What is doomscrolling?

Where the word came from

“Doomscrolling” joins “doom” with the motion everyone already knew. It entered wide use during the early months of COVID-19, when millions were locked indoors, refreshing feeds for the latest case counts and restrictions. Merriam-Webster records the first known use as 2020 and added the word in September 2023.

The behaviour is older. The feeds that make it possible arrived between 2006 and 2012.

Why the feed is hard to put down

Three design decisions, all made within six years, built the conditions for doomscrolling.

In 2006, Facebook replaced profile pages with a continuous stream of activity: the News Feed. In 2009 it added the Like button, which turned every post into a small, unpredictable test of social approval. Then the company moved from showing posts in order to ranking them by how much reaction they were likely to get.

Content charged with moral emotion or hostility to the other side tends to generate more interaction (William Brady and colleagues, PNAS, 2017; Steve Rathje, Jay Van Bavel and Sander van der Linden, PNAS, 2021). In 2017, an angry reaction on Facebook counted five times as much as a Like in the company’s ranking system, according to internal documents disclosed by Frances Haugen in 2021. When the company later set that weight to zero, users saw less misinformation and less graphic content, with no measurable fall in overall activity.

Layered on top: pull-to-refresh, infinite scroll and unpredictable notifications. Each one delivers a small, random social payoff. Because you never know when the next good one is coming, you keep checking. By 2013, when smartphone ownership in the US passed half, the feed was in every pocket.

For more on how attention has changed in this period, see Do we really have a goldfish attention span?

Sean Parker, Facebook’s founding president, described the design question to Axios in November 2017: how to consume as much of users’ time and attention as possible. He said the answer was a loop where people post, wait for approval, and come back for more, and that the founders understood this consciously.

Because you never know when the next good one is coming, you keep checking.

What it does to the body

Doomscrolling is a mild stressor. The trouble is that it rarely ends.

The body’s stress response is built for threats that arrive and pass. Comparison, outrage, uncertainty: content designed to provoke a reaction can keep that response switched on.

Upsetting or exciting content before bed can keep the brain wound up, which works against the calm that sleep requires. A review of 20 studies covering more than 125,000 children and teenagers found that using a screen at bedtime was linked to roughly double the odds of not getting enough sleep in those age groups (Ben Carter and colleagues, JAMA Pediatrics, 2016).

Sleep loss, in turn, weakens the part of the brain that handles self-control and makes the part that reacts to threats more sensitive (Adam Krause, Matthew Walker and colleagues, Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 2017). A person in that state responds more to upsetting content and finds it harder to put the phone down.

Each step in that sequence has evidence behind it. The full loop, running across whole populations because of the way digital environments work, has not been tested directly. That is a confirmed gap.

It runs both ways

None of this is fixed.

During the 2024 US presidential campaign, researchers gave 1,256 willing users of a major social platform a browser extension that re-ranked their feeds for ten days. Nobody’s posts changed. Only the order. When hostile posts were ranked higher, hostility towards the other party rose. When they were ranked lower, it fell. The shift in ten days was comparable to about three years of change in national surveys (Tiziano Piccardi and colleagues, Science, 2025).

What these systems do is a design decision, not a property of the technology. The Piccardi result shows it moves in both directions. It is one experiment on one platform, and it still needs repeating.