What is Doomscrolling? - Video Transcript
Hi,everyone! I'm Kristen, The Anxiety Therapist. Today, I'm going to be talking about doom scrolling and this is a term that refers to scrolling through social media or any sort of news feed in which we sort of go down the rabbit hole of consuming negative information. This inevitably elicits a sense of doom or dread or just a general sense of negativity about the state of the world. So, it's definitely not a new concept. Especially now, there's no shortage of negative news that we can be exposed to, but beyond knowing that it makes us feel awful.
They did a lot of studies on doom strolling during the pandemic and really linked it to both anxiety and depression. This isn't just in reference to COVID-19 related media but just any sort of negative news in general. However, what the pandemic did with more people being quarantined or working from home was that it allowed us to increase the amount of time that we spent on our phones. It made doom scrolling a lot more accessible and just easy to do. Like I said, this is not a new term or a new concept, but the precursor to going online before everyone had a smartphone was that people would watch the 11 o'clock news and 99. 9% of the news stories tend to be negative and pretty terrifying. But that terror when we witness it from the comfort of our own home, it can actually have a potentially calming effect on us and it sort of allows us to acknowledge that things are pretty horrible out there in the world, but I'm comfortable. There's this sense of peace that you're going to be able to sleep well tonight knowing you can feel good about your situation and safety.
The problem is with doom scrolling is that sort of become the modern day equivalent. But the difference is now that there's not a cut off time at a certain hour. There's this endless supply of news online and so we can really find ourselves engaging in this kind of compulsive reading of negative news and events. These headlines are provocative for a reason and they draw us in because they elicit fear and a sense of urgency. But, we often tend to keep scrolling past the point of collecting information that can actually be valuable and useful to us. So why do we do it?
Why do we engage in doom scrolling? There's a feeling of safety in knowledge, especially during difficult times. Whether that's the pandemic or the recent mass shootings, we feel a sense of safety. The more we know the design of social media platforms constantly refresh and boost the loudest voices.
So, we're just constantly getting bombarded with new stories or the same news just in from a different medium or platform and then there's the human fascination aspect. Just like you're driving on the highway and you see a car accident and everybody slows down to look.
There's there's just a fascination that humans have with these sort of negative events and the practice of doom scrolling can really be oddly soothing. Pamela Rutledge is the director of a media psychology research center and she described the compulsive need to try to get answers when we feel afraid of something and when we have access to information that constitutes a threat, then we're just naturally and biologically driven to attend to that right in order to keep ourselves safe.
It's sort of like this information and strategy gathering approach and doom scrolling can also mimic gambling behavior because there's this intermittent reinforcement. We're not only scrolling for bad news but also anything uplifting. We get this this bump when we see like a cute video of a puppy or something interspersed in there and so were that also keeps us hooked because there's the possibility of being exposed to something good or good news.
With that analogy, doom scrolling in a lot of ways is similar to playing the slots right where you don't really know what you're going to see next. You don't really know what you're going to get and that's what keeps us hooked. So, how do we address doom scrolling and how do we kick this habit?
Well awareness is definitely the first step. We have to have awareness of our habits in order to stop doing them. I would recommend to start keeping track of how much time you spend scrolling through social media or through the news and just start logging that for a week or two just to give you some information. Then, maybe set a timer so that you have sort of this external accountability. It reminds you that you need to get off your phone at a certain point and put it down and not continue to engage in that sort of compulsory behavior and go through your list of friends or followers or whatever platform you're using and black people who are not bringing valuable information to your social feed. There's so much misinformation out there that a lot of times we're exposed to things that really just illicit more distressing emotions than anything else. We have the opportunity to curate what we're exposed to, not on all platforms, but on most, we do have control over that piece of it. So, I would encourage you to take a look at your own social media behavior and doom scrolling. Make those changes and hopefully you will eventually see a difference in your mood and just how much it affects how you think about the world and other people and your outlook on life in general.
So again, I'm Kristen, the anxiety therapist. Be sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel, The Anxiety Therapist and follow me on social media @catharticspacecounseling. I put out new content each week, so have a good one and I'll see you next time.
