Why You Can’t Stop Doomscrolling and How to Break Free

It starts innocently enough. You’re lying in bed, intending to check the weather before you sleep. A headline catches your eye something about a global crisis or a political fiasco. You click. Forty minutes later, you’re still there, your thumb numb from scrolling, your heart racing, and your mind filled with a sense of dread. You’ve fallen into the abyss of the endless scroll.

This behavior has a name: doomscrolling, or “doomsurfing.” It’s the act of spending an excessive amount of time consuming large quantities of negative online news. While the term surged in popularity around 2020 amid the COVID-19 pandemic, protests, and elections, the habit isn’t just a recent trend. It’s a complex behavior rooted in a perfect storm of deep-seated psychological drivers and the addictive architecture of modern technology.

This article will explore the powerful forces that trap us in the doomscrolling cycle, assess the true cost to our well-being, and provide evidence-based strategies to help you regain control, break free from the loop, and protect your mental health in the digital age.

——————————————————————————–

The Anatomy of a Doomscroll: Why We’re Hardwired for Bad News

Understanding why we doomscroll requires looking at the dual forces that create the perfect conditions for this behavior: our internal psychology and the external technology that exploits it. This isn’t a simple matter of lacking willpower; it’s a powerful combination of ancient survival instincts meeting modern, attention-hijacking design.

The Psychological Pull: Our Brain’s Ancient Survival Kit

Our brains are not fundamentally built for the 24/7 information firehose of the internet. We’re running on ancient software that makes us uniquely vulnerable to the allure of negative news.

• Negativity Bias: Humans are evolutionarily hardwired to pay more attention to negative information than positive information. This was a critical survival mechanism for our ancestors. As one psychiatrist at the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center notes, humans are “all hardwired to see the negative and be drawn to the negative because it can harm [them] physically.” He cites evolution as the reason for why humans seek out such negatives: if one’s ancestors, for example, discovered how an ancient creature could injure them, they could avoid that fate. Your brain sees a threatening headline and instinctively pays attention, trying to protect you.
• The Quest for Control: During times of high uncertainty, people desperately seek information to feel a sense of mastery and control over an unpredictable situation. We believe that if we gather enough data, we can prepare for the worst. However, this often backfires, creating a vicious cycle where seeking information to reduce anxiety only increases it. For many, particularly students and young adults, this behavior is also a maladaptive attempt to cope with existential anxiety a deep-seated fear of helplessness, uncertainty, and a loss of meaning, which is amplified by the constant stream of global crises.
• Fear of Missing Out (FOMO): This common social media anxiety also applies to news. We develop a fear of missing out on crucial, albeit negative, information that could be vital for our safety or awareness. This is a widespread phenomenon. A 2013 Statista study found that more than half of Americans experienced FOMO on social media, while further studies found it affected 67% of Italian users in 2017 and 59% of Polish teenagers in 2021, creating constant pressure to stay plugged in.

The Technological Push: Platforms Designed for Addiction

Our psychological vulnerabilities are actively exploited by social media platforms, whose business models depend on capturing and holding our attention for as long as possible.

• The Infinite Scroll: This design feature, which continuously loads new content as you scroll, eliminates natural stopping points and encourages compulsive consumption. Aza Raskin, who is sometimes credited with its invention, later expressed regret, describing it as “one of the first products designed to not simply help a user, but to deliberately keep them online for as long as possible.“
• Engagement-Based Algorithms: Social media platforms thrive on user engagement. Their algorithms learn what captures our attention and prioritize content that is emotionally stimulating, sensational, and often negative to maximize the time we spend on their sites. This creates a feedback loop where emotionally charged, negative news is repeatedly pushed into our feeds.
• Variable Reward Systems: The experience of scrolling through a news feed is psychologically similar to playing a slot machine. Most of the content is mundane, but occasionally you are “rewarded” with a new, alarming piece of information. This intermittent reward system activates the brain’s nucleus accumbens—the region central to reward processing and addiction and triggers the release of the neurotransmitter dopamine. This unpredictable chemical reward reinforces the scrolling habit, making it incredibly hard to stop.

This potent combination of our brain’s ancient wiring and technology’s modern design creates a cycle that is incredibly difficult to break.

——————————————————————————–

The High Price of Constant Crisis: Assessing the Damage

While the urge to stay informed feels productive, the compulsive and excessive consumption of negative news has measurable and detrimental effects on our mental, physical, and cognitive health. The constant state of high alert it creates can make the world seem like what Associate Professor Bryan McLaughlin of Texas Tech University calls a “dark and dangerous place.”

The Toll on Your Mental and Physical Well-being

The damage from doomscrolling isn’t just a feeling of being “bummed out.” Research has documented a range of serious health consequences.

• Health professionals advise that doomscrolling can negatively impact existing mental health issues and trigger new ones. The primary psychological effects include:
  • Increased anxiety, stress, and depression
  • Feelings of fear, sadness, hopelessness, and isolation
• Key Research Findings:
  • A study published in the journal Health Communication found that 16.5% of people surveyed showed signs of “severely problematic” news consumption, which led to greater stress, anxiety, and poor physical health.
  • Problematic news consumption is widespread: The same study found that in addition to the 16.5% with “severely problematic” habits, another 27.3% reported “moderately problematic” levels of news consumption.
  • A study conducted with the Huffington Post found that watching just three minutes of negative news in the morning made participants 27% more likely to report having a bad day six to eight hours later.
• The mental strain of doomscrolling directly translates into physical harm. The constant barrage of threats keeps the body’s stress system, the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, in a state of chronic activation. This leads to:
  • Sleep Disruption: Scrolling on screens before bed is especially harmful. The blue light from devices can suppress melatonin production and interfere with our natural circadian rhythms, leading to insomnia and poor-quality sleep.
  • Chronic Stress Response: The persistent activation of the HPA axis floods the body with the stress hormone cortisol. This can lead to a state of hypervigilance, where the brain is constantly scanning for danger, and can manifest in physical symptoms like muscle tension, aches, headaches, and an upset stomach.
• Doomscrolling creates a state of cognitive overload, where the brain is overwhelmed with too much information. This can lead to:
  • Impaired decision-making
  • Shortened attention spans
  • Reduced ability to focus and concentrate

The cycle of consuming negative content doesn’t just make us feel bad—it actively harms our ability to function well in our daily lives. The good news is that we can take conscious steps to break this cycle.

——————————————————————————–

Reclaiming Your Attention: A Practical Guide to Breaking the Cycle

Breaking the doomscrolling habit requires more than just telling yourself to stop. It involves taking conscious, deliberate actions to build a healthier relationship with digital media. The following strategies are designed to directly counter your brain’s negativity bias, disrupt the algorithms’ engagement loops, and restore the sense of control that doomscrolling falsely promises. Think of these strategies as an empowering toolkit for reclaiming your attention.

Step 1: Cultivate Awareness and Mindfulness

The first step to changing any habit is becoming aware of it. Mindfulness helps break the automatic, compulsive loop of scrolling.

1. Notice How You Feel. When you find yourself scrolling, pause and do a quick body scan. Do you feel a racing heart, a stiff neck, or a sense of dread? These physical and emotional sensations are your body’s signals telling you it’s time to stop. Consciously paying attention to these negative feelings can motivate you to put the phone down.
2. Check Consciously, Not Compulsively. When you feel the urge to pick up your phone, pause for a moment. Recognize that you’re acting out of habit. To interrupt the impulse, try a thought-stopping technique: vividly imagine a red stop sign. This mental cue can help break the automatic behavior that platforms are designed to encourage.
3. Practice Gratitude. Actively shifting your focus away from negativity is a powerful antidote. Spend a few minutes each day writing down three to five things you are grateful for. Research shows that practicing gratitude is associated with a better mood and improved sleep, directly countering the effects of a negative news diet.

Step 2: Set Firm Boundaries (Digital Hygiene)

Creating clear rules around your news consumption is essential for regaining control.

1. Set Time Limits. Use a timer to cap your news consumption at 10-15 minutes per session. As one small study highlighted by AbleTo found, just 14 minutes of negative news was enough to increase anxiety and sadness. Use your phone’s built-in tools, like Screen Time (iOS) or Digital Wellbeing (Android), to set daily limits for news and social media apps. This creates a hard stop that the infinite scroll is designed to eliminate.
2. Schedule “News Time.” Instead of checking updates throughout the day, allocate one or two specific, limited blocks of time for news. To prevent the constant interruptions that pull you back in, disable push notifications from news and social media apps.
3. Avoid Bedtime Scrolling. This is one of the most important boundaries to set. The combination of blue light and anxiety-inducing content is especially harmful to sleep. Create a tech-free buffer zone of at least one hour before bed to allow your mind and body to wind down.

Step 3: Actively Reshape Your Digital Environment

Make intentional changes to your digital spaces to reduce temptation and promote positivity.

1. Curate Your Feeds. You are the editor of your own social media experience. Proactively unfollow, mute, or block accounts that frequently share distressing, sensationalized, or outrage-inducing content. This puts you in control of the algorithm, rather than the other way around.
2. Embrace “Bloom Scrolling.” Actively practice the opposite of doomscrolling. Coined by writer Karrie Zylstra Myton, “bloom scrolling” is the act of deliberately curating your feeds with and engaging in positive, uplifting content. Follow accounts dedicated to art, nature, flowers, hobbies, or inspirational stories to actively counter your brain’s negativity bias.
3. Create Friction. Make it harder to access addictive apps and disrupt the mindless habit loop. Move them off your home screen into a folder. Use app blockers like Freedom or Forest to restrict access during certain hours. You can also set your phone to monochrome or grayscale mode, which reduces its visual appeal and makes scrolling less stimulating.

Step 4: Counter Helplessness with Positive Action

One of the most corrosive effects of doomscrolling is the feeling of powerlessness it can create. Counteract this by taking small, tangible actions.

1. Move Your Body. Physical exercise helps reconnect you with your body, reduces the physiological symptoms of stress, and boosts serotonin, the brain’s “feel-good” neurotransmitter.
2. Do Something to Lighten Your Mood. Plan a positive activity to do immediately after you consume news. This can be as simple as journaling, listening to upbeat music, taking your dog for a walk, or calling a friend.
3. Take Meaningful Action. Feeling helpless in the face of global problems is a major driver of doomscrolling. This directly combats the feelings of powerlessness that arise from the “Quest for Control” backfiring, turning passive consumption into active agency. This could be volunteering in your community, making a charitable donation, or writing to an elected official. As Coach Advisor Carolyn Oldham says, “You can’t do everything. But you can do something.“

Taking even a small action can restore a sense of agency and break the cycle of passive, anxious consumption.

——————————————————————————–

Conclusion: From Mindless Scrolling to Mindful Engagement

Doomscrolling is a powerful and pervasive cycle, fueled by the convergence of our evolutionary psychology and the profit-driven architecture of digital platforms. It preys on our deepest instincts to seek out threats and maintain control, trapping us in a loop of anxiety and compulsive consumption.

However, this cycle is not unbreakable. By understanding the forces at play, we can consciously choose to disengage. The strategies outlined above are not about completely avoiding the news or sticking our heads in the sand. They are about shifting from mindless, reactive consumption to mindful, intentional engagement. By cultivating awareness, setting firm boundaries, reshaping our digital environments, and taking positive action, we can strike a healthier balance. We can choose to be informed without being overwhelmed, connected without being consumed, and ultimately, more present in our own lives. Protecting your mental well-being in the digital age is an active practice, and it is a power you have every right to reclaim.