Doomscrolling didn’t start as a pathology; it started as a hobby. A little peek at the news before bed, a tiny dip into global chaos with morning coffee. But somewhere between the fifth “breaking update” and the thousandth contradictory hot take, the habit metastasized. What was once curiosity became compulsion—and we’ve turned from viewers to “concerned citizens.” Since our brains are still wired for survival on the savannah, they treat every headline—pandemics, politics, celebrity divorces—as a rustling in the bushes that might be a lion. Spoiler: it is almost never a lion.
Neuroscientists will tell you that our threat-detection systems love bad news. Bad news feels urgent. Urgency feels important. And being “informed” feels virtuous. So we scroll, convinced we’re participating in civic engagement. In reality, we’re trapped in a dopamine roulette wheel where every pull of the digital lever might deliver something shocking, enraging, or—rarely—cute enough to keep hope alive. It’s an endless slot machine, but instead of cherries appearing, it’s charts, scandals, and one inexplicably viral raccoon.
What makes doomscrolling uniquely addictive is how platforms have learned to weaponize our anxiety. The algorithm doesn’t care if you’re enlightened or despondent—it just knows you’re still here. And so it feeds you more. If content is the product, then your attention is the harvest, and the fields are extraordinarily fertile when you're worried. Crisis is profitable. Calm is not. That’s why social media timelines resemble a psychological haunted house: dimly lit, disorienting, and full of things you wish you hadn’t seen.
But for many of us, doomscrolling isn’t about masochism—it’s about reassurance. We check the news compulsively not because we want catastrophe, but because we want confirmation that catastrophe has not, in fact, personally knocked on our door. Unfortunately, the internet has a way of saying, “Well, not yet,” which is hardly soothing. So we keep scrolling, trying to outrun uncertainty, even though uncertainty has much better stamina.
The emotional toll is subtle at first: a little more tension in the shoulders, a little less joy when the dog does something adorable. But over time, the world begins to feel like one long emergency broadcast. Our sense of proportion warps. A local zoning dispute feels as catastrophic as an international incident. A celebrity tweet feels like a referendum on civilization. Everything is crisis-level, which means nothing is truly processed. Our brains simply weren’t designed for a 24/7 catastrophe buffet.
Still, humans are resilient in small, stubborn ways. We daydream. We laugh. We occasionally put the phone down and experience sunlight. And researchers suggest that intentional breaks—micro-sabbaticals from the feed—can reset our internal equilibrium. Think of it as rinsing the palate between courses, except the courses are existential dread and a heated argument between strangers you’ll never meet.
Breaking the cycle isn’t about abandoning the world; it’s about rejoining it. Start with boundaries: no doomscrolling in bed, fewer “just checking” dips into chaos, and perhaps a brief mourning period when you unfollow the 10 accounts dedicated solely to worst-case scenarios. Replace the compulsion with something rooted in reality—walks, phone calls, petting a living creature, ideally with permission. Crisis may be constant, but your exposure to it doesn’t have to be.
In the end, doomscrolling is less a moral failure and more a mismatch between ancient neurobiology and modern technology. Our brains are old software trying to run on an operating system built by venture capital. Of course things glitch. Of course we worry. But the world is still happening off-screen, in full color, with fewer all-caps headlines. And it deserves, at least occasionally, your undivided, un-panicked attention.