Why we're all 'doomscrolling'

Doomscrolling, one of those perfect words that explains itself without much thought. Yes, we're all doomscrolling these days. As the world looks worse by the day, people are endlessly scrolling through their smartphones confronting themselves with all that is wrong with the world.

Aimless scrolling on smartphones is not a new phenomenon. We've been doing it since there were screens we could smear our thumbs across and find new content. But more recently, there has been a focus on the macabre, and for good reason.

Scrolling for sadness

dooAccording to Nicole Ellison, who studies communication and social media at the University of Michigan’s School of Information, many of us are finding the world a chaotic place with few answers. In psychology terms, this scenario puts increased stress on our cognitive procesing centres. " There’s no overarching narrative that helps us.” That, she adds, only compounds the stress and anxiety they're already feeling.

As our news feeds and social media profiles become increasingly tailored to surface trending stories, algorithms are increasingly incentivized to push trending topics into your feeds—making the probelm worse.

“In a situation like that, we engage in these more narrow, immediate survival-oriented behaviors. We’re in fight-or-flight mode,” Ellison says. “Combine that with the fact that, socially, many of us are not going into work and standing around the coffee maker engaging in collective sense-making, and the result is we don’t have a lot of those social resources available to us in the same way.”

So the next time you feel yourself slipping into a scroll of doom, try something else.