Doomscrolling and Mental Health: How to Break the Cycle of Negative News Consumption
2025 has been rough already for a lot of people. People are concerned about the state of the world, rising tensions nationally and internationally and a lot of people feel that things are looking bleak. Today's therapy sessions can consist of a lot of politics. Sometimes people are personally and directly impacted by the political climate, but many others live in the fear of being impacted. This blog post will explore one of our common responses to that fear, doomscrolling, its impact on us, and alternatives that may work for you.
What is Doomscrolling and Why Do We Do It?
The term doomscrolling is fairly new, surfacing around 2018 on Twitter and gaining significant traction during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Doomscrolling refers to "a state of media use typically characterized as individuals persistently scrolling through their social media newsfeeds with an obsessive focus on distressing, depressing, or otherwise negative information." (Sharma, et al., 2022) As you can imagine, being in lockdown with your primary connection to the world outside of your 'bubble' was almost exclusively channeled through social media and news outlets. And maybe some calls from your aunt, who also likely gets her information from social media.
In that sense, at least for a period of time, doomscrolling was less of a thing that one did and more of something that was done to us, based on the circumstances of the time. What else could we do? It’s a global pandemic! Then, lockdown measures lifted, people returned to outings with friends and many of them back to the office as well. Yet, in therapy, we still hear doomscrolling identified and described all of the time. The news looks differently bleak than it did in 2020 and many of us still utilize social media for hours a day, despite other priorities.
We have an inherent desire to want to be connected, to be informed, to understand. To some extent, it is human nature. The state of the world could have a direct impact on our lives, the lives of our loved ones, or just on society as a whole. Doomscrolling seems to start out of a desire to stay informed, but the information is never ending and doing so in large quantities can have a major impact on mental health.
Mental Health Impact of Doomscrolling
No longer are we just ‘staying informed,’ a phrase so broad that, in some senses, it has become meaningless. When we doomscroll, we surpass the threshold of information into territory more aligned with trauma. A study of journalists working with UGC (user generated content) found that " frequent, repetitive viewing of traumatic images can come with adverse psychological consequences" (Feinstein, et al., 2014.) There is significant mental health impact to watching videos and reading constant articles of violence in the Middle East or Latin America or from the next neighborhood over.
Moreover, we are given so much information 24/7, from contradictory sources that determining an objective truth within that has become a confusing and ardious process that none of us asked for. "Political information can convey nefarious meaning, be processed in a biased and skewed way, be promoted following perverse incentives, en- hance misperceptions, and generally be societally harmful." (Nai, et al., 2024)
Constant information, misinformation and traumatic information can lead to exacerbated symptoms of depression and anxiety. People also become defensive and acuse others of sheilding themselves from the information, throwing around words like privledge, in a derogatory sense. Often this stance is self-protective, as it recognizes the harm of doomscrolling but conveys an uncertainty about what to do otherwise. The thing about doomscrolling is that if it's not literally at your front door, off of your screens, that is a privledge and not in a derogatory sense.
How To Stay Informed and Stay Sane
Yes, staying informed is important. It makes sense to generally have an understanding of what is going on in the world and our place in it. However, it is equally (arguably more) important to make sure that we are keeping our heads above water in the process. We are no help to the world if we let the news overtake us. Here are some tips about how to stay informed without becoming overwhelmed and losing ourselves:
Engage with your preferred news outlet BUT do so with a grain of salt and keep time spent looking at news limited to under an hour a day. Set timers or app screen time locks on your phone to deter excesive usage.
Don't engage with social media or news at the very end of the day. Get good sleep and return to it in the morning. Sleep imacts both anxious and depressive symptoms.
Find ways to be active in your community based on the issues that matter to you most. Channel those feelings into something that feels productive, rather than ruminating on your phone.
Curate your social media. You don't have to interact with negative news on all of your platforms. Click “not interested,” block certain accounts, and avoid engaging with strangers on the internet (you don't even know if they mean what they're saying.) Interact with more puppy and kitty videos— it's okay to give yourself a break sometimes.
Think about why you're doomscrolling when you come up for air. Are you scared? Are you angry? Can you find other means of processing those emotions outside of the internet?
Conclusion
Doomscrolling is a common phrase for an increasingly common behavior of engaging with consistent news and information on the internet that illicits emotional responses from the viewer. We want to stay informed and sometimes can get sucked in to the excess of information out there. Doomscrolling is a means of offering control in a world that doesn't allow for control, and it's hurting us. As therapists, we are seeing more clients exhibit heightended anxiety and depression symptoms linked with frequent engagement with news and social media.
While there are ways to curb and explore this on your own, we offer support in our practice for those struggling to distance themselves from the endless news cycle and social media overuse. We can especially help with understanding the emotions beyond the behavior and what leads you, as an individual, to want to doomscroll. If you'd like to book an appointment with any of our clinicians, you can check out our bios here or make an appointment below. We look forward to working with you!
References
Feinstein, Anthony, et al. “Witnessing Images of Extreme Violence: A Psychological Study of Journalists in the Newsroom.” JRSM Open, vol. 5, no. 8, 8 July 2014, p. 205427041453332, https://doi.org/10.1177/2054270414533323.
Garcia-Navarro, Lulu. Your “Doomscrolling” Breeds Anxiety. Here’s How to Stop the Cycle. NPR, 7 2020, www.npr.org/2020/07/19/892728595/your-doomscrolling-breeds-anxiety-here-s-how-to-stop-the-cycle.
Nai, Alessandro, et al. “Disenchantment with Political Information: Attitudes, Processes, and Effects.” Communication Research into the Digital Society, edited by Peter Neijens and Theo Araujo, Amsterdam University Press, 12 Feb. 2024.
Sharma, Bhakti, et al. “The Dark at the End of the Tunnel: Doomscrolling on Social Media Newsfeeds.” Technology, Mind, and Behavior, vol. 3, no. 1, 10 Jan. 2022, tmb.apaopen.org/pub/nn9uaqsz/release/3, https://doi.org/10.1037/tmb0000059.
