It’s been quite the year already, hasn’t it? Judging by my social media feed, everyone is still a little shell shocked, one way or another. Doomscrolling is definitely making it worse.

The Urban Dictionary defines doomscrolling as “When you keep scrolling through all of your social media feeds, looking for the most recent upsetting news about the latest catastrophe. The amount of time spent doing this is directly proportional to how much worse you’re going to feel after you’re done.”

I was guilty of a fair amount of doomscrolling during 2020, especially in the early months of the pandemic. I was hoping that the new year would be better in that regard, as in so many others, but then 2021 said “hold my beer”.

There’s no question that doomscrolling is bad for one’s mental health. It will definitely leave you feeling more anxious and depressed than when you started. So why do we do it?

Articles I have read suggest that humans are naturally drawn to morbid or bad news – if it bleeds, it leads. That was clearly adaptive back when we were mostly concerned with learning how to avoid sabre toothed tigers. In today’s world, however, we are so deluged with information, mostly scary and depressing, that we need to take active steps to counter this tendency. This was already recognised back in the 1970s, with the so-called “mean world syndrome”, resulting from watching too much sensational and morbid television. 

So what to do? Don’t we need to know all this information? What about the sabre tooth tiger lurking around the corner? Hurricanes? Earthquakes? Social justice issues? Sedition?

Yes, we do need to know what’s going on. Yes, we need to engage and raise our voices if we feel we can contribute to improving the situation. No, we don’t need to spend hours each day scrolling Twitter to do it.

I know that I myself have a strong tendency to indulge in doomscrolling – and in many ways it does feel like a guilty “pleasure”. I’m not gaining much information beyond the first few minutes of learning what happened and perhaps some cogent analysis, and I’m not doing work that I consider to be important and helpful to people. You may be experiencing the same. So how do we stop?

One way is by using a timer – set yourself a certain time, maybe hourly if you are feeling very anxious, when you are allowed to check your feed and see what’s going on. Then you have to close the app and go do something useful, something that makes the world a better place, even if it’s in a very small way.

It’s going to be hard, but I have faith that we can do this. Will you do it with me?