A few minutes is enough to feel it. In two experiments published in 2021, psychologists led by Kathryn Buchanan, at the University of Essex in the UK and Simon Fraser University in Canada, randomly assigned adults to scroll pandemic news on Twitter, watch it discussed on YouTube, or see nothing at all. Two to four minutes of COVID-19 news on social media lowered people’s positive mood, while the same few minutes of pandemic kindness stories did not.¹

Doomscrolling is the habit of scanning feeds for more bad news long after it has stopped telling you anything you can use. It pulls because the mind gives threats priority and a feed never runs out; it may ease when you decide beforehand what you need to know and give the scroll an ending. None of these five habits has been tested as a fix, but each targets part of that loop:

1. Decide what you actually need to know
2. Check at set times instead of on alerts
3. Give the scroll an ending
4. Keep bad news out of bed
5. Notice how you feel, and let good news in

For which apps deserve a place in your life at all, see a beginner’s guide to digital minimalism.

Doomscrolling is a pattern, not a news habit

Doomscrolling is habitual, absorbed scanning of social media feeds for fresh negative news, in the definition of Bhakti Sharma, Susanna Lee and Benjamin Johnson of the University of Florida. Their 2022 study built a questionnaire to measure it, and found the habit less widespread than media reports suggested.

After focus groups with US students, they tested the questionnaire in two online surveys of about 900 adults in all, most of them in Europe. Its statements include feeling an urge to seek bad news, losing track of time while reading it, refreshing feeds for anything worse, staying up late looking for more, and finding it hard to stop. Many people scored toward the low end. Higher scorers also reported more anxiety and fear of missing out and lower self-control, though not lower wellbeing on a broader measure. The survey was taken once, so it cannot show whether anxiety drives the scrolling or the scrolling feeds the anxiety.²

Myth

Reading bad news every day means you are doomscrolling.

Fact

The researchers who built the doomscrolling questionnaire define it by the pattern: compulsive scanning for more bad news that is hard to stop. A bulletin you read and close is not it.

Reading grim morning headlines and closing the app is staying informed. Opening a feed at 11 p.m. to check on a war on another continent, refreshing for anything worse, then noticing it is past midnight, is the pattern. The test is not whether the news is bad but whether you can stop once you have what you came for.

Why bad news is so hard to put down

People react more strongly to negative news than to positive news, on average, across many countries. In a 2019 lab study led by Stuart Soroka, 1,156 people in 17 countries watched BBC World News stories while sensors tracked their heart and skin, and their bodies were more activated by negative stories, though individuals differed widely.³

Clicks show the same tilt: a 2023 analysis of thousands of randomized headline tests on the US news site Upworthy, by Claire Robertson and colleagues, found that negative words in a headline raised the chance of a click and positive words lowered it: a small effect per headline, but one that held across several word lists.⁴

Looking for information is also a sensible response to a threat, Buchanan and colleagues note, but in a crisis that keeps unfolding, no amount of information removes the uncertainty.¹ The feed supplies the rest: Sharma’s team points out that feeds have no natural end point, and that doomscrolling seems to start as a wish to stay updated about events close to home and turn into automatic browsing.²

1. A worry: something that could affect you or people close to you
2. Check the feed: looking for facts is a normal way to cope with a threat
3. A feed with no last item: and the bad news in it stands out
4. Uncertainty remains: more reading does not settle it, so you check again

A storm warning for your own town shows the loop: you open the feed to learn whether your road is closed and get flood videos, rumors and angry threads instead of an answer. The pull is ordinary, not a personal failing. What you can change is what the feed supplies: the missing end point, and the cue that starts the loop.

Doomscrolling can dampen your mood within minutes

Doomscrolling can lower mood quickly, and this is the one link shown in randomized experiments. The comparison in the Buchanan studies, about 900 adults in all, was fair: kindness stories from the same pandemic, on the same platforms.

People who took in the news reported less positive mood than those who saw nothing, and in the video study less optimism, but negative feelings did not clearly rise. The clearest cost was lost good feeling, not added bad feeling, while the kindness stories left mood no worse. The caveats: mood was measured minutes later, not days, and most participants were young, white and female. The authors suggest the cost may add up over hours and days of exposure, which their experiments did not test.¹

Think of a train wait spent on disaster footage from another continent: you board a little flatter, having learned nothing you can act on.

Hours of crisis coverage go with more stress

After a disaster, the more coverage people follow, the more stressed they tend to feel. In a 2014 study after the Boston Marathon bombings, Alison Holman and colleagues found that US adults who spent the most hours on bombing coverage reported higher acute stress than people with a direct connection to the attack.

The study

Limited evidence

Boston, April 2013: the more hours of coverage, the higher the acute stress

People who reported 6 or more hours a day of bombing-related media in the week after the attack, across TV, radio, print, online and social media, had higher acute stress scores than people who were at or near the bombings or had someone close there. Stress rose step by step with more daily hours of coverage, and the link held after taking account of people’s mental health and television habits measured before the bombings.⁵

This is not proof that coverage caused the stress: people who felt more shaken may have watched more, and stress was measured once. The authors suggest that seeing trauma coverage again and again soon after an event can prolong acute stress and feed rumination.⁵

After a serious event in your own city, the first hour of coverage tells you whether your people are safe and which streets to avoid; the fifth mostly replays the same footage, and Sharma’s focus groups also described negative news as repetitive.² Once you have what you can act on, switch off until a set time; rationing news also appears among everyday habits for reducing stress.

How to stop doomscrolling

No trial has yet tested a way to stop doomscrolling, so the steps below are reasonable habits, not proven cures. Qi Li and Xinrui Yin, authors of a 2026 review covered below, say practical advice must stay tentative, and name goals, stopping cues and knowing when you have enough information as ideas worth testing.⁶

Stepping back is common. In the Reuters Institute’s 2026 Digital News Report, an online survey of about 97,500 people in 48 markets, 42 percent said they sometimes or often avoid the news, up from 29 percent in 2017.⁷

1. Decide what you actually need to know

The World Health Organization’s 2020 advice during the COVID-19 outbreak was to seek information mainly to take practical steps to protect yourself and people you love, from trusted sources such as health authorities, and to look for updates at specific times of day, once or twice.⁸ Before you open an app, name the question (is my route to work open?) and close the app when it is answered.

2. Check at set times instead of on alerts

Matthew Price and colleagues, whose US diary studydiary study: A study in which people record what they do or feel repeatedly, often daily or when prompted at random moments, close to when it happens; the prompted form is called experience sampling. It relies less on memory, but it is still self-report.Full entry in the glossary appears below, suggest turning off news notifications and taking planned breaks from crisis coverage.⁹ In practice: news with breakfast and in the early evening, and nothing pushed at you in between. Our own suggestion: keep official emergency alerts for your area on and silence the rest.

3. Give the scroll an ending

A feed has no last item, so supply one before you start: an evening news summary, a timer, or a fixed count such as five stories and out. Taking the news app off your home screen removes one more cue, a move borrowed from breaking a bad habit.

4. Keep bad news out of bed

Staying up late looking for more negative news is one of the statements in Sharma’s doomscrolling questionnaire.² Leave the phone to charge in another room, or stop opening news apps once in bed; the evidence on screens in bed and lost sleep explains why that stretch matters.

5. Notice how you feel, and let good news in

When you close the feed, check whether you feel calmer or more wound up; if it is usually the second, cut back. Balance may help too: in the Buchanan experiments, kindness stories did not carry the mood cost of the news.¹

WiserHours

Six guardrails for the news feed

• Name the question before I open the app
• Pick one or two set times a day for news
• News alerts off, official emergency alerts on
• A bulletin, a timer or a story count to end the scroll
• Phone charging in another room overnight
• A check on how I feel when I close the feed

Find this checklist online:
https://wiserhours.com/digital-minimalism/doomscrolling/#checklist-doomscrolling-steps

Is doomscrolling bad for your mental health?

Doomscrolling goes along with worse mental health, but nobody has shown which comes first. The clearest daily evidence is a 2022 diary study by Matthew Price and colleagues, which followed 61 young adults in Vermont, in the US, for a month early in the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020; 41 of them were recruited for a history of childhood maltreatment.

On days when participants got pandemic news from social media, their depression and post-traumatic stress symptoms were higher, more so the more severe their childhood maltreatment; news from TV, radio or newspapers showed no such link. The traffic ran both ways, since people who began the month with more symptoms used social media for news more often. The study did not measure how much people read; all participants were aged 18 to 20, and most were women. The authors’ suggested reason: a newspaper presents one story at a time, while a feed mixes topics, strangers and friends.⁹

Picture two people following the same wildfire: one reads a morning bulletin, the other a feed where a friend’s evacuation photos arrive between strangers’ anger and rumor. The diary study hints that the second route costs more, above all for people who are already vulnerable, so if you are having a hard time, the feed deserves extra caution.

A 2026 systematic reviewsystematic review: A review that fixes its question and its rules for including studies in advance, then searches out every study that fits and weighs them together. Some systematic reviews pool the results into a meta-analysis; others describe what the studies found without combining the numbers.Full entry in the glossary and meta-analysis by Qi Li and Xinrui Yin pooled 21 studies and found doomscrolling associated with more anxiety, depression and distress and with lower wellbeing, but most were cross-sectionalcross-sectional: Describes a study that measures everyone in its sample at a single point in time. Because the possible cause and the outcome are recorded together, it can show that two things occur together but not which of them came first.Full entry in the glossary surveys, many from Türkiye, and the authors rated the certaintycertainty of evidence: A rating of how confident we can be that a body of research has an effect about right, graded high, moderate, low or very low. It grades the evidence, not the stakes: low certainty means little is known, not that little is at risk.Full entry in the glossary of every result very low.⁶

Proven, linked or untested: the doomscrolling evidence

The evidence is strongest on mood in the moment and weakest on what to do about it; only the Buchanan experiments and the headline tests were randomized.

In short: the short-term mood finding is the firmest; read the mental-health links as a reason for care, not a verdict, and run the steps as experiments on yourself.

When doomscrolling is a sign you need more support

Doomscrolling is a habit, not a diagnosis, but it can travel with anxiety or low mood that needs more than a new routine. The urgency levels are our own sorting of advice from the organizations named.

• Now: if suicide or self-harm is on your mind, or a life is in immediate danger, your local emergency number comes first. For free, confidential support, the International Association for Suicide Prevention points people to Find A Helpline, a directory of verified crisis lines in more than 150 countries.¹⁰ Two national examples: in the US, the National Institute of Mental Health gives 988 as the number to call or text for the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, and 911 when a life is threatened;¹¹ in the UK, the NHS gives 999 or A&E for moments when a life is at stake, and Samaritans (116 123) as a free listening service.¹²
• Soon: as a 2026 WHO fact sheet defines it, a depressive episode involves a depressed mood (sad, irritable or empty), or lost pleasure or interest, for most of the day, nearly every day, for two weeks or more, often with poor concentration, disrupted sleep or hopelessness about the future.¹³ Signs like these call for a visit to a doctor or other health worker within days; that timing is our suggestion, not the WHO’s.
• At your next appointment: if cutting back keeps failing, or late-night news keeps eating into your sleep, bring it up. That level is our suggestion rather than any guideline’s.

The bottom line

Doomscrolling starts as a sensible wish to know what is happening and becomes a loop because bad news grabs attention and a feed never ends. Experiments show only that a few minutes can dampen mood; the larger surveys find links, not causes, and no fix has been tested. Decide what you need to know, get it at set times from a source that ends, and stop there.