Doomscrolling: the habit that isn't really about your phone

I feel that by now we all have been there. Planning to go to bed early but staying up scrolling on our feed. Reaching out for our phone, moments after we have opened our eyes. The “just 5 minutes more” that ends up being hours long. The urge to reach out for your phone when you are out with friends. If that feels familiar, I guess you might be just a human being living in our current world. Many of us ask, “How do I stop?”, but a better question could be “Why did I even start?”

When Oxford Dictionary named “doomscrolling” the word of the year in 2020, it defined it as the act of constantly scrolling through and reading depressing news on a news site or on social media, especially on a phone. Since then, it has expanded to include more general content. What hasn’t changed are the feelings that doomscrolling can leave you with and the need to go back to it.

With negative news come feelings of dread and anxiety. With social media scrolling, we glimpse other people’s curated and effortless lives. We scroll through holidays we haven’t been to, bodies we would like to have, and lives more sorted than our own. This leaves us comparing ourselves and feeling less than.

The psychological layer

So why do we do it? From my personal experience and counselling work, there are some common points that keep coming up, even though the reasons can be different for each person.

Scrolling can give you the illusion of having things under control. Staying online feels like being informed, prepared and ahead of events. We scroll because we need to know what is going to happen in a world full of unpredictability and despair. Avoidance is also playing a role here. Sometimes it’s easier to reach for a phone rather than stay with the discomfort of boredom, anxiety, overwhelm and loneliness.

Distracting our attention gives us moments of perceived calmness. Uncertainty follows close behind. It’s uncomfortable for any nervous system, and scrolling makes us feel like we are doing something, even if it’s more of a numbing activity.

The design layer

It’s important when thinking about doomscrolling to include the systems behind it. Infinite scroll has been designed deliberately not to give us any stopping opportunity. Algorithms are for maximising engagement. Once it knows what keeps us hooked for longer, it gives us more of the same, keeping us “locked” for as long as possible. Likes and notification systems are a form of reward mechanism.

Funnily enough, it’s the same psychological principle behind how slot machines work, leading us to a cycle of addiction. The key mechanism is a variable reward. You get a dopamine hit occasionally, and this unpredictability is what makes you come back. Slot machines work like this: it’s the possibility of a reward rather than the reward itself that makes someone pull the lever or refresh their feed.

The bottom line is that reaching out for your phone is not a personal failure, but it’s part of a system that was built with making stopping difficult in mind.

How it affects us

The ways that this affects us vary. Our nervous system stays in a state of constant alert, without being given the opportunity to resolve anything or to be able to slow down. The cycle we end up in is feeling anxious, scrolling to calm down and ending up more anxious. Being in a state of constant anxiety removes any capacity we might have to tolerate stillness or stay with the feeling of not knowing even for a little while.

When this becomes everyday life, we miss an opportunity for self-awareness and to process things that are happening around us. Being constantly online might involve comparing ourselves with unrealistic expectations. This can distort the way we see ourselves and how we connect to others. We are in a system that is designed to make us feel that we are always missing something or that the grass is greener somewhere else, and that’s a place outside of our own reach.

This links to feeling low or overwhelmed, having disrupted sleep and struggling to concentrate. We are slowly getting used to short content and a shorter attention span.

The interesting question

When thinking about time spent on our phones, what I am always curious about is what was going on the moment before you picked up your phone. Scrolling is rarely random. It feels automatic, but we often think about it more than we realise. From my experience in addiction, the moment you decide to reach out for something to soothe your feelings can reveal much more than trying to fix the problem. Being tired, feeling lonely, changes in life, procrastination, or getting back some control over how you spend your time after a full working day can be reasons why.

Willpower as a way to stop doomscrolling is a way to move forward – we all hear about digital detoxes, screen time rules or going offline. However, I am finding that being curious about the trigger rather than how to fix things can be more useful.

The simple question of “What do I really need right now?” could give us more answers. Observing ourselves with the curiosity to learn something more about how we think, rather than judgement for not being able to stick to a plan, can be more useful. Being bored could be seen as a state of being rather than something we need to immediately fix.

Apps are intentionally designed to keep us scrolling. Recognising it can remove some of the shame that comes with it. The goal is not perfection, but more awareness when it comes to what makes us reach for our phones. It might show that your phone is the easiest answer to a question that you still haven’t asked. What you notice might also be the start of discovering something new about yourself.