What The Actual Science Says About “Doomscrolling”

Today, without leaving your chair, it's very likely your thumb will travel the height of the Empire State Building. The average person will spend 108 minutes scrolling per day, and every swipe only takes you closer to nothing. At some point, this becomes a compulsive hunt for the next thing, without even knowing what you're looking for. There's a name for it, you've likely heard it, doom scrolling. But I have good news, you are not doomed. In the next 10 minutes or so, I want to explore some of the science of your brain and the screen, show you what it's costing you, and then hand the off switch back to you. Everything starts with the brain. Our brains run on negativity bias. The idea is that it's an old survival mechanism that makes threats louder than everything else. The rustle in the bushes mattered more than the sunset, because a rustle could kill you. That instinct kept your ancestors alive. Now, the same circuit gets pointed at the screen. And the media knows this. A 2023 analysis studied more than 100,000 headline variations with over 370 million views. And the pattern was super clear. Each additional negative word in a headline raised the click-through rate by 2.3%, while positive words lowered it. But it doesn't stop at a click. Negative stories just travel farther. They move across networks and get shared more, which means more eyes, more reach, and more reward. The platform doesn't tolerate negativity, it actually runs on it. The design of these algorithms lean into your wiring. With the help of behavioral scientists, these sites make it effortless to fold down the rabbit hole of gloom, and it's really hard to climb out. You have infinite scrolls, autoplay, and notifications that do just one job. They delete your natural stopping points, so the page never ends. The next video plays itself, and there's always one more alert. So you weren't quite choosing to keep going, but the design was chosen for you. Here's the strange part about doomscrolling. It doesn't really feel like you're being manipulated, it can almost feel like you're being responsible. What do I mean? Bad news can create an illusion of control. Keeping a finger on the pulse of every threat tricks you into feeling that you're prepared. For example, during the pandemic, locked inside and anxious about the future, millions of people coped by trying to stay in the know. That was actually the soil in which this habit grew, and it never really left. But the thing is, staying in the know has a price. Studies find a heavy exposure to bad news, such as pandemic stuff or natural disasters, tracks with higher levels of stress that lingers, and with more depression. The vigilance that's supposed to protect you slowly starts to erode you. And there's a word for what's happening. Basically, when your sense of danger runs further ahead than the actual risk, that gap has a label, we call it anxiety. Doomscrolling is a machine for widening that gap. On the other hand, you might assume that keeping a distance keeps you safe. The news is out there, happening to other people far away. But the negativity doesn't stay out there. It actually crosses into your own life. The strongest evidence comes from a 2013 study. In the weeks after the Boston Marathon bombing, researchers followed nearly 5,000 Americans. They found that people who watched a lot of news, six hours or more of news per day about the bombing, were nine times more likely to report high acute stress than people with minimal exposure. And that held even after accounting for their mental health before the attack. And for some, watching the coverage proved more stressful than being near the event itself. And it's more than just stress. In a controlled experiment, researchers split people into three groups and show them a 14-minute news bulletin, positive, neutral, or negative. The negative group felt sadder and more anxious and then began catastrophizing their own lives, blowing up worries about money, relationships, and school into worst-case scenarios. The strange detail is that those worries had nothing to do with the news they watched. The dread out there had found a private door in here and walked right through it. And maybe it comes with no surprise that you don't even have to be close to the event. People nowhere near the 9-11 or Iraq war still show with elevated stress and even post-traumatic symptoms from the coverage alone. And on social media, the pool may run deeper still. And there's studies of users in the United States and Iran where doomscrolling was linked to existential anxiety, pessimism, and a grim outlook on life. They described a creeping hopelessness about whether much of it means anything at all. And the cost spreads outward too. These social media feeds shrink your attention span and quietly siphons it away from the people in the room. The more absorbed you are in the screen, the less you feel the person sitting right next to you. Doomscrolling has another victim, and that's your body. And it usually starts with sleep. If you watch something alarming right before bed, it's of course going to be hard to fall asleep. But the trap is a little more subtle than that. The urge to stay updated turns into a late-night scrolling, what researchers call bedtime procrastination. And there's even a low dread about facing tomorrow after a night spent on the phone. On top of that, you've likely heard before, the blue light from your screen suppresses melatonin, the hormone that tells your body it's time to sleep. So the content keeps your mind switched on, while the light is convincing your brain it's still daytime. You end up waking up foggy, irritable, and more fragile under stress, with impairments that even researchers compare to being drunk. Almost all of this research is correlational. We can see that heavy doomscrolling travels alongside anxiety, poor sleep, and a dark view of the world. And we can't really say, you know, which one came first. Anxious people may scroll more because scrolling feels like coping. The scrolling may then deepen the anxiety. The honest answer is that it's probably both at once. A loop where each side feeds each other and then pulls tighter. The platforms take your attention away, so it's your job to get it back. And research keeps pointing to two moves that do most of the work, limiting your time and filtering what you So start with time. Pick a window, set a timer, and then when it goes off, you're done. No more phone. And filter your content. Choose what you want to watch. Stay with a few credible sources, like this channel, and stop training your brain on fear. And next is to add some friction. Just put your phone across a room or in another room overnight. Block out an hour or two before bed for something with no screen in it. And if your own willpower won't hold, there's a version that just gives your phone to someone else while you're not supposed to be on it. Now here's a study which I think really shows that what you watch matters. During the pandemic, researchers had people scroll different feeds. One group watched pandemic doom, rising death tolls, overwhelmed hospitals, long-term complications, and the other was kindness scrolling. Real stories of people helping each other, like an old great-grandmother beating COVID or a daughter making tiny bow ties for her dad's video calls. And when they were measured against a group that saw no news at all, the doom feed pushed positive mood and optimism down. The kindness feed didn't. In the video version, it actually left people feeling less negative than seeing nothing at all. The takeaway here is that if you're scrolling anyways, you might as well choose content that is better for you, so-called kindness media. It will leave you happier, calmer, more grateful, and less irritated. Now if you want something more practical, like a checklist, there's research showing that the practical moves are simple. Just turn off news and app notifications, set a scroll timer, watch your screen time, and follow feeds that uplift you. And of course, spend more time with people in real life. Pick a hobby, exercise, meditate, and if you really can't stop, it's fine to ask for help. You can also do simpler things like listen to music, take a walk, or even take a warm bath. You can't always control what's on the feed, but you can decide what you keep feeding. This all brings me to an old story. A grandfather tells his grandson that two wolves live inside each of us. One is fear, anger, and despair. The other is hope, peace, and love. He says they're always fighting. The boy asks which one wins. The grandfather says the one you feed. Thank you for watching. If you like this video, leave a like, and make sure you subscribe to watch more content like this one. And also let me know, what do you think of doom scrolling, and how do you stop yourself from doing so? Let me know in the comments. Until next time. As a biologist and health journalist, I've spent a lot of time thinking about life. How the body works, what keeps us going, how fragile and incredible the whole thing is. And the more I learned about life, the more I wondered, what happens when it ends? I'm Akai, and I host a new documentary called Final Hours. This film is all about answering that question. I went looking for answers the way I was trained to. Science first, then philosophy. Both gave me a lot, but neither gave me everything. So I wanted to make a film that doesn't choose. Final Hours is both science and philosophy. It's data and storytelling. It's contemplation and beauty. At the center of it are people who, by every definition, were dead. But then they came back. Something called a near-death experience. Something that is unexplainable, but as I found out, holds answers to our deepest questions. So I sat with them, and I listened. I didn't shy away from the uncomfortable questions, and they didn't shy away from the answers. And after long travels and even longer conversations, I'm honestly not the same person I was when I started filming. Why? Well, the things these people shared with me have made me think more carefully about how I spend my time and how I treat other people. The implications of what these people experienced on the other side are profound. And they're profound for all of us, including you. It doesn't matter what background you have, where you live, or what you believe. I promise you, you will find something in this film that speaks to you. And I really hope you'll watch with curiosity, holding in your mind the questions humans have been asking forever. What is this life actually for? And what waits on the other side? Don't be afraid to ask the big questions. Watch Final Hours. The full documentary is linked below. We collided at very high speeds. What happens after death? There was really no way that you could muster a dream or hallucination out of that brain. As the surgical team kind of gets ready to operate on me, that energy in the room shifted. The next thing I knew, I had left my body. I looked up behind the surgeons. There were these huge light beams. It's a place that was very kind of primitive, of course. It's like being underground in dirty jello. I cried out, God help me. In the flash of just a second, it was a world of perfection. I was shuttled into this life review. I saw this vision of what I was meant to do. It says, I know that you died full of this regret. I'm here to offer you that second chance. But if I give you this offer, you have to make sure that the next time you die, you're ready for it. I heard my dad say to me, now that you know the truth, go back and live your life fearlessly.