What is doomscrolling?

Where the word came from

The word combines doom with scrolling and had been circulating online for several years before it became common. It reached general use in 2020, when dictionaries and news outlets picked it up during the pandemic, which is when a great many people recognised the behaviour in themselves at the same time.

It described something that already existed. Infinite feeds had been around for a decade by then. What changed was that there was suddenly an unbroken supply of genuinely alarming news, and a name arrived for what people were doing with it.

Why feeds make it easy

Three ordinary design decisions add up to it, none of them aimed at doom in particular.

There is no end. A feed that loads more as you reach the bottom removes the natural moment where you would have stopped. Turning a page or reaching the last item is a decision point, and infinite scroll deletes it.

What surfaces is what holds people. Ranking rewards posts that keep attention, and alarm holds attention very effectively. Nobody has to prefer upsetting material for it to rise: it simply performs well against the measure being optimised.

The next item is always unknown. An unpredictable reward is far more compelling than a reliable one, which is a well established finding and the same reason a slot machine is more gripping than a vending machine.

Put together, you have a supply with no end, weighted toward the alarming, and delivered in an order you cannot predict. The behaviour follows from the design rather than from anything about the person doing it.

What it does

The honest answer is that the research is young and mostly correlational. Surveys find that people who report more of this kind of scrolling also report more anxiety and worse sleep. What those studies cannot easily tell you is the direction: whether the scrolling makes people feel worse, or people who already feel worse scroll more. Both are plausible and both are probably true at once.

What is less disputed is the practical part. Reading alarming material about things you cannot act on tends to leave a residue, and doing it in the hour before sleep is a poor trade for anyone.

What it is not

It is not the same as being informed. Reading the news once is being informed; the twentieth similar post half an hour later adds nothing except the feeling of keeping up.

It is also not a moral failing or a lack of self-control, though it is often described as one. A feed built to have no stopping point is genuinely hard to stop reading, and that is what it was designed to be.

If you want the mechanics of why it holds on, that is set out in why it is hard to stop scrolling. If you would rather skip to what actually helps, there is the substitution route.

Calm Moments is a feed of slow scenes, with guided breathing and a grounding exercise alongside it. Free, no ads, collects no data.

Common questions

What does doomscrolling mean?

Continuing to scroll through distressing news and posts long past the point of having learned anything. The behaviour, not the subject matter, is what the word describes.

When did the word doomscrolling appear?

It circulated online for some years and entered general use in 2020, when dictionaries and news outlets picked it up during the pandemic. The behaviour it names is older than the word.

Is doomscrolling actually bad for you?

The research is young and mostly correlational: people who report more of it also report more anxiety and worse sleep, but the direction is unclear. The clearer part is that doing it before bed is a poor trade.