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Doomscrolling: What It Is and How to Break the Habit

With news and opinion always at your fingertips on your smartphone and computer, do you ever find yourself overdoing your media intake to the point where you feel anxious and unhappy? That's doomscrolling, a relatively new word for an old behavior—one that has become easier with modern technology and more common with what can seem like a never-ending series of worrisome world events.

Doomscrolling is fueled by a natural human need to stay informed when there are signs of danger. That alertness and curiosity can be helpful—at times even life-saving—when you're threatened by war or other violence, disease, or natural disaster. But when your search for information leads you from one alarming story to another—when it becomes such a frequent habit that it undermines your wellbeing—it's no longer protecting you from harm. It's causing you harm.

How Doomscrolling Can Be Bad for You

A habit of searching for bad news can become a self-reinforcing cycle. The more you look the more you find, the more you find the more anxious you become, and the more anxious you become the more you look for information that will help you feel more in control in the face of danger. The problem is that continued searching doesn't always bring you more helpful information. There's only so much of that available. As you keep digging, you find more of the same, more speculation, more misinformation, and more that makes you anxious.

Overconsumption of news and the anxiety it triggers can also interfere with your sleep, your ability to think clearly, your relationships, and your work. If you're prone to sadness, depression, or anxiety, doomscrolling can be especially tempting and especially dangerous. It can pull you down and intensify your fears.

How to Break the Doomscrolling Habit

Doomscrolling is a habit, a repeated pattern of behavior. Like any habit, it can be hard to break. But there are ways you can bring it under control and substitute new behaviors in its place:

• Notice the effect it has on you. Pay attention to how you feel when you are reading, watching, or listening to the news. Which news stories and opinion pieces make you feel anxious, scared, frustrated, or unhappy, and which help you feel more confident and relaxed?
• Notice when you're scrolling for news. How many times a day are you checking? How many alerts do you get that interrupt what you're doing and cause you to look at more news?
• Understand your triggers. What triggers you to go to a news site or look at social media? What urges cause you to look for news stories? Do you doomscroll when you're bored? When you're anxious? Whenever you have your phone in your hand?

With that awareness of your doomscrolling habit, you can begin to manage it by reducing your triggers, substituting new responses, and building new patterns of media consumption:

• Turn off push notifications. These alerts not only interrupt you in your work and your time with other people, but they're designed to draw you in to consume more news. Turn off as many notifications as you can live without.
• Choose specific times for news and information. You don't need to read every news story the minute it's posted. Decide when during the day you'll catch up on the news, and set a limit on how much time you'll spend. Decide on times when you won't look at the news, too: at mealtimes, for example, when you're with other people, or while you're working or engaged in another activity.
• Keep technology out of the bedroom. To improve your sleep, make the wind-down time before you go to bed one of your screen-free times. Read a book or magazine for a few minutes instead. If you want to look at your phone in the morning, or if you use it as an alarm clock, keep it on the other side of the bedroom.
• Substitute new behaviors. When you get the urge to look at news outside of the times you've set, do something else. Get up from your chair and stretch, drink a glass of water, or go for a short walk.
• Focus on the positive. Balance your diet of worrisome news with positive stories and supportive social connections. Reconsider who you follow on social media to include more posts that distract you from your worries or help you deal with them, rather than making them worse. Drop or block anyone whose posts upset you. Use your phone and social media to connect with friends.
• Take action. Consider what you can do to help make things better in the face of events that worry you. That might be by paying attention to your health or taking steps to keep your family safer. It might be by helping others in your community or around the world, even if it's only in small ways. Taking action is a better way to feel in control than consuming more news and information.