What is doomscrolling, and how do you stop doing it?

Summary: Doomscrolling is scrolling through bad news for far longer than you meant to, on a feed built to keep going. Studies link it to lower mood within minutes, higher anxiety and depression scores, and worse sleep, though most of the evidence can't prove cause. The fix isn't quitting the news. It's choosing a read that ends before you pick up the phone.

The scroll rarely starts as a decision. You open the phone to check one thing, and much later you know a little more about several disasters and feel worse about all of them. The word for that is new, the behavior less so, and the research has grown enough that we can say what it does, how large the effects are, and what works against it. We've written shorter posts on what doomscrolling does to you and on the method for stopping. This is both in one place.

What is doomscrolling?

Doomscrolling is spending excessive time scrolling through bad news online, well past the point where it tells you anything new. Merriam-Webster's entry defines the verb as spending excessive time scrolling through "online content (especially news) that makes one feel sad, anxious, angry" and so on.

The research uses the word more narrowly than most people do. A 2022 paper in Technology, Mind, and Behavior, which built the first scale to measure it, describes a habit where "social media users persistently attend to negative information in their newsfeeds about crises, disasters, and tragedies." A long evening reading one newspaper isn't doomscrolling. A long evening on a ranked feed of other people's emergencies is.

A 2021 paper in Journalism Studies, based on 550 written replies from Norway's March 2020 lockdown, put the definition in three parts: Dark and unsettling news, a habit of monitoring it on the phone, and news streams built for the attention economy, together "creating emotional drain through a flow which users find hard to get out of." The first part is the world. The second is you. The third is a design choice someone else made.

Doomscrolling meaning: Where the word came from

The word is a compound of doom and scroll, and it's younger than it feels. A finance reporter spotted it in a social media post from October 2018, per Merriam-Webster's article on the term. It spread in the spring of 2020, when lockdowns put a lot of people at home with a phone and a pandemic to follow. The Macquarie Dictionary's committee chose it as word of the year for 2020, per its announcement. Merriam-Webster added it in September 2023 and dates the first known use to 2020.

How do you know you're doing it rather than just reading? The 2022 scale asks about behavior, and three of its items make a fair test:

• You refresh for bad news. "I constantly refresh my newsfeeds to see if something bad happened."

• You stay up for it. "I stay up late at night trying to find more negative news."

• You feel braced. "I feel tense as if something bad is going to happen soon."

On that scale, scored 1 to 7, the 502 people in the original study averaged 2.10, and the authors called doomscrolling "less prevalent than anticipated, but variable." Fewer people do it than the word's popularity suggests. The ones who do, do a lot of it.

Is doomscrolling bad?

Yes, by every measure the studies have taken, with two honest caveats: The effects are small to moderate, and most of the evidence can't prove cause.

Start with mood, where the evidence is strongest. A pair of randomized experiments published in PLOS ONE in 2021 gave people 2 to 4 minutes of pandemic news, in one study on a live social feed with 299 people and in another on video with 603. Compared with people shown nothing, that short dose lowered positive mood right away. The effect explained about 3% to 6% of the variation in how people felt. People felt less good rather than more bad, and a few minutes was enough to produce it.

A 2022 diary study in Psychological Trauma followed 61 young adults in Vermont for 30 days from April 2020. On days they'd been on social media, depression scores ran about 0.44 of a standard deviation higher, and post-traumatic stress scores about 0.36 higher. Traditional news showed no significant link. That gap between social feeds and traditional news is the strongest hint that the feed, not the news, is the active ingredient.

Anxiety and depression come next, and here the numbers are correlations from one-time surveys. The 2022 scale paper found a correlation of 0.31 with anxiety among its 502 participants in 27 countries. A 2024 study in BMC Psychiatry gave a Chinese version of the scale to 2,885 students and found correlations of 0.35 with depression and 0.37 with anxiety. Those are moderate links, roughly 9% to 14% of the variation shared, and a survey taken once can't tell doomscrolling that lowers mood from low mood that leads to doomscrolling.

Then sleep. In a February 2026 American Academy of Sleep Medicine survey of 2,007 US adults, 38% said looking at news on a phone or tablet before bed made them sleep slightly or significantly worse. Among 18 to 24 year olds it was 46%. A December 2025 study of 663 adults in Türkiye found a small, statistically reliable link to poor sleep quality.

Two 2026 reviews, of 17 studies and 50 studies, found consistent links with anxiety, depression, stress, and reduced well-being, plus distraction and lost productivity. Only the 2021 experiments earn a causal verb, and only for a few minutes of mood. The right summary is that none of the effects is large, and all of them are nightly. A small cost paid every evening for years isn't small.

What to do instead of doomscrolling

The obvious answer is to quit the news, and the evidence on that is more interesting than you'd expect. A 2022 experiment in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications paid some of its 803 US participants to avoid news for a week. Their well-being didn't improve, and they knew no less than the people who kept reading. The authors put it down to how little news people see anyway: Roughly 3% of their online information diet, on average. Quitting removed almost nothing, so it changed almost nothing.

Cutting back looks better than quitting. A 2025 meta-analysis from the University of New England in Australia pooled 10 randomized trials with 1,491 people. Less social media eased depression symptoms, an effect the authors call small, and reducing use showed twice the effect of stopping entirely, though the gap wasn't statistically significant. The urge to check doesn't take a week off. A smaller, fixed dose gives it somewhere to go that ends.

So the useful replacement for doomscrolling isn't nothing. It's a read with a last line:

• One newspaper front page, print or digital, read top to bottom and then closed. It has an edge.

• One morning brief from one source you chose the night before. A feed chooses for you based on what you clicked, and a 2023 study of 22,743 headline tests found each additional negative word raised the click-through rate by 2.3%.

• A single weekly longread on the story you care most about, instead of a trickle of updates on it.

• Anything with pages. A 2006 University of Pennsylvania study on portion size found people treat one unit as the right amount, whatever the unit is. A feed has no unit, so the stop has to come from fatigue, a dead battery, or a mood bad enough to make you look up.

We built informed.now to be that unit for people who want the news itself and not the scroll: One text every weekday morning, a handful of fact-only summaries with a link to the primary source, and then it ends. Any format that ends works the same way.

How to stop doomscrolling

The method we use is the fixed read, laid out in full in our how-to post. Four steps, in order.

1. Set the stop before you start. Decide where you'll stop before you pick up the phone, at a point you can see coming: The last line of one article or the end of one brief. Decide it the night before, while you're calm: "One brief with coffee, then the phone goes in the bag." A 2025 Ulm University study of 72 people found infinite scroll is designed for long sessions, and prompts that interrupt the scroll help at first and then stop working as people get used to them. A decision made beforehand doesn't wear off the same way.

2. Keep the news and shrink the dose. Don't quit. The quitting experiment above shows it doesn't help, and the meta-analysis shows cutting back does. Pick one read a day, the same size every time.

3. Choose the source before you see a headline. Open your chosen source directly rather than arriving at news through a feed. The feed has learned which headlines you can't resist, and they're the negative ones. Our post on curated news vs algorithmic feeds explains the mechanism.

4. Protect the stop in your low moments. The same Ulm study tracked people for seven days and found that when they felt low and were at home, they took longer to stop scrolling after a prompt. If your worst scrolls happen on the couch after a hard day, do your reading somewhere you're usually steady: The train, a lunch bench, or your desk before work. And when you can't name the last thing you read, close it there, mid-scroll. One item on the 2022 scale reads, "I lose track of time when I read bad news on social media." Noticing it is the cue.

For some people, the checking itself is the problem rather than the content. A 2022 Texas Tech study put 16.5% of a national US sample in a severely problematic news consumption group, and the team's 2024 replication put 7.5% there. Both times, that group had worse mental health. If you can't bring the checking down, or it's costing you sleep, talk to a doctor or therapist.

What's left when the scroll ends

In a February 2026 Pew Research Center survey of 3,560 US adults, 52% said they're worn out by the amount of news. Doomscrolling is what happens when people who feel obligated to stay informed meet a format with no bottom. You can keep the obligation and drop the format.

Tonight something bad will have happened somewhere, and the phone will be within reach. A few minutes of it costs some mood, the hour before bed is where the sleep numbers come from, and a read that ends takes the decision out of the moment where you're least equipped to make it. Pick the read. Set the stop. Let the last line do its job.