Just quickly checking the news – and suddenly an hour is gone
„I’ll just have a quick look at what’s happened.“ – „One more article, then I’ll put the phone down.“ – „How is it already midnight?“
Do you know that pull? You open an app to stay briefly up to date – and scroll from one piece of bad news to the next. Crises, conflicts, catastrophes, an outraged comment in between. Afterwards you don’t feel better informed, you feel more drained than before. There’s now a word for exactly this: doomscrolling.
Where the term comes from
The expression surfaced around 2018 and became so ubiquitous in 2020 – the first year of the pandemic – that the Australian Macquarie Dictionary named it word of the year. It refers to extended, almost automatic scrolling through predominantly negative news and feeds, often late at night, often for longer than planned.
The need behind it isn’t new: our brain has a built-in negativity bias – threatening things attract our attention more strongly than pleasant ones. For a long stretch of history that was vital for survival. An endless feed exploits precisely this mechanism: there is always one more piece of bad news.
What the research shows – honestly assessed
Since 2022 there has been a first validated doomscrolling scale, developed by the researchers Sharma, Lee and Johnson. Their work shows that doomscrolling is associated with higher anxiety, lower self-control and a stronger tendency to attend to the negative. A study by Satici and colleagues from 2023 also found that people who doomscroll more report more psychological distress and lower well-being.
An important caveat: these studies are correlational. They show associations, not chains of cause and effect. Perhaps scrolling makes people more anxious – perhaps anxious people are also more likely to reach for the endless feed in order to keep a sense of control. Probably both. The fact that scrolling is often also an escape from uncomfortable feelings is explored in the article Distraction: a modern escape mechanism.
There is genuine causal evidence by now, though: a randomised controlled trial published in BMC Medicine in 2025 had participants substantially reduce their smartphone screen time for three weeks. The result: better well-being, fewer depressive symptoms, less stress and better sleep – with small to medium effects. Less screen time therefore does change something measurable. No surprise, but a solidly evidenced lever.
The myth of the dopamine detox
At this point you’ll quickly run into a promise online: „Do a dopamine detox and reset your brain!“ It sounds catchy – but it doesn’t hold up scientifically. Dopamine is not a poison that accumulates and needs flushing out. It’s a messenger substance your brain needs constantly, including while you read this sentence. A «withdrawal» from it is neither possible nor desirable, and a neurological «reset» after a few phone-free days is a marketing image, not a research finding.
The same goes for buzzwords like «brain rot» or comparisons with hard drugs: excessive phone use is not a recognised addiction diagnosis, and your brain is not rotting.
And yet: there’s a sound intuition behind the trend. Deliberate breaks from screens and constant noise do many people good – that’s exactly what the study mentioned above shows. So by all means take time out from the feed. You just don’t need a pseudo-scientific justification for it. «It does me good» is entirely enough.
What actually helps
Bans imposed from outside rarely work – sensible conditions do. The most effective adjustments:
- Time windows instead of permanent access: Set one or two fixed times a day when you check news and feeds – deliberately and in a limited way, for instance with app limits.
- Notifications off: Every push message is an invitation to keep scrolling. Switch off everything that isn’t genuinely urgent.
- No news before sleep: The feed pulls hardest in the evening – and costs you the sleep that, according to the evidence, is one of the first things to benefit from less screen time. The phone sleeps better in another room.
- Replace passive with active: The pull comes from passive consumption. Replace part of it with something active – write to someone instead of only reading along, read a chapter, step outside for a moment.
🟢 A mini exercise to start with: Next time you reach for your phone automatically, pause for three seconds and ask yourself: what am I really looking for right now – information, distraction or a break? Often it’s a break. And those exist offline too: how small interruptions without a screen work is covered in the article Micro-breaks – small time-outs.
Conclusion
Doomscrolling is not a personal failing but the interplay of an ancient negativity bias with feeds that never end. The research shows associations with anxiety and lower well-being – and since 2025 a causal link too: people who reduce screen time sleep better and feel better. That requires no «dopamine detox» and no panic about your own brain. It requires a few deliberate conditions – and the honest question of what you’re actually looking for when you scroll.
Do you notice that constant scrolling costs you more than it gives you?
In coaching we work out together which need lies behind reaching for the phone – and develop habits that give you energy back.
Your progress is my joy.
