It is worth separating two things. Knowing what is happening in the world is a civic good. Absorbing it for three hours in bed is not knowledge. It is exposure.
The Holman research is a quiet rebuke to the idea that more exposure means more responsibility. People who watched the most did not help Boston more. They just carried more of its stress. You can care about the world and still decide that it does not get your last hour of the day.
The feed will always have one more thing to show you. That is its design, not your duty.
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Related reading: News Avoidance · Brain Rot Isn't a Joke · Does a Digital Detox Actually Work? · Revenge Bedtime Procrastination
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Frequently Asked Questions
What is doomscrolling?
Doomscrolling is compulsively scrolling through negative news and social media content, often for long periods and often late at night. Researchers Bhakti Sharma, Susanna Lee and Benjamin Johnson developed a scale to measure it in 2022 and found it is distinct from simply wanting to stay informed. It was linked to fear of missing out and to being constantly connected through a smartphone.
Why can't I stop doomscrolling?
Several mechanisms stack up. Negative information grabs attention more than positive information, unpredictable rewards keep you scrolling for the next interesting post, and uncertainty makes the brain keep searching for information that would settle the threat. Feeds are designed around all three. That is why changing your environment, such as where the phone sleeps, usually works better than relying on willpower.
Is doomscrolling bad for your mental health?
The evidence is mostly correlational, but it points in a consistent direction. Studies link doomscrolling to psychological distress and lower wellbeing, and heavy exposure to distressing news after collective trauma has been associated with higher acute stress. A 2022 daily-diary study by Matthew Price and colleagues found more pandemic-related social media exposure was linked to increases in depression and PTSD symptoms, especially in people with a history of childhood maltreatment.
Does doomscrolling before bed affect sleep?
It likely does, through two routes. Phone use in bed delays sleep and is associated with worse sleep quality and more insomnia symptoms, according to Liese Exelmans and Jan Van den Bulck's 2016 study of 844 adults. And threatening content raises arousal at exactly the moment your nervous system needs to stand down. Charging the phone outside the bedroom is the simplest fix.
How do I stop doomscrolling at night?
Change the defaults rather than fighting yourself. Charge your phone outside the bedroom, use a separate alarm clock, read news in one defined window earlier in the day, keep a book or notebook by the bed as an analog off-ramp, and when you notice the pull, take a few slow breaths with a longer exhale than inhale.