What doomscrolling does to you, per the research

Summary: Doomscrolling is spending far too long scrolling through bad news online, well past the point where it helps you. Studies link it to lower mood within minutes, higher anxiety and depression scores, and worse sleep, with small to moderate effects. Nearly all of that evidence comes from one-time surveys, which can't show cause.

Doomscrolling is opening your phone to check the news and still being on it long after it stopped telling 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. It dates the first known use to 2020.

The word gets used for any long night on a phone. The research means something narrower: bad news, on a feed built to keep going, for longer than you chose. A finance reporter spotted the word in a social media post from October 2018, per the dictionary's article. In 2020 the Macquarie Dictionary's word of the year committee chose it, per its announcement. Merriam-Webster added it in September 2023.

What does doomscrolling do to your mood?

The strongest evidence is a pair of randomized experiments in PLOS ONE in 2021. In the first, 299 people spent at least two minutes on a live social feed of pandemic news. In the second, 603 watched about four minutes on video. Compared with people shown nothing, 2 to 4 minutes of bad news lowered positive mood right away. The effect was small, about 3% to 6% of the variation in how people felt. In the first study negative mood didn't rise by a significant amount: people felt less good, not more bad. A 2026 scoping review in Mental Health and Digital Technologies found 17 doomscrolling studies and only one experiment among them.

A 2022 diary study in Psychological Trauma followed 61 young adults in Vermont for 30 days from April 2020, collecting 1,117 end-of-day reports. 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. A diary gets closer to cause than a one-time survey, though it can't rule out low mood driving the scrolling.

Does doomscrolling make you anxious?

These are one-time surveys, so each number is a link. A 2022 paper in Technology, Mind, and Behavior that built a doomscrolling scale found a correlation of 0.31 with anxiety among 502 people in 27 countries, about 9% of the variation shared. A 2024 study in BMC Psychiatry gave a Chinese version of the scale to 2,885 students. Correlations came out at 0.35 with depression and 0.37 with anxiety, roughly 12% to 14% shared.

What does doomscrolling do to your sleep, attention, and body?

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%, 8 points higher. A study published in December 2025 in BMC Psychology asked 663 adults in Türkiye about both habits. It found a small, statistically reliable link to poor sleep quality. With fear of missing out and phone-separation anxiety added, the model explained about 14% of the variation in sleep quality.

A 2021 paper in Journalism Studies read 550 written replies from Norway's March 2020 lockdown. It's qualitative: quotes, no sizes. One postgraduate student described following the news "in a constant state of alarm" and planned to cut back "because I find that it affects my concentration." Some reported "asthma attacks or nausea"; others said they felt overwhelmed rather than afraid. A 2026 scoping review of 50 studies in the Journal of Social Media Research lists distraction and reduced productivity as recurring findings.

Who doomscrolls most, and why the feed makes it easy

Fewer people than the word's popularity suggests. On the 2022 scale, scored 1 to 7, those 502 people averaged 2.10, and the authors called it "less prevalent than anticipated, but variable." Men and younger adults scored slightly higher, in the authors' word, and the paper gives no size for the gap. In a 2017 American Psychological Association survey of 3,440 US adults, 56% wanted to stay informed but said following the news stressed them. By February 2026, in a Pew Research Center survey of 3,560 US adults, 24% followed the news only because they felt they should.

The Norwegian paper explains the rest. It defines doomscrolling as three things meeting: 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 is the world. The second is a habit. The third is a design choice. Ranked algorithmic feeds pick the next story by predicted engagement. It's why the word has "scroll" in it. Doomscrolling is the mirror image of the selective news avoiders we've written about: same news, same fatigue, opposite response.

How do you know you're doing it?

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."

If those sound like most of your evenings, the scale is describing you.

What the research can't say yet

Two 2026 reviews, of 17 and 50 studies, found consistent links with anxiety, depression, stress, and reduced well-being. The evidence is "limited by cross-sectional designs, self-report bias and conceptual inconsistency," in the smaller review's words. A survey taken once can't tell doomscrolling that lowers mood from low mood that leads to doomscrolling. So "linked to" is the right verb for most of this, and no single study settles it. Only the 2021 experiments earn a causal verb, and only for a few minutes of mood. The method for stopping is its own post.

Tonight something bad will have happened somewhere, and the phone will be within reach. The research above says a few minutes of it already costs some mood, and the hour before bed is where the sleep numbers come from. None of it is large. All of it is nightly.

informed.now is one text every weekday morning, written to be read in minutes, and it has a last line. Nothing scrolls after it.