Why You Can't Stop Doomscrolling (And What's Actually Happening)

Why you can't stop doomscrolling comes down to one thing: the pull is in the checking, not in the content. You are not scrolling because the next post will be good — you are scrolling because you do not yet know what it will be, and the not-knowing is what keeps your thumb moving. Which is why a feed full of good news tomorrow would not fix it, and why "just read less bad news" has never worked for anyone.

Four things that do change the pattern are at the end. First, what is actually going on, because the mechanism is the part that makes the fixes make sense.

The short answer

Doomscrolling is a loop with three parts. Something unresolved is on your mind. Checking feels like doing something about it. The checking produces no resolution, so the impulse to check returns — usually within minutes.

The loop sustains itself because it is reinforced unpredictably. Most times you refresh, nothing much happens. Occasionally there is something genuinely significant. A reward that arrives on an unpredictable schedule produces far more persistent behaviour than one that arrives reliably — that is one of the oldest and most robust findings in the psychology of behaviour, and it is the engine underneath an infinite feed.

So the feed is not holding your attention by being interesting. It is holding it by being uncertain.

What research describes

Two things are worth separating: whether doomscrolling is a real, distinct pattern, and whether negative material genuinely grabs us harder.

On the first. Researchers at the University of Florida — Benjamin K. Johnson, Bhakti Sharma and Susanna S. Lee — published work in the American Psychological Association journal Technology, Mind, and Behavior in 2022 developing and testing a scale to measure doomscrolling. Their finding was that it is a distinct behaviour rather than a new label for ordinary news-reading: it starts with wanting to stay updated on bad news and becomes compulsive scrolling for more of it. A doomscroller, in their account, is more than someone who wants to be informed.

Three details from that work are worth having. People leaning left and right politically did it at similar rates — this is not a partisan behaviour. Men and younger people were more likely to do it than women and older adults. And it was associated with fear of missing out and with constant smartphone connectivity.

The authors were explicit about what they could not establish: whether doomscrolling causes anxiety or anxiety leads to doomscrolling. They think the two feed each other and say more research is needed. I am not going to improve on that.

On the second. A cross-national study by Stuart Soroka, Patrick Fournier and Lilach Nir in PNAS (volume 116, issue 38, page 18888) tested this physiologically: 1,156 participants across 17 countries on six continents watched BBC World News stories while skin conductance and blood volume pulse were recorded. Participants in all the countries showed higher heart rate variability during negative stories than during positive ones, which the authors suggest may reflect heightened attention and arousal. Negative stories also produced a greater change in normalised skin conductance than neutral or positive ones.

But here is the part that usually gets dropped when this study is quoted, and it is the most interesting part: responses varied enormously within every country, and many participants showed no change at all as stories became more negative. The individual differences were not strongly tied to which country someone was from. So "humans are wired for bad news" is too strong. A lot of people are, on average, and plenty are not.

An everyday version

You read something at 10pm about a thing you cannot do anything about. You put the phone down. Four minutes later you pick it up — not to read anything specific, just to check.

Notice what the second pick-up is for. There is no new information; nothing has happened in four minutes. What has happened is that the unresolved feeling came back, and checking is the only action available that feels related to it. So you check. And because checking does not resolve anything, the feeling returns, and you check again.

By 11.40pm you have read forty posts and learned approximately nothing, and you feel flatter than you did at ten.

The scroll is not failing. It is doing exactly what it does. It just isn't doing what you hoped it would.

Not everyone responds by scrolling

Worth knowing that the scroll is one response to a heavy newsfeed, and a growing number of people pick a different one: leaving.

The Reuters Institute's Digital News Report 2022, based on around 93,000 interviews across 46 markets, found 38% of people said they often or sometimes actively avoid the news — up from 29% in 2017.

That is a useful reference point for two reasons. It tells you the discomfort is widespread rather than personal. And it shows the common alternative to compulsive checking is total avoidance — which is a blunt instrument, and the reason the suggestions below try to find something in between.

What this does not necessarily mean

This section matters more than the fixes, so it comes first.

• It does not mean something is wrong with you. Infinite feeds with unpredictable content are built to produce exactly this behaviour, and they are very good at it. Doing a thing that a well-designed system is engineered to produce is not a personal defect.

• It does not mean you have a condition. Doomscrolling is a pattern of behaviour, not a diagnosis. Nothing in this article, and nothing in the quiz below, can tell you anything about your mental health.

• It does not mean your anxiety is caused by your phone. The research is explicit that the direction of causation is unresolved. Blaming the phone can be as misleading as ignoring it.

• It does not mean caring about the news is the problem. Wanting to know what is happening is reasonable. The behaviour described here is the compulsive checking that produces no new information, which is a different thing from being informed.

• It does not mean you are unusually affected. In the physiological study above, a substantial number of participants showed no measurable change at all as material got more negative. Averages hide people.

Four things to try

These target the mechanism — the uncertainty and the availability — rather than your willpower, because willpower is the thing the loop is designed to outlast.

1. Give the checking a container. If you are tracking something you are genuinely worried about, check it at two fixed points in the day rather than continuously. The information rarely changes between refreshes; what changes is how often you feel the pull. A container does not require you to care less, which is why it tends to survive longer than a ban.

2. Sort the worry once. Ask one question: is there an action I can take about this? If yes, write it down and take it — that is what the checking was standing in for. If no, more information will not help, and you can stop treating the scroll as research. This sorting is the whole of what makes the container bearable.

3. Change the friction, not your intentions. Log out of one app. Take it off the first home screen. Delete it from the phone and use the browser version, which is just annoying enough. Put the phone in another room overnight — the two ends of the day are where this pattern has the most room, and the bedside table is the single highest-leverage object in the whole problem.

4. Replace, don't just remove. The twenty minutes was doing something — filling a gap, delaying sleep, avoiding a thought. Remove it and the gap stays. Decide in advance what the last twenty minutes of the day is now for and put the object for it where the phone used to be. A removal without a replacement usually lasts about four days.

And one thing that does not work, worth saying because it is the most popular advice: trying to want it less. You cannot reason your way out of a variable-reward loop while sitting inside it with the device in your hand.

When professional help may be appropriate

Scrolling is not a medical problem and this article is not about treating anything. But a few things are worth taking to a GP, and they are about the mood rather than the phone:

• Low mood, hopelessness or anxiety that is there whether or not you have been on your phone, and has persisted for weeks

• Sleep that is badly disrupted, where removing the phone from the bedroom has made no difference

• Feeling unable to stop a behaviour that you can see is affecting work, relationships or health

• Any thought of harming yourself — that is a reason to speak to someone today, not to wait

None of those are about doomscrolling. They are reasons to talk to someone regardless of what your screen time looks like.

What keeps you scrolling?

Six questions about when the scrolling starts, what you are looking for, and what ends it. It describes a pattern and suggests a few things to try. It is not a test and not a diagnosis, and nothing is stored.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What is doomscrolling, exactly? A: Researchers at the University of Florida, publishing in the American Psychological Association's Technology, Mind, and Behavior in 2022, described it as a distinct behaviour that begins with wanting to stay updated on negative news and becomes compulsive scrolling for more of it. The distinction they draw is between being informed and compulsive checking: a doomscroller, in their account, is more than someone who simply wants to know what is going on.

Q: How do I stop doomscrolling? A: Target the mechanism rather than your motivation. Give the checking a fixed container — twice a day rather than continuously. Sort the worry: if there is an action, take it; if there is not, accept that more information will not help. Change the physical friction by logging out, removing the app from the home screen, and moving the phone out of the bedroom. And decide what the freed time is now for, because a gap left empty gets refilled by the same thing.

Q: Why does bad news feel more gripping than good news? A: A study of 1,156 participants across 17 countries, published in PNAS, found people showed higher heart rate variability during negative news stories than positive ones, and a greater skin-conductance change for negative stories. That is consistent with negative material drawing more attention on average. The same study found responses varied widely within every country, and many participants showed no change at all — so it is a tendency, not a rule about everyone.

Q: Is doomscrolling the same as being addicted to my phone? A: Mind Decoded does not use clinical language for everyday behaviour, and the honest answer is that this article describes a pattern, not a condition. The research it draws on measured a behaviour with a questionnaire; it did not diagnose anyone. If the behaviour is affecting your work, sleep, relationships or health and you cannot change it, that is a conversation to have with a GP rather than a question to settle by reading.

Q: Does doomscrolling cause anxiety? A: Unresolved. The University of Florida researchers said plainly that their study could not establish whether doomscrolling causes anxiety or anxiety leads to doomscrolling, and that they expect the two to feed each other. Anyone telling you confidently which way round it goes is going beyond the evidence. Practically, it does not change what helps.

Q: Would I scroll less if the news were better? A: Probably not much, and that is the most useful thing to know. The pull sits in the unpredictability of the checking rather than in the content, which is why unpredictable rewards produce such persistent behaviour. People who try switching to a cheerful feed often find the thumb keeps moving. The structure is doing the work, not the subject matter.

Q: Is it better to just quit the news altogether? A: A lot of people do — the Reuters Institute found 38% in 2022 said they often or sometimes avoid the news, up from 29% in 2017. It is an understandable response and a blunt one: it solves the compulsive checking by also removing the being-informed. The middle path, a fixed container twice a day, is harder to set up and easier to live with long-term.

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