What doomscrolling does to your brain, and how to stop it

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What doomscrolling does to your brain, and how to stop it

By Art Markman

There are times when you’re just feeling anxious. There might have been an event in the news that has you feeling bad about life, the universe, and everything. It might also be something more personal. Recent bad news or a concern about your job or industry may have you spiraling downward.

A common response to that feeling is to spend far too much time on social media. You may find yourself searching your feed for links to stories that relate to what you’re feeling, or continually reading negative articles online. Yup. You’re doomscrolling .

Doomscrolling isn’t really novel. It is actually just a modern variant of a common psychological response to anxiety called rumination. When you are anxious, there is a tendency to cycle through a series of thoughts related to your concern. (The term rumination is based on the word for animals that chew their cud.) The modern element to doomscrolling is that you use both your own thoughts as well as easily available information on the internet.

The problem with rumination (and doomscrolling by extension) is that it is only a temporary relief for your anxiety. While you’re thinking through your problem (or reading other people’s thoughts), you feel a bit better, because you feel like you’re taking an action to address your anxiety. In actuality, you’re easing a symptom, not addressing the underyling cause.

In fact, rumination and doomscrolling can actually make the problem worse. After all, you start out anxious about something that is just in your own head. The more time you spend seeing social media posts and reading articles, the more reality that the problem begins to take on. Suddenly it is everywhere.

Not only that, you base your belief about how widespread something is on how frequently you encounter it. This psychological mechanism made a lot of sense in our evolutionary environment in which you saw things in your daily life that were in your environment, and you lived with a (relatively) small number of other people who could provide information about their experiences. Now that we have access to a world of information—and there are also people with a vested interest in influencing your beliefs—the number of times you encounter a piece of information is not a good proxy for how common it is in the world.

All of which means that you need to break the cycle of rumination and doomscrolling.

The first step in this process is just to recognize what you’re doing. When you find yourself having a cycle of thoughts or turning to your phone or computer to go down the anxiety rabbit hole, stop what you’re doing. Next, you have to give yourself an alternative action. There are several effective ways to decrease anxiety . Here are three concrete steps to control your doomscrolling.

• If you are actively feeling anxious, consider activities that will help you to calm yourself. Mindfulness meditation practices, deep breathing, exercise, or just going out for a walk can all help.
• Engage in some expressive writing. Studies show that writing about emotionally difficult or traumatic situations can be difficult in the moment, but can ultimately ease your anxiety. Writing helps both because it gets the source of your anxiety outside of your head, and also creates a more coherent narrative around your anxiety that can make it easier for you to understand.
• Determine whether any of the things that are making you anxious are things you can do something about. Focus your energies on taking concrete steps to influence things under your control.?

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