Why we doomscroll: the psychology of why you cannot stop

The short answer: you cannot stop doomscrolling because several normal parts of your mind are working against you at once. Bad news grabs attention more than good news, the feed never gives you a place to stop, the odd great post keeps you checking, and after enough repeats the whole thing runs on autopilot. None of this means you are weak. It means the habit is well built, and once you can see how it works, it gets easier to change.

Below are the forces behind it, what the research says about each one, and where the evidence is thinner than the headlines suggest.

What is actually happening when you doomscroll?

Doomscrolling is the habit of scrolling through bad news, often on social media, long after it stops being useful. Researchers at the University of Florida built the first survey scale to measure it in 2022, published in the American Psychological Association journal Technology, Mind, and Behavior. They found it is a real and distinct behaviour, not just a trendy name for staying informed.

One of the authors, Benjamin Johnson, summed up the cause neatly. He said it comes from living through a crisis while holding a smartphone with a newsfeed that never ends. "It just keeps going. So, we keep scrolling," he told Futurity.

That one line contains most of the psychology. Let's take it apart.

Why does bad news grab you more than good news?

Psychologists call this negativity bias. In a widely cited 2001 review titled "Bad is stronger than good", Roy Baumeister and colleagues looked across many areas of psychology, from relationships to feedback to first impressions. Their conclusion: bad events and bad information usually carry more weight than good ones, and exceptions are rare.

You can see this in what people click. A 2023 study in Nature Human Behaviour analysed about 105,000 headline variations from the news site Upworthy, tested in 22,743 randomised experiments that drew around 5.7 million clicks. Because Upworthy showed different headlines for the same story, the researchers could isolate the effect of the words themselves. What they found:

• For a headline of average length, each extra negative word raised the click-through rate by 2.3%.
• Positive words lowered it.
• Sad words increased clicks, while words linked to joy and, interestingly, fear reduced them. Anger had no clear effect.

The effect per word is small, but feeds serve you hundreds of headlines a day. A small pull, repeated, adds up. And because platforms are paid in attention, the content that wins those small contests tends to rise to the top of your screen.

Why is it so hard to stop once you start?

Because nothing tells you to stop. A newspaper ends. A TV episode ends. A feed does not.

The Florida researchers point to this directly: the way social media feeds are built means a doomscrolling session has no natural end point. You stop when you get tired, get interrupted or notice the time, not because you finished.

The designer who created infinite scroll, Aza Raskin, has said this openly. In a conversation with Adam Grant, he explained that he built it to spare people pointless decisions like clicking "next page". He says he was blind to how it would be used to hold attention, because without a stopping cue people rarely pause to ask whether they want to keep going. He now argues doomscrolling would not exist without it.

Why does scrolling feel rewarding if it makes you feel bad?

Most of what you scroll past is forgettable. But every so often there is something genuinely good: a funny post, a message from a friend, a piece of news you really wanted. You cannot predict when it will appear, so you keep swiping to find it.

There is real research showing that social media use follows the same reward principles as other behaviour. A 2021 study in Nature Communications led by Björn Lindström analysed over one million posts from more than 4,000 people. It found that people timed their posts in a way that matched reward-seeking models, posting more when likes came in and less when they did not. A follow-up experiment with 176 people confirmed that likes changed how often people posted. The researchers compared it to the same basic principles that lead rats to chase food rewards in a lab box.

An honest caveat: that study looked at posting, not scrolling. The idea that unpredictable rewards keep you scrolling is widely accepted and fits the evidence, but it has been tested less directly than the headlines on this topic often claim.

Why do you keep checking when the news is scary?

When something big and frightening is happening, not knowing feels worse than knowing. Checking for updates promises to reduce that uncertainty, even when there is nothing new to find.

A study of Norwegian media users early in the 2020 lockdown, by Brita Ytre-Arne and Hallvard Moe, described exactly this pattern. People intensely monitored constantly updated news streams and found the experience immersive and emotionally draining. Interestingly, many of the same people then deliberately avoided news for stretches, simply to cope.

That swing between checking everything and checking nothing will feel familiar to anyone who followed a war, an election or a market crash on their phone. It is also why doomscrolling spikes during crises, which matches Johnson's point about crisis plus smartphone.

Why does your thumb open the app before you decide to?

Because much of what we do every day is habit, not choice. In a classic set of diary studies published in 2002, psychologists Wendy Wood, Jeffrey Quinn and Deborah Kashy asked students to log what they were doing every hour. Between a third and a half of all behaviours (35% in one study, 43% in the other) were habits: things done almost daily, usually in the same place.

The telling part: while people were doing habitual things, their thoughts were often somewhere else entirely. That is the experience of finding yourself in a feed without remembering deciding to open it. The trigger is the context (the queue, the bed, the boring meeting), and the action follows on its own.

This was a study of everyday behaviour in general, run before smartphones. But it explains why "just use more willpower" rarely works. Willpower is a conscious tool, and the habit is not running on the conscious level.

Who is most likely to doomscroll?

The Florida study offers a few clues. According to the researchers:

• Men and younger people were more likely to doomscroll than women and older adults.
• Doomscrolling was linked to fear of missing out and to being constantly connected through a smartphone.
• Doomscrollers came from both the left and the right politically.
• It was less common than some media reports suggest.

The big open question is direction. The researchers could not say whether doomscrolling causes anxiety or anxiety drives doomscrolling. They suspect each feeds the other, but that remains to be proven.

How the pieces fit together

What does this mean for you?

The useful thing about understanding the psychology is that it changes the fix. If the problem were laziness, the answer would be to try harder. But since the problem is design and habit, the answer is to change the design and the habit: add a pause, set a limit, give yourself something that ends.

Our post on alternatives to doomscrolling goes through seven things to reach for instead, and what each one is good for.

Disclosure: we make Qrio, a free Android app of one-minute videos on business, startups and the world, built with a clear stopping point.

And if the scrolling comes with low mood, anxiety or poor sleep that last for weeks, the phone may be a symptom rather than the cause. In that case, a doctor or counsellor will help more than any app setting.

Sources

• Sharma, Lee and Johnson, "The Dark at the End of the Tunnel: Doomscrolling on Social Media Newsfeeds", Technology, Mind, and Behavior (2022), summarised by the University of Florida and Futurity
• Robertson et al., "Negativity drives online news consumption", Nature Human Behaviour (2023)
• Baumeister, Bratslavsky, Finkenauer and Vohs, "Bad is stronger than good", Review of General Psychology (2001)
• Lindström et al., paper on reward and social media engagement, Nature Communications (2021), and Futurity's summary
• Wood, Quinn and Kashy, "Habits in Everyday Life: Thought, Emotion, and Action", Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (2002)
• Ytre-Arne and Moe, "Doomscrolling, Monitoring and Avoiding: News Use in COVID-19 Pandemic Lockdown", Journalism Studies (2021), University of Bergen summary
• Aza Raskin on ReThinking with Adam Grant, episode transcript