Is doomscrolling bad for you? What the research actually says

The short answer: yes, doomscrolling is probably bad for you, but less certainly than the headlines say. Studies consistently link it to lower mood, more stress and more anxiety, and one experiment shows a mood dip after just a few minutes. What the research mostly cannot show yet is whether doomscrolling causes long-term harm or whether people who already feel low simply scroll more.

Below is what the main studies actually found, how strong each one is, and what that means for your evening with your phone.

What counts as doomscrolling?

Doomscrolling is the habit of scrolling through bad news, usually on social media, long after it stops being useful. It is different from reading the news. You open the app to check one thing and look up twenty minutes later, feeling worse and not much better informed.

We covered why it happens in our post on the psychology of doomscrolling. This post is about the next question: what it does to you.

What does the research say overall?

The best single summary is a 2026 scoping review by Sharpe and colleagues in the journal Mental Health and Digital Technologies. They gathered seventeen studies on doomscrolling and mental health. Their findings, in brief:

• Across the studies, doomscrolling was consistently linked with anxiety, depression, stress and reduced resilience.
• Researchers often described it as a habitual, compulsive behaviour, reinforced by infinite scroll and algorithmic feeds.
• The likely mechanisms they pointed to were rumination, emotional exhaustion and difficulty tolerating uncertainty.

The review is just as clear about the weaknesses. Most studies were cross-sectional, meaning they measured people once. They relied on self-report, and they did not always define doomscrolling the same way. The authors call for longer studies and proper experiments before anyone claims cause and effect.

So the honest headline is: a consistent link, not yet a proven cause.

Can a few minutes of bad news really change your mood?

This is where the evidence is strongest, because it comes from an experiment rather than a survey.

In a 2021 study in PLOS ONE, Kathryn Buchanan and colleagues randomly assigned people to one of three groups. One group scrolled COVID news. One saw COVID stories about acts of kindness. One saw nothing.

• In the first study, 299 people scrolled a live Twitter feed for at least two minutes.
• In the second, 603 people watched a YouTube creator react to the news for about four minutes.

The result: just 2 to 4 minutes of COVID news led to an immediate drop in positive mood compared with the control group. In the video study, optimism dropped too. The kindness stories did not cause the same dip, and in the video study, people who watched them reported less negative mood than the control group.

There are limits. The participants were mostly young, white and female, the effects were measured straight away and not days later, and the live Twitter feeds were not identical for everyone. But because people were randomly assigned, this is about as close as the field gets to showing that bad news on a feed causes a short-term mood drop.

Is doomscrolling linked to anxiety and depression?

Yes, especially for people who are already vulnerable.

A study by Matthew Price and colleagues, published in 2022 in Psychological Trauma, tracked people every day for 30 days early in the pandemic, giving 1,117 daily observations. On days when people used more pandemic social media, they reported more symptoms of depression and post-traumatic stress.

Two details make this study more useful than most:

• The link was stronger for people with more severe childhood maltreatment in their past. Doomscrolling may hit hardest those who are already carrying something.
• The same pattern was not found for traditional media like TV and newspapers. It was specific to social media.

The researchers also found that people with worse mental health at the start used more social media during the study. That is the chicken and egg problem in one line: low mood may drive scrolling as well as the other way round.

Can it make you feel worse about the world?

A 2024 study led by Reza Shabahang at Flinders University surveyed about 800 university students: 620 in Iran and 180 in the United States. It was published in Computers in Human Behavior Reports.

In both countries, doomscrolling was linked to higher existential anxiety, meaning worry about life, death and meaning. In the Iranian sample it also predicted misanthropy, a general dislike of other people. Shabahang has described negative news on social media as a source of vicarious trauma, where you are affected by events you did not live through.

This was a one-off survey of students, so it shows an association. But it matches something many people notice: after an evening of scrolling, the world can feel darker and people can seem worse than they really are.

Does it affect your physical health?

There is some evidence, though it is thinner.

In 2022, Bryan McLaughlin, Melissa Gotlieb and Devin Mills at Texas Tech University published a study in Health Communication on what they call problematic news consumption. They surveyed 1,100 US adults. According to Texas Tech, nearly half fell into the moderately or severely problematic groups, and about one in six were severe: their thoughts were dominated by news, and it interfered with daily life.

As UPI reported, 61% of the severe group said they felt physically unwell "quite a bit" or "very much", compared with 6% of everyone else.

That gap is striking, but it is one correlational survey. It does not show that news caused the symptoms. People who are unwell may also spend more time scrolling.

Can watching bad news be worse than being there?

One older study suggests heavy exposure can be surprisingly powerful. After the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings, Alison Holman, Dana Rose Garfin and Roxane Cohen Silver surveyed 4,675 American adults for a paper in PNAS. As summarised by Journalist's Resource, repeated media exposure to the bombings was associated with higher acute stress than direct exposure, and people who took in six or more hours of coverage a day in the first week were among the most affected. Mother Jones reported that heavy viewers were nine times as likely to show high acute stress as people with neither direct nor heavy media exposure.

This was mostly TV, and it was before short video feeds took over. But the lesson carries: hours of repeated coverage of a frightening event can keep the stress alive long after the facts stop changing.

How strong is the evidence, study by study?

So should you stop reading the news?

Probably not, and the researchers themselves say so. "We don't want to tell people to turn off the news," Melissa Gotlieb told Texas Tech. Following what is happening in the world matters.

Many people are stepping back anyway. The Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2025 found that 40% of people across its markets sometimes or often avoid the news, up from 29% in 2017. Common reasons include feeling powerless and feeling overwhelmed.

Avoiding everything is not the only alternative to doomscrolling. The research points to a middle path:

• Keep sessions short and bounded. The harm in the studies grows with heavy, repeated exposure.
• Balance the diet. The kindness stories in the PLOS ONE study did not lower mood. Not everything you read has to be bad news.
• Prefer formats that end. A feed that never stops makes "just one more" easy. Something with a clear finish line does not.
• Watch for warning signs. If scrolling crowds out sleep, work or people, that is the pattern the Texas Tech team linked to poor health.

Our list of alternatives to doomscrolling has seven practical swaps to try.

Disclosure: we make Qrio, a free Android app of short videos on business, startups and the world, built to end instead of scrolling forever.

If the low mood, anxiety or poor sleep stays for weeks, the phone may be a symptom rather than the cause. A doctor or counsellor will help more than any screen time setting.

Sources

• Sharpe, Tyndall, Poulus, Obine and Sharpe, "The influence of doomscrolling on mental health: a scoping review", Mental Health and Digital Technologies (2026)
• Buchanan, Aknin, Lotun and Sandstrom, "Brief exposure to social media during the COVID-19 pandemic: Doom-scrolling has negative emotional consequences, but kindness-scrolling does not", PLOS ONE (2021)
• Price et al., "Doomscrolling during COVID-19", Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy (2022)
• Shabahang et al., "Doomscrolling evokes existential anxiety and fosters pessimism about human nature?", Computers in Human Behavior Reports (2024), and the Flinders University summary
• McLaughlin, Gotlieb and Mills, "Caught in a Dangerous World: Problematic News Consumption and Its Relationship to Mental and Physical Ill-Being", Health Communication (2022), via Texas Tech University and UPI
• Holman, Garfin and Silver, "Media's role in broadcasting acute stress following the Boston Marathon bombings", PNAS (2014), via Journalist's Resource and Mother Jones
• Reuters Institute, Digital News Report 2025 executive summary