The Dangers of Doom Scrolling

By: Camden Baucke LLP

The topic of doom scrolling has become popular recently, most ironically through social media. It is best defined as using your phone to scroll through negative or distressing information on popular media platforms. Meanwhile it is often joked about in conversation, doom scrolling can have negative effects on your mental and physical health. However, we can address doom scrolling as a habit, just like any other behavior with context and consequences. Once you understand doom scrolling’s place within your everyday life you can then create change. First, let’s dive deeper into what doom scrolling really looks like.

What is Doom Scrolling

Doom scrolling starts with the action of being on your phone. You pull it from your pocket or bag to then open a form of social media. The common apps for doom scrolling are Instagram, Youtube, Facebook, Snapchat, etc. These apps have shaped their platform to allow you to easily go from content to content with continuous streams of videos or pictures. There is often little personal control over what content is shown after you have clicked the initial content you wanted to see. This decision is often left to algorithms and personalized content tailored to your time spent on similar subjects. It could mean that if you spend more than a second on a piece of media regarding a distressing topic like school shootings, you are more likely to be presented with similar content. As a result, there is a momentum to scrolling as you begin with one stressful post which then leads to several stressful posts arriving in your feed. Beyond algorithms, there is a psychological factor in how doom scrolling pulls our attention.

Negative Effects

It is a well known fact that threatening or distressing media pulls our attention more than anything peaceful or calming. Our brains are wired for survival and to maintain our basic well-being. Emotions and physical responses to survival are anger and anxiety which are fueled by hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline. So if our brain has the option to look at one of two bushes, one looking like it may have a hungry lion behind it, we will focus our eyes on that bush. This is similar to our attention to negative media. Once it has our attention, it elicits a distressing response that can have ramifications to your health. Studies on doom scrolling during the COVID-19 pandemic showed a significant portion of individuals who watched “problematic” news media were likely to be experiencing moderate to severe levels of physical and mental distress. This mental distress is anxiety, which is paired with stress hormones that cause negative effects on the body’s cardiovascular and immune systems. Doom scrolling is dangerous to your health, and now that we know the effects, we must address doom scrolling and its context.

Context is Everything

To understand an unhealthy behavior, you must explore why it presents itself in the first place. Social media is often used as a method of distracting ourselves from unpleasant experiences. For example, if you find yourself just standing on a metro going to work, you might be tempted to pull out your phone and scroll through Instagram. While doom scrolling is the problematic behavior, we need to look at why being bored needs a distraction. There are several key times and places that present distressing experiences, thus times that we are more than likely to doom scroll. Let’s look at these situations, beginning with the start of each day.

In the Morning

The morning can be anxiety-producing for most, where you wake up from your rest and evaluate what the rest of the day will demand from you. This can be overwhelming and lead to anxious planning. As a result, you might pull out your phone, doom scroll to try and push the anxious thoughts out, but be increasingly perturbed by the negative media on your phone. Once you put the phone down, you are not only exactly where you were before you doom scrolled, but you feel worse due to having been exposed to anxiety-producing material. If the morning appears like a frightening time to sort your to-do list, then it’s important to sit in that moment and address the issue at hand instead. 

Remember, the key to changing habits is not just changing your behavior, but understanding the barriers to healthy actions. You must address anxiety before doom scrolling, not doom scrolling before anxiety. Alternatives to doom scrolling can range from mindfulness practices to doing one item on your list at a time. Choosing a task and only doing that one thing. Additionally, you can set a time in your schedule to plan your day, and not do it continuously throughout your day. You can make a list of 3 things you are grateful for and 3 things you look forward to. The morning is a time to prepare you for your day, not a time to bear the weight of results not yet produced. Once you start your day, there are often two other circumstances that lead to doom scrolling: anxiety and boredom.

When Anxious or Bored

Again, doom scrolling is often the consequence of initially looking at your phone to distract yourself from a feeling. That feeling, more often than not, is anxiety or anger. Like in the morning, look to find ways to manage the emotion rather than find a distraction that worsens your experience. Take time for deep breathing with 5 second inhales and 8 second exhales. Voice your feelings with a friend or express them in a journal. Recognize that you have the urge to distract yourself, find out what from, and then manage that anxiety. It’s easier said than done, but if you can learn to process anxiety when it comes, then you are much less likely to doom scroll, which would only make the situation worse. The opposite of a situation filled with anxiety is a situation filled with nothing and consequential boredom. 

Boredom may be just a word, but everyone has their own relationship with it. Being bored can often allow intrusive and negative thoughts to creep into your consciousness. It can be a negative label that if you ever find yourself bored, you are being “lazy” and “unproductive.” These negative thoughts can be combined with an urge to use your time in some way, thus social media seems like the next best option. Again, it’s best not to ignore how you feel, but become comfortable with identifying it and addressing it with actions to make yourself feel better. Boredom is often necessary, being a rest for your brain and body when immersed in a world of stimulation and attention grabbing. Additionally, there is nothing inherently wrong with “boredom” as that is more likely a mental relationship formed through some experience in your life. I encourage actively seeking time to feel bored, if even 10 minutes or taking a silent drive to or from work. Boredom could be considered another name for “rest” and rest is necessary for sustaining your life. However, much of boredom is associated with silence, which can allow increasingly anxious thoughts to arrive, especially before bed.

Bedtime

Doom scrolling in bed is one of the most notorious contexts for mismanaging anxious thoughts. It’s the end of your day, and you lay there and try to quiet your mind until you drift off into sleep. This is often blocked by either negative thoughts of yourself, the day you just survived through, or the difficult day you must overcome when you wake up. No matter the distress, again, our brain looks for a distraction from our thoughts. This often ends up being social media, which then often presents negative and distressing content. Once seeing these, your body becomes stressed, releasing cortisol. While cortisol is a stress hormone, it also is the hormone that helps jolt you into waking up in the morning. Needless to say, a boost of a waking hormone is not conducive to falling asleep. This then often causes a delay in falling asleep, which may cause more anxiety. You may not get much sleep, and wake up more anxious due to being overwhelmed and even more fatigued. Then, doom scrolling is an available option to spin this cycle of anxiety more and more. 

Sleep is one of the most vulnerable parts of your day. You are intentionally lying down and doing nothing to then lose consciousness. It’s worth treating with extreme consideration, as it is what fuels you for whatever the following day holds. At night, it may benefit you from explicitly addressing your anxiety before you lay in bed. You might try some mindfulness and grounding exercises to get you “into your body” and out of your thoughts for the night. In your body are your sleep cues, the internal signals telling you it’s time to get cozy and go to bed. In terms of your phone, it may be best to set it to the side or maybe in another room. Even the blue light from phone screens have shown to delay sleep cycles in the brain. While it may seem uncomfortable to not have your phone with you, your sleep is worth protecting. Address your pre-sleep anxiety, create a conducive space to sleep, and keep yourself from reaching for your phone, you will thank yourself tomorrow.

Bring it All Together

Doom scrolling is dangerous to your immediate and long term physical and mental health. It is not a behavior that occurs in isolation. Doom scrolling has a function, and that’s to distract you from how you’re feeling and what you’re thinking. To address this, you must first look at the anxiety you’re wishing to avoid and the context in which it appears. Then, you can make active choices to engage in alternative actions that will be conducive to your mental health. Doom scrolling is dangerous and contagious, but it serves as an extension of a distress that is already there. 

If you’d like to learn more about managing anxiety and methods of keeping yourself from doom scrolling, feel free to visit greatlakesmentalhealth.com to start your therapy journey today!

THANK YOU FOR READING!