A wildfire in California, a flood in Bangladesh, a stabbing in a city you have visited once, a politician saying something unforgivable, a thread about the politician saying the unforgivable thing, a rebuttal of the thread, a screenshot of a deleted tweet, a missile strike, a photograph of the aftermath of the missile strike, a fundraiser for the aftermath of the missile strike that has raised eleven percent of its goal, a clip of a news anchor losing composure on air, a infographic about global temperatures, a body-camera video you should not be watching, a list of species declared extinct this year, a child in rubble, a counter-argument about the child in rubble, a meme about the counter-argument, a correction of the meme, a new wildfire, and somewhere around here — you cannot say exactly where — your thumb stopped deciding and your nervous system took over, and you have been lying in this position, on this sofa, in this light, for forty-seven minutes, and you feel worse than when you started but you do not stop, because stopping would mean looking up and seeing the room and feeling whatever it is you have been using the screen to not feel, so you do not stop, and the next headline loads.
That is doom scrolling. Not the act of reading bad news — people have always read bad news — but the specific, compulsive, self-reinforcing loop of consuming distressing content on an infinite feed with no endpoint, no resolution, and no moment at which the algorithm says enough. The doom is not in any single headline. The doom is in the scroll itself: the gesture, the momentum, the frictionless continuity of one horror bleeding into the next until the distinction between them dissolves and what remains is not information but atmosphere. A weather system of dread that has settled over your evening and will not lift.
The word first appeared in something close to its current meaning around 2018, tucked into scattered tweets — “taking a break from doomscrolling,” one user wrote, “and being inundated with things and stuff” — but it lived in obscurity until March 2020, when the pandemic shut the world indoors and handed every confined person a device with an endless feed and an unprecedented volume of catastrophic news. The journalist Karen Ho, a finance reporter for Quartz, began posting nightly reminders to her followers — often between eleven and one in the morning — to stop doomscrolling and go to bed. The tweets were gentle, almost maternal in their repetition. They were also, implicitly, an admission that she needed the reminder as much as anyone. The Oxford English Dictionary named it one of the words of the year in 2020. It has not gone away since.
To understand why we do it — and why it is so difficult to stop — you have to understand a piece of evolutionary machinery that was never designed for this.
Human beings are equipped with what psychologists call a negativity bias: a cognitive tendency to attend more closely to threats than to comforts. This is not a flaw. For most of the history of our species, it was the reason we survived. The ancestor who noticed the rustling in the grass and assumed it was a predator lived to reproduce. The ancestor who assumed it was the wind did not. Our brains are wired to scan for danger, to orient toward the novel and the threatening, and to keep scanning until the threat has been identified and resolved.
The problem is that an infinite news feed offers identification without resolution. The threat is always present. The danger is always fresh. Each new headline activates the same ancient circuitry — attend, assess, prepare — but provides no action to take, no predator to flee, no danger to resolve. The scroll gives the nervous system exactly enough threat to keep it engaged and never enough closure to let it rest. It is, in the language of behavioural psychology, a variable-ratio reinforcement schedule — the same mechanism that makes slot machines addictive. You keep pulling the lever not because every pull pays out, but because the next one might.
A study conducted at the University of Sussex found that participants who watched just a few minutes of negative television news showed measurable increases in anxiety and sadness, along with a heightened tendency to catastrophise their own personal worries — worries that had nothing to do with the news itself. A separate study found that three minutes of negative news in the morning made participants twenty-seven percent more likely to report a bad day six to eight hours later. Three minutes. Most doom scrolling sessions last far longer than that.
What makes doom scrolling different from simply watching the evening news — something people have done for decades — is the architecture.
A nightly newscast has a beginning, a middle, and an end. A newspaper has edges. Even twenty-four-hour cable news, for all its excesses, has commercial breaks, segment boundaries, the physical act of changing the channel. Each of these is what designers call a stopping cue: a moment at which the flow of information is interrupted and the consumer has to make a conscious decision to continue. Infinite scroll — the feature introduced by Aza Raskin in 2006 and since adopted by virtually every major social platform — eliminates stopping cues entirely. There is no page to turn. No “next” button to click. The content loads automatically, continuously, seamlessly, and the only thing separating you from the next piece of distressing information is the width of your thumb.
Raskin himself has spoken publicly about regretting the invention, comparing it to a behavioural trap — something that makes the path of least resistance also the path of greatest consumption. The platforms, of course, have no incentive to add stopping cues back. Their business model depends on time spent. The longer you scroll, the more advertisements you see, and the more data they collect on which headlines kept your thumb moving. The algorithm learns that you linger on catastrophe. It feeds you more catastrophe. You linger again. The doom is optimised.
This is the point at which doom scrolling intersects with surveillance capitalism: the platforms are not neutral conduits of news. They are engines designed to maximise engagement, and engagement, it turns out, is most reliably produced by content that triggers anxiety, outrage, or fear. The feed does not show you the world as it is. It shows you the version of the world most likely to keep you from putting down your phone.
There is a particular cruelty in the fact that the people most vulnerable to doom scrolling are the people for whom it is most damaging: the anxious, the empathic, the politically engaged, the traumatised. Research has found that doom scrolling is strongly associated with a psychological trait called intolerance of uncertainty — the deep discomfort with not knowing what is happening or what will happen next. People with this trait scroll not for entertainment but for control. They believe, on some visceral level, that if they can just find one more piece of information, the uncertainty will resolve. It never does. The scroll has no bottom. The uncertainty is structural.
Studies across multiple countries — the United States, Iran, Turkey — have found that habitual doom scrolling is associated with increased anxiety, depression, existential dread, and a diminished sense that the world is fair or that other people can be trusted. One research team described the link between doom scrolling and existential anxiety as the most striking finding: participants who scrolled compulsively through negative news reported higher levels of emptiness, hopelessness, and the feeling that life lacks meaning. The content did not make them better informed. It made them more afraid.
For people who have experienced trauma, the effect is compounded. Exposure to distressing news online can act as a trigger, producing symptoms that resemble post-traumatic stress — not because the reader experienced the events directly, but because the body’s threat-response system does not always distinguish between a real danger and a vivid representation of one. The screen, held six inches from your face in a dark room at midnight, is a remarkably efficient delivery system for vicarious horror.
And yet.
If you are reading this and recognising yourself — the phone on the pillow, the glow in the dark, the promise that you will stop after one more headline — you are also recognising something else. You know it is not good for you. You have known for a long time. You do it anyway.
This is the part that deserves compassion rather than instruction. Doom scrolling is not a failure of willpower. It is the predictable outcome of a threat-detection system that evolved for the savannah being plugged into an information system designed for profit. The mismatch is not your fault. Your brain is doing exactly what it was built to do — scanning for danger, refusing to look away — in an environment that exploits that instinct with surgical precision.
The historian and writer Alex Wright, tracing the phenomenon back to the nineteenth century, has argued that doom scrolling is not even especially new. When industrial printing made newspapers cheap and abundant, the Victorians experienced their own version of information overload. Thoreau, writing in Walden in 1854, complained that people could barely take a nap after dinner without waking to read the latest dispatch. The technology was different. The compulsion was the same. What changes across centuries is not the human appetite for alarming news but the friction — or its absence — between the appetite and the supply.
The infinite scroll removed the last friction. And now you lie here, thumb still moving, the room dark around you, the feed regenerating faster than you can process it, the doom neither arriving nor departing but simply continuing, endlessly, like a weather system that has forgotten how to end.
You can put the phone down. You know this. The room will still be here when you look up.
It is the looking up that is hard.
See also: Revenge Bedtime Procrastination · Attention Residue · Surveillance Capitalism
The Nervous Age · Glossary of Now
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