Doomscrolling

What doomscrolling is

Doomscrolling is the compulsive consumption of bad news - scrolling on and on through a feed of troubling stories even though it leaves you feeling worse and rarely tells you anything you needed to know. You mean to check one thing; an hour later you are still going, wrung out, unable to look away. The word pairs “doom” with “scrolling” for a reason: this is not reading for pleasure or even for information, but a grim, sticky kind of attention that is hard to break.

The term came into wide use in 2020 - a year of bushfires, a pandemic and a fraught US election, when bad news seemed to arrive with every refresh. Australia’s Macquarie Dictionary made doomscrolling its Word of the Year for 2020, describing it as the practice of continuing to read predominantly negative and upsetting feeds online despite the toll. The behaviour is older than the word, but 2020 gave it a name and a moment.

It is not the same as staying informed

Keeping up with the world is healthy and necessary; doomscrolling is what happens when that slips its leash. The difference is in the feeling and the function. Staying informed has a stopping point - you learn what is going on and get on with your day. Doomscrolling has no stopping point, because the thing it is really chasing - a sense of safety, of being on top of the threat - is not something more bad news can ever deliver.

Why we doomscroll

At the root of doomscrolling is negativity bias, the deep human tendency to notice and dwell on bad news far more than good. For our ancestors, paying close attention to threats was a matter of survival: missing a predator was fatal, missing a nice view was not. That ancient alarm system is still running, only now it is pointed at a screen that can deliver disasters from across the planet, one after another, all day long.

On top of the wiring sits a story we tell ourselves: that if we just keep reading, we will understand the danger and be ready for it. Doomscrolling feels like taking control. The trouble is that the events on the screen - a distant war, a market crash, a looming election - are mostly ones we cannot do anything about from the sofa. So the vigilance has nowhere to go. It builds without resolving, which is a recipe for anxiety rather than safety.

The feeling of being almost finished

Feeds are also built to feel as though the next post will be the one that settles things. There is always one more update, one more take, one more thread, and the brain, primed to expect a resolution that never quite arrives, keeps reaching for it. The reward is unpredictable, which is exactly the pattern that makes a behaviour hard to stop. Psychologists call this intermittent reinforcement: a payoff that arrives sometimes, on no schedule you can predict, is far stickier than one that arrives every time - it is the same mechanism that makes slot machines so compelling. A crisis raises the stakes further still, because missing the one update that might matter feels too risky to chance, so you keep checking just in case.

How feeds turn it into a habit

Doomscrolling is not only something we do to ourselves; it is something the design encourages. Within the attention economy, platforms make money from time spent and engagement, and few things hold attention like alarm and outrage. The stories that provoke the strongest feelings travel furthest, so the system surfaces them, and a feed of the world’s worst news is the predictable result.

The mechanics help too. The infinite scroll - a feed with no bottom and no natural stopping point - was designed to remove the small pause where you might otherwise put the phone down. Its own inventor, the technologist Aza Raskin, has publicly expressed regret over creating it. Pull-to-refresh works like the lever on a slot machine: you tug, and you might get something new and dramatic, or nothing. That uncertainty is the hook. These are the same devices, and the same incentives, that quietly thin our memory through digital amnesia - two pulls of the same bargain we keep making with our screens.

What doomscrolling does to us

A growing body of research links habitual doomscrolling to poorer wellbeing. Studies across several countries associate it with higher anxiety, stress and low mood, and with a bleaker view of the world. A 2024 study from Flinders University found that doomscrolling was tied to existential anxiety, greater distrust of other people and a sense that life lacks meaning - the constant stream of crisis quietly reshaping how people see human nature itself. These are associations rather than proof that scrolling alone causes the harm, but the pattern is consistent enough to take seriously.

Two further effects are worth naming, because they build on how the mind already works. A relentless diet of bad news feeds the availability heuristic: vivid, dramatic stories come to mind easily, so we overestimate how common the dangers are and the world starts to feel far more threatening than the figures suggest. And the sheer volume can bring on compassion fatigue, where exposure to so much suffering gradually wears down our capacity to care. Watching crisis after crisis we are powerless to change can also teach a draining sense of learned helplessness - the very opposite of the control we were reaching for. Some research suggests these threads form a chain rather than sitting side by side: the more compulsively we take in bad news, the more helpless we feel, and that helplessness is part of what turns the habit into lasting unease.

If reading any of this brings on a flicker of “that’s me”, it is worth treating gently rather than as one more thing to feel bad about. The habit is engineered, widely shared and beatable, and noticing it is the first move.

How to break the doomscroll

The aim is not to stop caring or to look away from the world, but to take back the choice of when and how much. A few small changes tend to help more than willpower alone.

Give the scrolling edges. Decide when you will check the news and roughly for how long, so it has a beginning and an end rather than seeping through the whole day. Try to keep it out of the two moments it does most damage - first thing in the morning and last thing at night - since starting and ending the day in dread colours everything in between. Curate your sources down to a few you trust, so you can stay informed without the firehose. Turn off the alerts whose job is to pull you back in. And when you feel the pull, swap the refresh for something that discharges the worry rather than feeding it: a walk, a message to a friend, a small useful action on something you can change.

Above all, it helps to remember what the scrolling is really after. The wish underneath it - to feel safe, prepared, on top of things - is a reasonable one. More bad news is simply the one thing that cannot grant it.