Doomscrolling is continuing to scroll through bad news past the point where it is telling you anything new. The defining feature is not that the content is negative — it is that the scrolling carries on after it has stopped being informative.
It started as slang and it is now a measured construct, which is a more interesting transition than it sounds. There is a validated scale, real sample sizes, and a reproducible association with distress. There is also a gap at the centre of the evidence that almost every article about it skips.
It has an actual measurement scale
In 2023, Satici and colleagues published three studies in Applied Research in Quality of Life developing and validating a Doomscrolling Scale (PMID 36275044):
- Study I (N = 378) — both a 15-item and a 4-item form confirmed by confirmatory factor analysis, with item response analysis showing strong discriminative power on every item.
- Study II (N = 419) — correlation and network analysis linking doomscrolling to the big five personality traits, social media addiction, and fear of missing out.
- Study III (N = 460) — structural equation modelling relating doomscrolling to psychological distress and to life satisfaction, mental wellbeing and harmony in life.
That matters because it moves the word out of the category of things everyone recognises and nobody can measure. You can now ask whether one person doomscrolls more than another and get an answer that means something.
The gap almost nobody mentions
These are cross-sectional studies. They measure doomscrolling and distress in the same people at the same time and find them associated. They cannot tell you which came first.
Three explanations fit the same data equally well:
| Explanation | Consistent with the evidence? |
|---|---|
| Scrolling worsens how you feel | Yes |
| Feeling bad makes you scroll more | Yes, equally |
| Something else drives both | Yes, equally |
Headlines pick the first one because it is the one that reads as advice. The research does not distinguish it from the other two. “Doomscrolling is associated with distress” is what the evidence supports; “doomscrolling causes distress” is not.
The pandemic shaped the early evidence
A 2022 study in Psychological Trauma by Price and colleagues tracked daily social and traditional media consumption against mental health symptoms during COVID-19, and found a negative association (PMID 35157484).
That is a real result and it comes with an unusual caveat: it studied people under an acute, shared, genuinely frightening stressor, at a time when there was both a great deal of consequential news and a great deal of time to read it. A population in that state may not behave like the same people in ordinary conditions. Worth knowing when the finding gets quoted as a general fact about phones.
Why it is hard to stop
Two things, one structural and one not.
Feeds have no ending. A newspaper runs out. A broadcast finishes. An infinite feed supplies no cue that you are done, so the decision to stop has to come entirely from you, repeatedly, against a stream that never signals completion.
And the association with fear of missing out is measured, not assumed — Study II found it directly (PMID 36275044). That matches what people describe: the feeling that stopping means missing the update that finally makes the thing make sense. The update rarely arrives, and the feed is built so that you can always check once more.
What helps — and why this section is short
We looked for trials of interventions and did not find them. There is good work on what doomscrolling is and what it travels with, and very little testing whether anything specific reduces it.
What follows from the mechanism rather than from evidence: if the structural problem is the absence of a stopping cue, then supplying one from outside — a set time, a fixed number of items, a timer — addresses that half of it. We are flagging that as reasoning, not as a finding. Nothing we read tested it, and an article that presents its own inference as a research result is the thing this site exists not to be.
The one test that costs nothing: if you closed the app right now, would you be missing anything you do not already know? If the answer is no and you keep scrolling, that is the behaviour the word names.
Related
Sources
- Satici SA, Gocet Tekin E, Deniz ME, Satici B. “Doomscrolling Scale: its Association with Personality Traits, Psychological Distress, Social Media Use, and Wellbeing.” Applied Research in Quality of Life 2023;18(2):833-847. PMID 36275044.
- Price M, Legrand AC, Brier ZMF, et al. “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 2022;14(8):1338-1346. PMID 35157484.
Frequently asked
What is doomscrolling?
Doomscrolling is continuing to scroll through negative news or social media content past the point where it is telling you anything new or useful. The defining feature is not that the content is bad — it is that the scrolling continues after it has stopped being informative. It is now a measured construct rather than only a slang term: a 2023 paper in Applied Research in Quality of Life developed and validated a Doomscrolling Scale across three studies with 378, 419 and 460 participants, confirming both a 15-item and a 4-item form by confirmatory factor analysis (PMID 36275044).
Is doomscrolling actually bad for you, or is that just a figure of speech?
There is a real measured association with worse outcomes, and the causal direction is genuinely unresolved. In the scale-validation work, doomscrolling was associated with psychological distress and with lower life satisfaction, mental wellbeing and harmony in life (PMID 36275044). A separate study in Psychological Trauma tracked daily social and traditional media consumption during the COVID-19 pandemic and found a negative association with mental health symptoms (PMID 35157484). What none of this establishes is which way the arrow points. People who are already distressed may scroll more, scrolling may worsen distress, or both may follow from something else. These are correlational designs and they cannot separate those possibilities.
What is the difference between doomscrolling and just reading the news?
Usefulness, and when you stop. Reading the news has a natural endpoint: you learn what happened and you are done. Doomscrolling continues past that endpoint, and the later material is usually reaction, speculation and repetition of what the first few items already told you. A practical test: if you closed the app right now, would you be missing anything you did not already know? If the honest answer is no and you keep scrolling anyway, that is the behaviour the term names.
Why is it so hard to stop?
Part of it is design and part of it is us. Feeds are infinite by construction, so there is no natural stopping cue — no last page, no end of the broadcast. And negative information holds attention more tightly than neutral information, which is a well-established pattern in psychology long predating social media. The measurement work also found doomscrolling associated with fear of missing out and with social media addiction scores (PMID 36275044), which fits the experience people describe: the sense that stopping means missing the update that finally makes it make sense.
Does doomscrolling relate to personality?
The scale-validation study examined that directly and found significant associations with the big five personality traits, alongside social media addiction and fear of missing out, using both correlation and network analysis on 419 participants (PMID 36275044). That means doomscrolling is not evenly distributed — some people are more prone to it than others. It does not mean it is fixed, and the study did not test whether anything changes it.
What actually helps?
The honest answer is that we could not find the trials. There is good measurement work on what doomscrolling IS and what it correlates with, and very little testing whether any specific intervention reduces it or improves outcomes. What follows from the mechanism rather than from evidence: infinite feeds have no stopping cue, so supplying one externally — a set time, a set number of articles, a timer — addresses the structural half of the problem. We are flagging that as reasoning, not as a finding, because nothing we read tested it.
Where does the word come from?
It surfaced in common usage around 2020, during a period when there was an unusual amount of consequential news and an unusual amount of time to read it. That timing shaped the early research — the Psychological Trauma study is explicitly about pandemic media consumption (PMID 35157484) — which is worth knowing when reading it, because a population under an acute shared stressor may not behave like the same people in ordinary conditions.