The idea of doomscrolling first arose in 2018 on Twitter, where it described the obsessive consumption of posts on social media. At that time, the term wasn’t as familiar as it is today, but during the pandemic in 2020, this concept quickly became a well known concept.
Let’s be real. During the pandemic, everyone was on their phones. Whether it was Instagram or Tiktok, we were all consuming things at a dangerously compulsive rate. There wasn’t much to do, and because everyone was locked inside and looking for new and different hobbies, many people found inspiration on their phone. Take the Dalgona Coffee and Cloud Cake as two prime examples. These were staple foods during the pandemic, providing amateur bakers with a boost of creativity. The inspiration for that creative came from the phone.
While many consume digital media at an alarming rate on a consistent basis, during the pandemic it can be argued that many people just wanted to find things to do or make, exacerbating the digital scrolling times. The bottom line….everyone was doomscrolling. According to The Pew Research Center, the vast majority of adults (90%) say the internet has been, at minimum, important to them personally during the pandemic. Unfortunately our society hasn’t recovered from its peak pandemic media consumption. In fact, it may be getting worse. According to Talker Research, since 2024, a study of 2,000 Americans revealed that 36 days of our year are lost to scrolling, streaming, and bingeing. And statistics get even worse with our younger generation, as many Gen Z have revealed that they believe they’ve lost 5 days per month. While multiple studies demonstrate evidence that social media consumption creates a detrimental impact on mental health, there are further negative implications of this rampant social media use. First and foremost is desensitization. With the influx of negative news around every corner, anyone is susceptible to becoming desensitized to traumatic events. In psychology, this is what we call desensitization.
Ms. Evans, Psychology Teacher explains the science of desensitization explaining how an individual may actually lose fear or emotional responses after being exposed to stimuli for an extended period of time. This notion is almost scary, because in the process of consuming negative content, our brains wire us to consume it more, and over time, seeing catastrophic events trigger nothing beyond indifference. Our dopamine levels are activated, so that whenever we see emotionally charged content, we think “What’s next?” Furthermore, the amygdala is triggered to have a stress response and works with storing the violent media in our brains (hence, why we seem to remember violent media more).
Research suggests doomscrolling and desensitization are correlated .and there appears to be limited options for combating the impacts of such. It is inevitable that if we become attuned to constantly searching our phones for a new idea, for fulfillment, or out of boredom, we will ALWAYS find negative content, even if we do not think too much of it. This leads us to the real solution….Put down your phone! Using your phone less is the cure to phone addiction and more so the process of restoring our brains back to a more balanced state. When it comes to doomscrolling, there are no magic fixes from psychologists or scientists. The first step is simply just reducing that screen time and learning to experience life, rather than see it through a screen.