The habit of scrolling through bad news has a name, and understanding why it hooks you is the first step toward scrolling on your own terms.

This article is general information about everyday health habits, not medical advice. If you have a health condition, are pregnant or take regular medication, talk to your doctor or another qualified health professional before making big changes to your diet, activity or sleep. Figures come from US public health sources such as the CDC, HHS and the Dietary Guidelines for Americans.

Most of us have done it: pick up the phone to glance at the news, then look up feeling tense, sad or angry, with no clear sense of where the time went. That pattern has a name, doomscrolling, and it became common enough that dictionary editors started tracking it. This explainer walks through what the word means, why upsetting feeds pull people in, and what actually helps if the habit has crept into your evenings.

What Doomscrolling Actually Means

Doomscrolling is spending an excessive amount of time scrolling through news or other online content, especially content that leaves you feeling sad, anxious or angry. Merriam-Webster added the word to its dictionary in September 2023 with almost exactly that definition. The idea is not entirely new. Researchers compare it to “mean world syndrome,” a term from the 1970s describing the belief that the world is more dangerous than it really is after long-term exposure to violent television. What is newer is the delivery: feeds that never end, in your pocket, refreshed by the second.

Its first documented use was in a tweet from 2018, and the term caught on widely once the pandemic had people checking their phones hour by hour for updates on a crisis that kept changing.

Staying informed is not the problem. The issue is getting caught in hours of negative stories, which can create an exaggerated sense of threat. For related vocabulary, our screen-time terms glossary covers the words that show up alongside this one.

Why Bad News Grabs Our Attention

Human attention is tilted toward threat. Studies find that news consumers pay more attention to negative stories, and that negative news produces stronger physiological and psychological reactions. Negativity also drives online news consumption and social media use, so the content most likely to hold your attention is often the content most likely to upset you.

There is a brain-level reason. The amygdala, a structure in the brain’s limbic system, promotes self-preservation and drives the fight-or-flight response to danger. Scanning a feed is, in a sense, scanning for threats, and stress fuels the urge to keep looking. Harvard experts describe our brains and bodies as built for short bursts of stress, with doomscrolling as our response to stress that never quite ends.

Uncertainty adds fuel. Research finds that minimizing uncertainty is a significant driver of news use: when the world feels unpredictable, information feels like control. The certainty people are hunting for usually does not exist, so the search keeps going. People prone to anxiety face a harder version of this, because they orient quickly to negative cues and struggle to disengage once they start reading.

There is also a less cynical explanation for heavy negative coverage. Researchers who analyzed thousands of network TV news segments from 1968 to 2013 found that what looks like bias is often the media reporting what is surprising and new. After accounting for how newsworthy a topic was, an apparent tendency to over-cover rising unemployment fell to a statistically insignificant 2.4 percent. Bad news gets airtime partly because it departs from everyday life.

How Feeds and Notifications Keep the Loop Going

The habit does not run on willpower alone. Several design features remove natural stopping points.

• Infinite scroll loads new content continuously, so there is no page boundary where you might pause and decide.
• Push notifications deliver alerts whether or not you asked for them, each one an invitation to reopen an app.
• News events surface through the accounts you follow even if you never open a news app.
• Studies show that seeing upsetting news leads people to seek out more information on the same topic, creating a self-perpetuating cycle.

An illustration of the loop: a push alert warns of severe weather in a neighboring state. You open the app to check whether it could reach you. The feed under that story shows a string of other alarming headlines, and each tap loads more. Twenty minutes later you know nothing new about your own weather, but your body has reacted to every headline as if it were about you. This is a made-up example, but it is the pattern researchers describe.

Signs You’ve Been Doomscrolling

The clearest signals are practical rather than technical.

• You lose track of time and stay far longer than planned.
• You feel worse afterward than before, in mood or in your body.
• You hit refresh again and again, and the stream starts anew each time.
• You keep reading past the point of learning anything new.
• You find it genuinely hard to limit your news time even when you try.

Surveys suggest the habit is more common among younger people and those who closely follow political events, and people prone to anxiety or with a history of trauma seem especially drawn into the cycle. None of that makes the habit permanent. It means the setup leans toward it, and small changes to the setup can help.

How It Can Affect Mood and Sleep

The clearest evidence comes from the pandemic years. In one study, 546 college students completed more than 80,000 daily surveys over 8 weeks. Greater daily exposure to COVID-19 news was associated with higher worry that day and the next, and that worry was linked in turn to greater next-day hopelessness and general worry.

Other research points the same way. A study of adults who lived through major earthquakes in Türkiye found doomscrolling may increase stress, anxiety and depression, and a 2024 study involving participants in Iran and the United States associated doomscrolling with existential anxiety. One survey study found that people who spent more than 1 hour a day consuming COVID-19 information, and those who found it extremely difficult to limit that time, had increased odds of clinically significant mental health symptoms.

Sleep is often where the cost shows up first. Scrolling in bed keeps your mind in alert mode, and worry picked up from a late feed follows you to the pillow. Our evening wind-down routine offers a way to give the last hour of the day a different shape.

Simple Ways to Break the Scroll

You do not have to quit the news. Research on prevention points to limiting media overexposure and building tolerance for uncertainty as the most useful moves. In practice, that looks like:

• Checking the news at set times, once in the morning and once in the early evening, instead of continuously.
• Turning off push notifications from news and social apps so updates arrive on your schedule.
• Curating the feed. Muting accounts that reliably spike your stress changes what the loop has to work with.
• Putting a physical boundary around bedtime, such as charging the phone outside the bedroom.
• Replacing the scroll with something else. New habits stick better when they take over an old cue, which we cover in how habits form.

Small step: If you change only one thing, change your notifications. The feed pulls hardest when it can interrupt you, so deciding when news reaches you is the most effective lever most people have.

If stepping away leaves you wound up, our guide to healthy ways to handle everyday stress gathers other down-to-earth ways of settling a busy mind.

When It Might Be Time to Talk to Someone

Scrolling a lot is common and does not automatically mean something is wrong. But some signals are worth taking seriously. The National Institute of Mental Health notes that when repetitive behaviors or intrusive, unwanted thoughts take over, for example taking up more than an hour a day or interfering with daily life, it is worth talking to a health care provider. Similarly, if you have tried repeatedly to cut back and cannot, or if scrolling is feeding persistent anxiety, low mood or sleepless nights, a doctor, nurse or therapist can help you sort out what is going on and what might work for your situation.

Still wondering?

Is doomscrolling an official word?

Merriam-Webster added it to the dictionary in September 2023. The phrase first appeared on social media around 2018 and spread widely during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Is reading the news bad for you?

No, staying informed is useful and normal. Problems show up when hours of negative stories create an exaggerated sense of threat or become hard to stop.

Why does bad news feel so hard to stop reading?

Negative stories produce stronger attention and physical reactions, and uncertainty makes information feel like control. Since the certainty you want rarely exists, the search keeps going.

What is the fastest way to cut back?

Turn off push notifications from news and social apps, then check at set times instead. Deciding when news reaches you beats resisting each alert.