Doomscrolling: What It Is, Why It Happens, and How to Stop

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Author: Ukrainian Psychological Hub · Published: September 27, 2026 · Editorial Policy

Doomscrolling is the repeated or persistent consumption of predominantly negative, threatening, or distressing online information, often accompanied by difficulty disengaging even when the person feels worse or no longer learns anything useful. It can happen on social media, news apps, search results, video platforms, messaging channels, and any feed that makes the next alarming item immediately available.

Research on doomscrolling has grown quickly, but the concept is still a research construct and behavioral pattern rather than a psychiatric diagnosis. The most comprehensive evidence available in 2026 is a systematic review and meta-analysis that included 44 unique studies. Doomscrolling was associated with more anxiety, depression, and psychological distress and with lower well-being and life satisfaction, while the authors rated certainty as very low and emphasized that the evidence does not establish causality. Li & Yin, 2026

That distinction is central. Reading a lot of news during a war, disaster, election, outbreak, market shock, or personal crisis is not automatically doomscrolling. Neither is spending many hours online. What matters is the pattern: repeated negative-content seeking, persistence beyond the point of usefulness, difficulty stopping, emotional cost, and the way the behavior interacts with a person's goals, responsibilities, sleep, relationships, and mental state.

Doomscrolling also sits inside a larger digital-life system. It can overlap with digital stress, information overload, fear of missing something important, habit, and social-media use, but those are not interchangeable constructs. The goal of this article is to separate them clearly, explain what current research can and cannot show, and offer practical ways to regain control without pretending that total disconnection is a universal treatment.

Doomscrolling: The Short Answer

Doomscrolling means repeatedly consuming negative online content and continuing to scroll or check even when the information is no longer helping you make a decision, understand a situation, or take useful action. The behavior often feels purposeful at first: you want to know what happened, whether the danger is changing, or whether there is something you need to do. The loop becomes less useful when checking keeps extending without producing proportionate new information.

The original measurement work described doomscrolling as a distinctive media habit centered on persistent attention to negative information in social-media newsfeeds about crises, disasters, and tragedies. Researchers found that it was related to, but distinguishable from, constructs such as online vigilance, problematic social-media use, fear of missing out, passive use, habitual media use, anxiety, and low self-control. Sharma, Lee, & Johnson, 2022

Doomscrolling is a behavioral pattern and research construct.
It is not defined by a universal number of minutes or hours.
It is not an official diagnosis and a questionnaire score is not a diagnosis.
Negative news can be genuinely important; the problem is not simply that the content is negative.
The strongest current evidence shows associations with poorer mental-health and well-being outcomes, while causal evidence remains limited.
Stopping usually works better when you change cues, access, stopping rules, and the function of checking rather than relying only on willpower.

What Exactly Counts as Doomscrolling?

The boundaries of the term matter because everyday language often expands doomscrolling to mean almost any prolonged scrolling. Research definitions are narrower. The 2026 scoping review found that studies commonly conceptualize doomscrolling as habitual, persistent, or compulsive consumption of negative online content and frequently connect it with difficulty disengaging. The review also found substantial variation in definitions and methods, which is one reason the field should not be treated as if it already has a single clinical threshold.

The same review identified 17 empirical studies and concluded that the evidence base is still methodologically young, with cross-sectional designs dominating and intervention research remaining sparse. Sharpe et al., 2026

Four features are especially useful

Negative or threatening information is central. The feed is dominated by bad news, crisis updates, conflict, danger, outrage, loss, catastrophe, or other distressing material.
The behavior is repetitive. A person checks, refreshes, scrolls, opens another thread, watches another clip, or returns soon after leaving.
Stopping becomes difficult. The next item feels as though it might contain something important even after many previous items have added little.
The pattern has a cost. The person may notice more distress, time loss, delayed tasks, disrupted sleep, reduced concentration, or a sense that the behavior is no longer serving the original goal.

Not every feature has to be extreme, and none of them establishes a mental disorder. They describe a continuum of behavior. Someone can have a mild, situational loop during a breaking event and stop when the event stabilizes. Another person may repeat the pattern daily across many topics and experience substantial interference.

Doomscrolling is not the same as screen time

Time is only one exposure variable. A long period online can involve work, study, conversation, entertainment, exercise instruction, navigation, or meaningful social support. A short period can be highly distressing. That is why the English Psychology Hub separates duration from content, context, purpose, control, and impairment in Screen Time vs Problematic Use.

For doomscrolling, the informational and emotional pattern matters more than a raw duration cutoff. Current research does not establish a universal medical limit such as “more than X minutes of bad news is pathological.”

Doomscrolling is not identical to problematic news consumption

Problematic news consumption is a related research construct focused more broadly on maladaptive preoccupation with news and interference in functioning. A two-wave replication found support for the construct's factor structure and an association between a severely problematic profile and poorer mental well-being, while longitudinal findings were more limited than a simple causal story would suggest. McLaughlin, Gotlieb, & Mills, 2025

Doomscrolling can occur within problematic news consumption, but the concepts are not synonyms. Doomscrolling emphasizes repetitive negative-content consumption in digital feeds; problematic news consumption can describe a broader relationship with news.

Why Do People Doomscroll?

There is no single cause. Doomscrolling is better understood as an interaction among the information environment, the person's current goals and vulnerabilities, learned checking habits, uncertainty, emotional state, social context, and interface design. A person may enter the loop for one reason and remain in it for another.

1. Threat information can feel unusually important

When events appear dangerous or consequential, monitoring them can be adaptive. Information can tell you whether to change plans, avoid a location, contact someone, prepare supplies, seek medical care, or simply understand what is happening. The problem arises when the marginal value of another update becomes very small while the urge to keep checking remains high.

Negative information can command attention because it may signal risk. That does not mean the brain has a simple built-in “doomscrolling circuit,” and it does not justify claims about dopamine damage. It means that threatening content can have high perceived relevance, especially under uncertainty.

2. Uncertainty can turn checking into an open-ended search

A person often scrolls because they want closure: What happened? Is it getting worse? Am I safe? Did I miss something? Studies connect doomscrolling with intolerance of uncertainty and anxiety, although the direction of influence is not simple. A 2025 study of 443 young adults found relationships among trait anxiety, intolerance of uncertainty, resilience, and doomscrolling, using structural equation modeling rather than an experiment. Türk Kurtça & Kocatürk, 2025

A two-wave study of 255 Turkish university students affected by the 2023 Kahramanmaraş earthquake also linked earthquake fear, doomscrolling, anxiety, and intolerance of uncertainty over six months. The population and disaster context are specific, so the results should not be generalized to all users, but they support the idea that doomscrolling can become part of an uncertainty-management cycle. Özmen, 2026

The paradox is that more checking does not always produce more certainty. Fast-moving feeds contain partial reports, conflicting interpretations, speculation, repeated footage, and constant updates. The person can therefore continue gathering information while feeling no closer to a stable endpoint.

3. Repetition can become a cue-driven habit

Many scrolling episodes begin with a cue rather than a deliberate decision: a notification, a spare minute, waking up, going to bed, waiting in line, feeling tense, opening a browser, or seeing a headline in a group chat. If opening the feed repeatedly produces novelty or the feeling of being updated, the action can become easier to repeat.

Habit language is useful here because it does not require a diagnosis. A behavior can become automatic, cue-linked, and difficult to interrupt without meeting criteria for an addictive disorder or obsessive-compulsive disorder. Repeated phone checking by itself is not evidence of OCD, and doomscrolling is not an OCD compulsion simply because it feels repetitive.

4. Fear of missing out and online vigilance can keep the loop open

Early doomscrolling research found associations with fear of missing out and online vigilance, and later scale-validation work found links with social-media-use variables and psychological distress. Satici et al., 2023

FOMO is a broader construct with its own mechanisms; it can involve social events, opportunities, status, relationships, or information. When the concern is specifically “What if something important happens while I am offline?”, it can make crisis feeds unusually difficult to leave. See Fear of Missing Out (FOMO): Psychology, Social Media, and Problematic Use for the broader evidence.

5. Feed design can reduce natural stopping points

Digital environments differ in how clearly they signal that an information session is finished. Infinite feeds, autoplay, continuous recommendations, alerts, trending modules, and frictionless refresh can make continuation easier than stopping. These features do not force any individual to doomscroll, and empirical findings about behavior should be separated from assumptions about a company's intentions. The broader incentive and design context is covered in Attention Economy: How Digital Platforms Compete for Your Time and Focus.

A newspaper page ends. A television bulletin ends. A feed can keep generating another item. When the external stopping cue disappears, the user has to supply an internal stopping rule. That makes explicit boundaries more useful than vague intentions such as “I should scroll less.”

6. Crises can temporarily change what feels reasonable

During the COVID-19 pandemic, daily social and traditional media exposure was associated with mental-health symptoms across repeated daily assessments. The study is informative because it followed people over time, but its media-exposure measure is broader than the modern doomscrolling construct and the pandemic was an exceptional context. Price et al., 2022

The same caution applies during war, natural disaster, civil emergency, or rapidly changing local danger. Frequent checking can be practical when information changes what you need to do. The useful question is not “Am I checking a lot?” but “Is this check likely to change an action, improve understanding, or protect someone right now?”

What Does Research Show About Doomscrolling and Mental Health?

The clearest answer is that doomscrolling is consistently associated with poorer mental-health and well-being outcomes across the current literature, while confidence about causality is much weaker. This is exactly the kind of topic where correlation is easy to overstate: distressed people may doomscroll more, doomscrolling may intensify distress, both may be influenced by a third factor, and all three processes can operate together.

The 2026 meta-analysis

Li and Yin's 2026 systematic review and meta-analysis synthesized 44 unique studies. Twenty-one studies, representing 23 independent analytic samples, contributed to the five primary meta-analyses. Doomscrolling was associated with anxiety at r = 0.35, depression at r = 0.35, psychological distress at r = 0.51, lower psychological well-being at r = −0.29, and lower life satisfaction at r = −0.25. Li & Yin, 2026

Those correlations are meaningful signals, but they are not estimates of how much doomscrolling causes each outcome. Heterogeneity was high in every domain, geographic concentration limited generalizability, and the authors rated certainty as very low for all five outcomes. The review explicitly concluded that the evidence does not establish causality.

This also means that headlines such as “doomscrolling causes depression” or “doomscrolling causes anxiety disorders” go beyond the evidence. Depression and anxiety are clinical conditions with multiple causes and diagnostic requirements. A digital behavior can be associated with symptoms or distress without being their sole or primary cause.

Short-term experiments show that content can affect mood

Some experimental evidence can support narrower causal claims. In two preregistered studies during the COVID-19 pandemic, Buchanan and colleagues exposed participants to only a few minutes of pandemic-related negative information on Twitter or YouTube. Negative COVID-19 content reduced immediate positive affect in both studies and optimism in one, while kindness-focused content did not produce the same pattern. Buchanan et al., 2021

That experiment shows that brief exposure to negative crisis content can change immediate emotional outcomes under specific conditions. It does not prove that ordinary doomscrolling causes a psychiatric disorder, that all negative news has the same effect, or that replacing every negative story with positive content is a treatment.

Cross-cultural studies broaden the picture but remain mostly observational

A 2024 study of university students in Iran and the United States found that doomscrolling was associated with existential anxiety in both samples. Other associations differed across the two countries, illustrating why cultural context matters. Shabahang et al., 2024

The growing international literature is useful, but it remains uneven in age, geography, platform, measurement, and study design. Much of it relies on self-report questionnaires and cross-sectional data. Better causal inference will require more experiments, ecological momentary assessment, behavioral measures, preregistered longitudinal studies, and research outside the populations that currently dominate the evidence base.

Does Doomscrolling Damage the Brain or Destroy Your Attention Span?

Current evidence does not justify claims that doomscrolling permanently “fries,” “rewires,” or damages the brain, nor that it consumes a fixed neurological resource called an “attention span.” Those phrases collapse several different cognitive processes into one dramatic story.

Attention includes sustained attention, selective attention, executive control, orienting, working-memory demands, task switching, and resistance to distraction. A person who has been emotionally activated by alarming news may find it harder to settle into another task, and repeated checking can fragment a work session. That is different from demonstrating permanent impairment in an underlying cognitive capacity.

Doomscrolling can also coincide with cognitive load. The person is processing a stream of new claims, images, updates, opinions, and uncertainties while deciding what is credible and relevant. If the volume becomes difficult to manage, the more precise concept may be information overload rather than a damaged attention span.

For that broader mechanism, see Information Overload: Why Too Much Information Becomes Mentally Exhausting. The key distinction is between a temporary state of overload or distraction and a claim about lasting neurological injury. Current doomscrolling research supports the former far more readily than the latter.

Is Doomscrolling an Addiction or Mental Disorder?

Doomscrolling is not an official standalone clinical diagnosis. Researchers sometimes use words such as compulsive, excessive, or problematic to describe the behavior, but those words do not create a DSM or ICD diagnosis. A high score on a Doomscrolling Scale is a research measurement result, not a medical diagnosis.

WHO's current ICD-11 framework for disorders due to addictive behaviors identifies gambling disorder and gaming disorder as named categories. Doomscrolling is not listed as a named disorder in that section. World Health Organization: Addictive behaviour

The practical distinction is functional rather than semantic. A person can have a real problem with doomscrolling without needing a diagnostic label. If the pattern repeatedly interferes with work, study, sleep, relationships, caregiving, or emotional stability, it deserves attention because of the impairment it creates.

This is also why total time on a phone cannot diagnose addiction. The Hub's Social Media and Mental Health and Screen Time vs Problematic Use articles distinguish ordinary use, high-frequency use, problematic use, distress, and impairment. The same distinction applies here.

How to Tell Whether Doomscrolling Is Becoming a Problem

Instead of asking whether your behavior looks excessive compared with someone else's, ask whether it is doing the job you intended and what it costs. A useful self-check focuses on control, function, consequences, and flexibility.

You repeatedly open negative news without making a conscious decision to do so.
You continue after noticing that new items are mostly repetitions, speculation, or incremental updates.
You intend to check for a few minutes and regularly lose much more time.
You feel more agitated, helpless, angry, frightened, or mentally saturated as the session continues.
You postpone work, meals, exercise, sleep, conversations, or other planned activities because of the feed.
You close the app and reopen it almost immediately because uncertainty feels intolerable.
You need several platforms to feel sufficiently updated even when they are covering the same event.
You use scrolling to manage an emotion, but the emotion is no better afterward.
You feel unable to choose when to engage and when to disengage.
The pattern persists across weeks or months rather than only during a short-lived breaking event.

None of these signs is a diagnosis. They are practical indicators that the behavior may be less voluntary, less useful, or more impairing than you want it to be.

How to Stop Doomscrolling

There is currently no universally established clinical treatment protocol specifically for doomscrolling. The 2026 scoping review found intervention evidence to be sparse. Sharpe et al., 2026 The most defensible practical approach is therefore to target the mechanisms that keep the loop going: cues, uncertainty, frictionless access, lack of stopping points, emotional regulation, and the absence of a clear information goal.

You do not have to quit the internet or stop following important events. The aim is to convert open-ended monitoring into intentional information use.

1. Define the information job before you open the feed

Ask one concrete question: What am I trying to find out? Examples include “Has the evacuation order changed?”, “What time is the announcement?”, “Did the agency update the guidance?”, or “What happened in the last six hours?” A specific question gives the session an endpoint. “See what's happening” does not.

Once the question is answered, the information job is complete. You can choose to read more, but the continuation is now a choice rather than an undefined requirement.

2. Replace continuous monitoring with scheduled checks

Choose check times that match the actual speed and importance of the situation. A fast-moving local emergency may justify frequent checks; an ongoing national story may not. Scheduling separates the need to stay informed from the impulse to refresh whenever uncertainty appears.

A simple rule might be: check two trusted sources at 9:00 a.m., 1:00 p.m., and 6:00 p.m. The exact schedule is less important than having one. A plan creates a future point at which you know you will update yourself, which can make “not now” easier.

3. Go directly to sources instead of entering an endless feed

If your goal is information, open the source that is most likely to contain it: an emergency agency, local authority, established news organization, official weather service, school, employer, or other relevant primary source. Search for the answer and leave.

A personalized social feed mixes the information you wanted with commentary, emotional reactions, unrelated crises, recommended posts, conflict, advertisements, and new topics. Direct navigation narrows the information environment and reduces opportunities for the session to mutate into open-ended scrolling.

4. Create a visible stopping cue

Feeds often lack natural endings, so create one. Use a timer, a fixed number of articles, a single newsletter, one podcast episode, or a rule such as “two sources, then stop.” The rule should be observable. “Stop when I have had enough” is harder to execute because the feeling of enough may never arrive during an uncertain event.

Stopping cues work best when chosen before the scroll begins. A rule negotiated while you are already activated by alarming content has to compete with the immediate urge for one more update.

5. Reduce cues that start the loop

If notifications, widgets, browser tabs, lock-screen headlines, or app placement repeatedly trigger checking, change the environment. Turn off nonessential breaking-news alerts, remove news widgets, move high-trigger apps off the first screen, log out, close persistent tabs, or use a browser instead of an app.

These changes add a small amount of friction. Friction is useful when the problem is automaticity: it inserts a moment in which an action can become a decision again.

6. Separate urgent alerts from general news

Not all notifications have the same value. Weather warnings, civil-defense alerts, school closures, security notices, or messages from family can be time-sensitive. General headlines are usually less urgent. Preserve the channels that protect safety and mute the channels that mainly reproduce the same story in slightly different forms.

This avoids an all-or-nothing digital detox. The objective is not to become uninformed; it is to let truly actionable information interrupt you while routine updates wait for a chosen time.

7. Replace the behavior, not only the app

If doomscrolling fills boredom, loneliness, anxiety, transition time, or avoidance, removing the feed leaves the original function untouched. Decide what will occupy the same moment: walk for five minutes, make tea, send a message to one person, stretch, read a saved long-form article, do one small task, or listen to something that has an endpoint.

The replacement should be easy enough to start when the cue appears. A plan that requires extraordinary motivation will lose to a feed that opens with one tap.

8. Use a one-sentence interruption

When you notice the loop, say what is happening in concrete terms: “I am looking for certainty, but this feed is giving me more updates rather than more certainty.” Or: “I already know the actionable facts; I am now repeating the check.” The sentence is not a treatment. It is a way to restore the difference between the original goal and the current behavior.

Avoid arguing with yourself about whether you are “addicted.” Diagnostic self-labeling can become another distraction from the practical question: What do I want to do next?

9. Protect times when the cost is predictably high

If doomscrolling regularly displaces sleep, keep the phone or news feed out of the bedtime routine and move the last scheduled news check earlier. Evening device use and sleep involve multiple mechanisms, including timing, arousal, displacement, content, and light exposure; the relationship cannot be reduced to a single screen-time number. See Screen Time and Sleep for the digital-use × sleep evidence.

The same principle applies to focused work, meals, caregiving, exercise, driving, and conversations. Protecting a specific context is often easier than trying to become globally “more disciplined” with technology.

10. Curate for informational quality, not emotional comfort alone

The Buchanan experiment found that brief negative crisis content reduced immediate positive affect, while kindness-focused content did not produce the same pattern. Buchanan et al., 2021 That does not mean you should replace serious news with forced positivity. It does suggest that a feed's content mix matters.

Favor sources that distinguish confirmed facts from speculation, summarize rather than endlessly update, correct errors, provide context, and tell you what changed since the last report. Information architecture can reduce repetition without asking you to ignore reality.

11. Measure whether your strategy actually works

For a week, record only a few variables: when you started, why you opened the feed, when you stopped, whether you learned something actionable, and how you felt afterward. This can reveal whether the main driver is morning habit, bedtime anxiety, boredom, a particular platform, a specific topic, or notifications.

The point is not self-surveillance. It is to replace a vague judgment such as “I doomscroll too much” with a pattern you can change.

How to Stay Informed Without Doomscrolling

People often resist reducing doomscrolling because the alternative sounds like ignorance. A better model is high-quality, bounded information use. You can be well informed without being continuously exposed.

Choose a small number of reliable sources with different roles, such as one primary official source and one strong news organization.
Prefer summaries and scheduled briefings over live feeds when the event does not require minute-by-minute action.
Ask what changed since your last check instead of rereading the entire story.
Distinguish confirmed information from analysis, prediction, commentary, and social reaction.
Save long-form explanations for a planned reading window rather than mixing them into constant alerts.
When a story is personally relevant, identify the action threshold in advance: what new fact would actually make you change a decision?

This approach changes the objective from “consume enough information to stop feeling uncertain” to “collect enough reliable information to make the next decision.” The second goal has an endpoint.

Doomscrolling, Anxiety, Depression, Sleep, and ADHD: Important Boundaries

Doomscrolling research touches several clinical topics, but the relationships need precise language.

Anxiety: doomscrolling is associated with anxiety symptoms and distress in meta-analytic evidence. That does not mean doomscrolling automatically causes an anxiety disorder. Anxiety can also increase monitoring and negative-news seeking. Anxiety-specific doomscrolling questions require attention to this bidirectionality.

Depression: the 2026 meta-analysis found a positive association between doomscrolling and depressive symptoms, with very low certainty and high heterogeneity. A scrolling pattern cannot diagnose depression, and current evidence does not support treating doomscrolling as a single sufficient cause.

Sleep: doomscrolling can occur at night and may delay bedtime or maintain arousal, but sleep-disorder diagnosis and treatment are separate clinical questions. For the broader digital-behavior intersection, see Screen Time and Sleep.

ADHD: current doomscrolling evidence does not establish that negative-news scrolling causes ADHD. ADHD is a neurodevelopmental diagnosis. A person with ADHD may experience particular difficulties with task switching, reward, time awareness, or stopping, but those possibilities should not be reversed into a claim that scrolling creates the disorder.

OCD: repeated checking of news or a phone is not automatically an OCD compulsion. OCD involves specific obsessions, compulsions, distress, impairment, and diagnostic assessment. The surface fact that both behaviors can involve repetition is not enough to equate them.

These boundaries protect both sides of the problem: ordinary digital behavior should not be medicalized, and genuine clinical symptoms should not be reduced to a phone habit.

What Research Still Does Not Know

The current evidence base is much stronger at showing correlation than at explaining direction, dose, mechanisms, or long-term outcomes. The 2026 meta-analysis and scoping review both identify major limitations. Li & Yin, 2026 Sharpe et al., 2026

There is no universally accepted behavioral cutoff that separates normal negative-news use from doomscrolling.
The field uses multiple scales and operational definitions, and results are not perfectly interchangeable.
Many studies are cross-sectional and cannot determine whether doomscrolling precedes distress, follows it, or both.
Samples are geographically concentrated, and several outcome estimates rely heavily on studies from Türkiye.
Self-report measures cannot perfectly reconstruct what people actually viewed, for how long, or with what emotional intensity.
Platform design changes quickly, so evidence from one feed architecture may not generalize to another.
Doomscrolling can involve news, social media, video, messaging, and search; these exposure contexts may have different effects.
Intervention research is still too limited to name one best treatment or promise a specific improvement in anxiety, depression, sleep, or attention.

These gaps are not reasons to dismiss the phenomenon. They are reasons to describe it at the level the evidence supports.

When Professional Support May Be Useful

Consider professional support when doomscrolling is part of a broader pattern of persistent anxiety, depression, trauma-related symptoms, panic, severe sleep disruption, or functional impairment; when you repeatedly cannot carry out work, study, caregiving, or relationship responsibilities because of checking; or when attempts to change the pattern repeatedly fail and the distress remains high.

A clinician can assess the larger context rather than diagnosing from screen time or a self-test. The same scrolling behavior can serve different functions in different people, so treatment should be based on the underlying clinical picture when one is present.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does doomscrolling mean?

Doomscrolling means repeatedly consuming predominantly negative or threatening online information and continuing even when it becomes difficult to disengage or the next update adds little value. It is most often discussed in relation to social-media and news feeds but can occur across digital platforms.

Why is doomscrolling so hard to stop?

It can combine several forces at once: important or threatening information, uncertainty, fear of missing an update, cue-driven habit, emotional arousal, and feeds with weak stopping cues. The exact mix differs by person and situation.

Is doomscrolling a mental illness?

No. Doomscrolling is a behavioral pattern and research construct, not a standalone psychiatric diagnosis. Research scales can measure tendencies or severity within a study, but they do not diagnose a disorder.

Is doomscrolling an addiction?

The term “doomscrolling addiction” may appear informally, but current evidence does not establish doomscrolling as a named standalone addictive disorder. Difficulty stopping can be real without converting the behavior into a formal diagnosis.

Does doomscrolling cause anxiety?

Doomscrolling is associated with anxiety, and a 2026 meta-analysis estimated a pooled correlation of r = 0.35. The certainty of evidence was rated very low and the available literature does not establish a simple one-way causal effect. Li & Yin, 2026

Does doomscrolling cause depression?

Doomscrolling is also associated with depressive symptoms, with a pooled correlation of r = 0.35 in the 2026 meta-analysis. That association does not prove that doomscrolling causes depressive disorders. Li & Yin, 2026

Does doomscrolling damage attention span?

Research does not support the claim that doomscrolling permanently destroys a single neurological resource called attention span. Negative content, emotional arousal, information overload, interruptions, and repeated checking can make concentration more difficult in the moment, but those are more specific claims than permanent brain damage.

Is doomscrolling caused by dopamine?

There is no adequate evidence basis for reducing doomscrolling to “dopamine addiction.” Dopamine participates in many normal learning, motivation, and reward processes. Doomscrolling research currently emphasizes behavioral, emotional, cognitive, informational, social, and interface factors rather than a single neurotransmitter explanation.

How do I stop doomscrolling without ignoring the news?

Use bounded information sessions: decide what question you need answered, choose one or two reliable sources, schedule check times, create a stopping rule, preserve truly urgent alerts, and leave the feed when the information job is complete. This keeps access to important information while reducing open-ended monitoring.

Should I do a digital detox?

A temporary break can be useful for some people, but digital detox is not a universal treatment and it is not necessary for everyone. For doomscrolling, targeted changes to news access, cues, timing, and stopping rules are often more directly connected to the behavior than abandoning all digital technology.

References

Buchanan, K., Aknin, L. B., Lotun, S., & Sandstrom, G. M. (2021). Brief exposure to social media during the COVID-19 pandemic: Doom-scrolling has negative emotional consequences, but kindness-scrolling does not. PLOS ONE, 16(10), e0257728. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0257728

Li, Q., & Yin, X. (2026). Doomscrolling, mental health, and psychological well-being in adolescents and adults: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Frontiers in Psychology, 17, 1893800. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1893800

McLaughlin, B., Gotlieb, M. R., & Mills, D. J. (2025). Problematic news consumption and its relationship to mental and physical health: A replication study. Health Communication, 40(10), 2016–2024. https://doi.org/10.1080/10410236.2024.2434955

Özmen, M. (2026). Earthquake fear, doomscrolling, anxiety and intolerance of uncertainty: A longitudinal serial mediation study. Journal of Health Psychology, 31(3), 1278–1290. https://doi.org/10.1177/13591053251387438

Price, M., Legrand, A. C., Brier, Z. M. F., van Stolk-Cooke, K., Peck, K., Dodds, P. S., Danforth, C. M., & Adams, Z. W. (2022). Doomscrolling during COVID-19: The negative association between daily social and traditional media consumption and mental health symptoms during the COVID-19 pandemic. Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy, 14(8), 1338–1346. https://doi.org/10.1037/tra0001202

Satici, S. A., Gocet Tekin, E., Deniz, M. E., & Satici, B. (2023). Doomscrolling Scale: Its association with personality traits, psychological distress, social media use, and wellbeing. Applied Research in Quality of Life, 18, 833–847. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11482-022-10110-7

Shabahang, R., Hwang, H., Thomas, E. F., Aruguete, M. S., McCutcheon, L. E., Orosz, G., Hossein Khanzadeh, A. A., Mokhtari Chirani, B., & Zsila, Á. (2024). Doomscrolling evokes existential anxiety and fosters pessimism about human nature? Evidence from Iran and the United States. Computers in Human Behavior Reports, 15, 100438. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chbr.2024.100438

Sharma, B., Lee, S. S., & Johnson, B. K. (2022). The dark at the end of the tunnel: Doomscrolling on social media newsfeeds. Technology, Mind, and Behavior, 3(1), 144–156. https://doi.org/10.1037/tmb0000059

Sharpe, A. T. R., Tyndall, I., Poulus, D. R., Obine, E. A. C., & Sharpe, B. T. (2026). The influence of doomscrolling on mental health: A scoping review. Mental Health and Digital Technologies, 3(3), 290–342. https://doi.org/10.1108/MHDT-10-2025-0068

Türk Kurtça, T., & Kocatürk, M. (2025). Beyond the Scroll: Exploring how intolerance of uncertainty and psychological resilience explain the association between trait anxiety and doomscrolling. Personality and Individual Differences, 233, 112919. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2024.112919

World Health Organization. (n.d.). Addictive behaviour. https://www.who.int/health-topics/addictive-behaviour

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