What Exactly Is Doomscrolling and How Does It Affect Us?

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It could be early in the morning, perhaps even before you get out of bed, or any time of day thereafter. It starts with a notification. You just plan to reply to that one text—but then, since you’re already on your smart phone, you decide to check your email, prior to moving on to social media, which has its own gravitational pull where one news item, post, or comment leads to another, and to another, and another, etc. Before you realize it, half an hour has disappeared, and you’re left feeling stressed, anxious, overstimulated, fatigued, and emotionally riled up.

A new term that succinctly encapsulates the phenomenon of endless attention-consuming scrolling on social media has recently emerged: “Doomscrolling.” Doomscrolling specifically relates to spending time in contact with disturbing news through social media, including but not limited to conspiracies, intense/emotional political conflict, or violent events, often to the point where it becomes compulsive. While it may seem like just another essentially benign or neutral time-wasting habit, new research from Flinders University in Australia demonstrates that it can significantly impact mental-emotional health and well-being and even alter people’s perception of reality.[1]

Researchers surveyed 800 university students from two distinctly different cultures, the United States and Iran, to explore how excessive negative news consumption on social media can impact their thoughts and feelings relating to their lives. Participants were asked to respond to how often they doomscrolled through social media, how anxious they felt about their existence, whether they believed that the world is a fair place, and how they felt about humanity in general.

According to this study, habitually checking social media, particularly when negative, upsetting, or traumatic stories are involved, is linked with changes in how we view other people, our overall sense of safety, and of life. Doomscrolling makes people more likely to be suspicious and distrustful of others, and can even onset a sense of existential despair that life lacks any real meaning.

Source: Orion Quest from Pixabay

It turns out that far from being a harmless activity, doomscrolling can negatively affect how we view the people and world around us. In both American and Iranian study participants, doomscrolling was associated with existential anxiety—worries about existence, life, and death. No wonder so many people seem drawn to cat videos.

The new research also seems to confirm what lived experience has suggested for some time—that viewing disturbing news on social media can be a source of vicarious trauma, wherein someone has distressing psychological effects even though they did not experience trauma directly. Extensive exposure to information and images pertaining to traumatic events can result in symptoms similar to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) that include anxiety, depression, anger, distrust, and despair. Extending this dynamic, it seems extremely likely that doomscrolling subjects people who have experienced trauma previously—whether or not they have PTSD—to retraumatization and a worsening of their trauma-based distress.

Physiologically, doomscrolling changes nervous system activity by activating the stress-based fight-flight reactions of the sympathetic division of the autonomic nervous system that occur when we feel unsafe. This is a series of reactions that happen in response to threats—whether those threats are real and present (e.g. someone is pointing a gun at us) or perceived, existing only in the realm of our thoughts and the internal stories those thoughts combine to create, or a more vague sense that terrible things are imminent.

As a result, breathing becomes fast and shallow, heart rate goes up, blood pressure goes up, muscle tension increases, and cortisol and adrenaline are released. Because the mind-body connection is so direct and intimate, this leads to increased anxiety, fear, depression, distrust, and even despair.

All of this reinforces how important it is for people to practice being mindful of their online habits. Our mental-emotional health and well-being requires paying conscious attention to how much time we spend on social media and to become more aware of the ways it affects our thoughts, emotions, and relationships—especially when it comes to negative news and events. Each day presents us with the opportunity to start making changes to reduce the amount of that time and begin to take regular breaks from social media and exposure to disturbing content.

Copyright 2024 Dan Mager, MSW