Your phone is feeding you a constant diet of dread.
The act of “doomscrolling”—the compulsive need to scroll through an endless feed of negative and alarming news—has become a defining feature of modern life. While it can feel like a responsible way to stay informed about a chaotic world, this habit is having a devastating effect on our collective mental health. It is a direct and powerful engine for the anxiety that has come to characterize our era.
This is not just about reading the news; it’s about how the modern digital environment is designed to keep us hooked on fear.
1. It keeps your body’s threat response system permanently activated.
Your brain doesn’t know the difference between a real-life threat and one you are reading about on your phone. Every alarming headline about a new crisis, a political conflict, or a natural disaster triggers your body’s ancient fight-or-flight response, releasing stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline. This is a system designed for short-term survival, not for constant, low-grade activation.
Doomscrolling effectively keeps this alarm system switched on for hours a day. This state of chronic physiological stress is a primary driver of generalized anxiety, disrupting your sleep, digestion, and overall sense of well-being.
2. The algorithm is literally designed to feed you outrage.
Social media and news platforms are businesses, and their business model is based on engagement. They have discovered that nothing generates more engagement—more clicks, comments, and shares—than content that makes you angry, scared, or outraged. The algorithm learns this and starts to feed you a carefully curated diet of the most alarming and emotionally charged content it can find.
Your feed is not an objective reflection of reality; it is a for-profit machine that has learned that your fear is its most valuable product. It creates a vicious cycle, where the more you scroll, the more negative the content becomes.
3. It creates a catastrophically distorted view of the world.
The news has always had a “if it bleeds, it leads” bias, but social media has amplified this a thousand times over. Your feed is a highly concentrated and distorted version of reality, a highlight reel of the worst-case scenarios happening all over the world at any given moment. It completely omits the vast, silent majority of life that is normal, positive, or neutral.
This constant exposure to the worst of humanity and the planet can lead you to believe that the world is a much more dangerous, hateful, and hopeless place than it actually is. This cognitive distortion is a classic ingredient for a serious anxiety disorder.
4. It fosters a profound sense of learned helplessness.
Doomscrolling bombards you with a relentless stream of massive, complex, and seemingly intractable problems. You are reading about global pandemics, geopolitical conflicts, and the climate crisis, all before you’ve had your morning coffee. As an individual, you feel completely powerless to do anything about these enormous issues.
This can lead to a state of “learned helplessness,” where you begin to feel that your own actions are pointless and that the world is spiraling out of control without your consent. This feeling of having no agency over your own life or the state of the world is a direct pathway to anxiety and depression.
5. It robs you of your sleep.
The act of doomscrolling is particularly damaging at night. The blue light emitted from your phone’s screen is known to suppress the production of melatonin, the hormone that helps you sleep. On top of that, you are flooding your brain with anxiety-inducing and stimulating content right at the moment when it is supposed to be winding down.
This is a perfect recipe for insomnia and poor-quality sleep. You lie in bed with your heart racing, thinking about the day’s bad news. This lack of restorative sleep is a massive contributor to anxiety, creating a vicious cycle where anxiety disrupts sleep and a lack of sleep worsens anxiety.
6. It replaces real-world action with passive consumption.
The feeling of being “informed” that comes from doomscrolling can often be an illusion of engagement. You can spend hours reading about a problem, becoming an expert on all its dire facets, without ever taking a single action to help solve it. It allows you to feel like you are participating in the issue, when in reality, you are just passively consuming content about it.
This can become a substitute for real-world engagement, like volunteering in your local community or taking other small, concrete actions that can actually create change and alleviate feelings of helplessness. It keeps you stuck in a loop of anxiety rather than action.
7. It crowds out the positive and the personal.
Your time and attention are finite resources. Every minute you spend scrolling through negative news is a minute you are not spending on something that could bring you joy, connection, or peace. It crowds out the mental space for positive information, for engaging with a hobby, or for having a meaningful conversation with a loved one.
The negativity literally consumes your attention, leaving you with a skewed and unbalanced mental diet. This can make it much harder to notice and appreciate the good things in your own life, as your brain has been trained to be on constant lookout for the next threat.