Doomscrolling is the compulsive habit of consuming an endless stream of negative news online. It surged during the Covid pandemic, grew through geopolitical conflicts and economic instability, and has since settled into daily life for a significant number of people. Checking the headlines over morning coffee is one thing. Doomscrolling looks different: it is repetitive, hard to stop, and tends to happen on X, TikTok, Instagram, and news apps well past the point of being useful. One more article turns into thirty minutes down the drain. Tabs multiply. Time distorts.
Gary Tucker, chief clinical officer at D’Amore Mental Health, draws a clear line between simply catching up with current events and doomscrolling. Tucker states that “each scroll reinforces a heightened state of alertness in the brain, and over time that state becomes harder to switch off, gradually pulling down a person’s sense of well-being and satisfaction with life.” A 2022 study developed a validated Doomscrolling Scale that confirmed exactly this, finding it to be a behaviourally distinct pattern with its own measurable psychological weight.
Why the brain keeps scrolling
The human brain is wired to treat negative information as more urgent than positive information. During a crisis, this tendency intensifies, pushing people toward constant news-checking in search of clarity and control. What sustains the habit is intermittent reinforcement. Occasionally, a scroll does turn up something significant, and that unpredictable reward keeps the behaviour going in the same way a slot machine does not need to pay out every time to keep a player engaged.
Zoe Tambling, LMFT, clinical director at Anchored Tides Recovery, captures where the line gets crossed. Tambling shares that “staying informed can genuinely give people a sense of control and even optimism. What becomes harmful is the repetitive, unregulated cycle of checking, where the emotional drive to seek out information overtakes any practical purpose, and worry begins to compound and spill into other areas of life.” A longitudinal daily-diary study conducted over eight weeks during the pandemic, supports Tambling’s point, finding that higher daily news exposure was linked to increased same-day optimism for some participants, alongside elevated worry for others.
How doomscrolling affects mental health
The study found that greater daily news exposure predicted higher worry on the same day and the following day, and that this specific worry then generalised into broader hopelessness and pessimism over time. The 2022 study found that higher doomscrolling scores were associated with greater psychological distress, which in turn predicted lower life satisfaction, reduced mental well-being, and a diminished sense of harmony in daily life. Sleep is also affected, as late-night scrolling combines blue light exposure with emotional activation at exactly the wrong time.
For younger people, the risks are more pronounced. A systematic review of 13 studies involving over 760,000 young people found that heavier Covid news consumption, particularly through social media, was consistently linked to elevated anxiety, depression, and psychological distress . Michael Anderson, licensed professional counsellor at Healing Pines Recovery, points to why social media is a specific concern: “Algorithm-driven feeds are designed to maximise engagement, which means they naturally surface the most emotionally intense content available. For younger people who are already carrying anxiety or depression, that kind of sustained exposure can entrench and reinforce it, making recovery from those conditions harder over time.”
How to reduce doomscrolling
Doomscrolling is an understandable response to uncertainty, and treating it as a personal failing tends to be less effective than treating it as a habit that can be restructured. Setting defined news windows of around 15 minutes, twice a day, gives the brain the information it is seeking without open-ended exposure. Turning off push notifications for news and social apps removes the constant environmental cues that trigger checking behaviour. Adding small practical barriers, such as moving news apps off the home screen, logging out between uses, or setting app timers, reduces the likelihood of automatic, unconscious scrolling. Replacing the habit at high-risk moments like late at night or first thing in the morning with an alternative activity, such as reading, stretching, or journaling, gives the brain something constructive to do with its restlessness. Clinicians increasingly view doomscrolling as a specific behavioural pattern worth addressing directly, rather than a side effect of general stress.
Adam Mulligan, a psychology graduate from the University of Hertfordshire, has a keen interest in the fields of mental health, wellness, and lifestyle.
