The science behind doomscrolling — and how to stop it

There has been, you may have noticed, no shortage of bad news lately. Wars rumble on, markets teeter, ice caps retreat.

Some of us respond in a way that feels almost instinctive — we reach for our phones, we refresh late into the night, we obsessively absorb new details. The habit has acquired a name: doomscrolling.

Coined during the pandemic, when new crises seemed to unfold by the hour, the term describes the compulsion to trawl through endless bleak headlines on social media.

So why does bad news have such a grip on us? And how can we loosen it?

At its core, doomscrolling appears to exploit a quirk of human psychology — our built-in bias for negativity.

Evolutionarily, being alive to danger helped our

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