Doomscrolling is the habit of scrolling through bad, frightening or upsetting news and posts long after they have stopped being useful, often late at night and often while feeling worse with every swipe. It happens because your brain is wired to scan for threats, because feeds never end, and because tiredness makes it hard to put the phone down. You can stop by changing how news reaches you, not by trying harder.
If you have ever looked up from your phone at midnight with a tight chest and no clear memory of what you just read, you are far from alone. This guide explains what is actually going on when you doomscroll, what research says about its effect on mood, how to tell staying informed apart from doomscrolling, and nine practical ways to break the loop without cutting yourself off from the world.
What does doomscrolling mean?
Doomscrolling means continuing to consume negative news and posts on a screen even though they leave you anxious, sad or helpless. The word combines "doom" with "scrolling", and it first appeared on Twitter in 2018. It spread widely in 2020, when the pandemic gave people an endless supply of alarming headlines and a lot of time at home to read them.
Today people use it in two ways:
- The strict meaning: reading bad news, crisis updates and angry comment threads, one after another.
- The looser meaning: any long, aimless scroll that you did not decide to start and cannot seem to stop, even when the content is not especially grim.
Both share the same pattern. You open the phone for one thing, the feed carries you along, and twenty or forty minutes later you feel more tense than when you started. Researchers at the University of Florida, who built the first questionnaire to measure the habit in 2022, found that doomscrolling is a distinct behaviour linked to lower life satisfaction and mental well-being. It is not just "using social media a lot".
Why do we doomscroll?
It helps to know that doomscrolling is not a character flaw. Several ordinary features of the human brain meet a product built to hold attention.
Your brain is a threat detector
Psychologists call it negativity bias: bad news grabs attention more strongly than good news, because noticing danger kept our ancestors alive. When something frightening is happening, part of you feels that reading one more update keeps you safe. It feels like preparation, even when there is nothing you can do with the information.
Uncertainty keeps you searching
When a situation is unclear, such as an election, a storm or a health scare, the mind wants closure. Each new headline promises the answer, and each one only adds more questions. Checking again gives a brief sense of control, which is why doomscrolling spikes when the news is uncertain rather than when it is simply sad.
The feed has no bottom
Printed papers and evening bulletins end. A feed does not. Aza Raskin, the designer who created infinite scroll in 2006 to make browsing easier, has since said he regrets how it came to be used to capture attention. Without a natural stopping point, the decision to stop falls entirely on you, and that is a hard decision to keep making.
Tiredness lowers your brakes
Most doomscrolling happens in bed or on the sofa at the end of the day. You are tired, the house is quiet, and the phone is the easiest thing within reach. Reading frightening news at that hour also makes it harder to wind down, which is why our sleep hygiene checklist treats the last hour before bed as screen-free time.
Is doomscrolling bad for you?
A few minutes can lower your mood, and heavy, compulsive news use is linked with poorer well-being. The research is still young, so here is what it does and does not show.
- Short exposure has a measurable effect. In a 2021 experiment published in PLOS ONE, Kathryn Buchanan and colleagues showed people 2 to 4 minutes of real COVID-19 news on Twitter or YouTube. Their mood dropped compared with people who did not scroll. People who saw stories about acts of kindness during the pandemic did not show the same drop.
- Problematic news use is common. A 2022 survey of 1,100 US adults in the journal Health Communication found that 16.5% showed signs of severely problematic news consumption: being absorbed by the news, thinking about it constantly and finding that it interfered with daily life. That group was far more likely to report mental strain, such as stress and anxiety, and physical symptoms, such as fatigue, aches and poor concentration.
- Cause and effect run both ways. A survey cannot prove that news causes distress. Anxious people may also read more news to cope. The honest takeaway is that the habit and the low mood tend to feed each other.
None of this means you should stop following the news. It means the way you take it in matters.
Doomscrolling or staying informed? How to tell the difference
The same app can be used either way. Ask yourself these questions, or compare your last session with the table.
| Staying informed | Doomscrolling | |
|---|---|---|
| How it starts | You decide to check the news | You pick up the phone without deciding |
| Where it ends | When you know what happened | When something interrupts you |
| What you read | A few full articles from sources you trust | Headlines, clips, comments and reposts |
| How you feel after | Informed, perhaps concerned | Tense, helpless, more anxious than before |
| What you can do with it | Make a plan, take an action or let it go | Nothing, except keep reading |
| Time of day | A chosen time | Late at night, first thing in the morning, while waiting |
If most of your answers land in the right column, the problem is not that you care about the world. It is that the format has taken over.
How to stop doomscrolling: 9 steps that work in real life
You do not need all nine. Start with two or three that fit your life and add more once they feel normal.
1. Catch it and name it
The first step is noticing. When you realise you are scrolling, say it plainly to yourself: "I'm doomscrolling." Naming the habit interrupts the automatic loop for a second, and a second is enough to choose. Then check your phone's screen time report to see when it happens most, not just how long. Patterns usually cluster around bedtime, waking up and waiting.
2. Choose your news times
Pick one or two check-ins a day, for example after breakfast and early evening, and use a source that has an end: a daily newsletter, a news podcast, the radio or a printed paper. You still know what is going on, but you get the full story once instead of fragments all day.
3. Put a stopping point back
Since the feed will not end, give it an end yourself. Set a 10-minute timer before you open a news or social app, or use your phone's app limits so a reminder screen appears after your chosen time. Another simple rule: read one full article, then close the app.
4. Turn off breaking news alerts
Push alerts pull you into the feed at random moments. Turn them off for news and social apps, or switch to a scheduled notification summary. In a 2019 experiment with 237 people, receiving notifications in three batches a day, instead of as they arrived, left people feeling less stressed, more attentive and more in control of their phones. Turning all notifications off completely made some people more anxious, so batching is often the better middle ground.
5. Move the apps out of reach
Take news and social apps off your home screen, put them in a folder on the last page, or log out so getting in takes a few extra taps. That small pause is often enough to stop "just checking" from becoming forty minutes. Our guide to a minimalist phone setup walks through the home screen, grayscale and focus modes step by step.
6. Curate the feed you keep
Mute or unfollow accounts that leave you angry or frightened without telling you anything new. Use "not interested" on content you do not want more of. Then deliberately follow a few accounts about hobbies, nature, local community or people helping each other. The kindness-scrolling result from the 2021 study suggests that what fills the feed matters, not only how long you look at it.
7. Protect the last hour before bed
Night-time is when doomscrolling does the most harm, because it pushes back sleep and leaves your mind racing. Charge your phone outside the bedroom, use a basic alarm clock and set a Downtime or Bedtime mode that locks news and social apps an hour before lights out. Our 7-day digital detox plan for calmer evenings builds this up one night at a time, and our timed evening routine for lowering cortisol before sleep gives you something to do with the freed-up time.
8. Give the feeling somewhere else to go
Doomscrolling usually answers a feeling: anxiety, boredom, loneliness or the need to switch off. If you remove the phone without meeting the feeling, the habit comes back. Match the replacement to the feeling:
- Anxious: a grounding technique such as 5-4-3-2-1 from our grounding exercises for anxiety, or a few minutes of slow breathing with a longer exhale.
- Bored or restless: something for your hands, such as a jigsaw, knitting or sorting a drawer.
- Lonely or worried about someone: a phone call or message to a real person instead of reading about strangers.
- Wired at night: a few lines in a notebook to get the worries out of your head and onto paper.
A couple of small, low-tech things make these swaps easier to reach for than the phone:
- Intelligent Change The Five Minute Journal. A short, structured daily journal with the same few prompts each morning and evening, useful when a blank page feels like too much. Downside: the fixed format can feel repetitive if you prefer free writing.
- A 4-pack of 500-piece jigsaw puzzles for adults. Four seasonal landscape puzzles, a size you can finish over a few evenings at the table. Downside: you need a flat spot you can leave a half-done puzzle on.
9. Turn worry into one small action
Much of what makes doomscrolling so draining is helplessness: you absorb a crisis you cannot affect. When a story moves you, choose one concrete act, such as donating, writing to a representative, checking on a neighbour or volunteering an hour, and then close the app. Action gives the feeling a place to land. Our guide to protecting your energy covers how to care about the world without carrying all of it every hour of the day.
What to do in the moment you catch yourself
When you notice you are deep in the feed, try this 60-second exit:
- Stop on the next post. Do not finish the thread.
- Turn the phone face down or put it out of reach.
- Take three slow breaths, making each exhale a little longer than the inhale.
- Name the feeling in one word: scared, angry, sad, tired.
- Pick the next thing you will do instead: bed, a glass of water, a call, a page of your book.
It will not feel dramatic. The point is to make stopping a skill you practise, not a battle you win once.
Where doomscrolling fits in a wider digital detox
Doomscrolling is often the first habit people want to change, but it rarely lives on its own. If social apps are where most of your scrolling happens, our gentle 30-day social media detox focuses on those alone. If you are unsure whether your overall use is a problem, start with how much screen time is too much for adults, which looks at what matters more than the number. If you reach for the phone dozens of times a day for no reason at all, our realistic steps to break phone addiction go deeper into habit change. And if you have seen the "dopamine detox" trend, our honest look at what a dopamine detox really is explains why you do not need to fast from everything to feel better.
Some people find that their best intentions dissolve at 11 pm, however good the plan. For them, physical distance works better than willpower.
When is it more than a habit?
For most people, doomscrolling is a habit that improves with the steps above. Consider talking to a doctor, therapist or counsellor if:
- You feel anxious, low or hopeless most days for two weeks or more.
- Your sleep, work or relationships are suffering and cutting back has not helped.
- You find it hard to stop checking even when you very much want to.
- Specific news, such as coverage of an event you lived through, brings back distressing memories.
These are common experiences and they respond well to support. If you are in the US and ever feel in crisis, you can call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at any hour. For everyday stress, our anti-stress toolkit helps you match a calming tool to the kind of stress you feel.
The Bottom Line
Doomscrolling is what happens when a threat-scanning brain meets a feed with no end, usually at the time of day you have the least energy to resist. It is common, it can lower your mood within minutes, and it is very changeable. You do not have to choose between caring about the world and protecting your peace. Take the news at set times from sources that end, turn off alerts, curate what you see, keep the phone out of the bedroom, and give the feeling behind the scroll somewhere else to go. Start with one change tonight. For more ways to build calmer evenings, browse our meditation and relaxation guides.
