Key Points
Even when we try to take a break from our devices, we're often quickly drawn back into a spiral of bad news: violence, war and crises dominate our news feeds..
And the transition from one to another is practically seamless: the pandemic was followed by the war in Ukraine, followed by earthquakes, natural disasters and war in the Middle East..
Doomscrolling is what we do when we keep scrolling through bad news, even when it distresses us..
Doomscrolling affects different people differently, but studies have observed a link between excessive consumption of bad news and higher rates of depression, stress and other symptoms that are similar to those found among people with post-traumatic stress disorder..
A collaborative study by psychologists and the news outlet Huffington Post showed that participants who had spent three minutes reading bad news in the morning were 27% more likely to say they'd had a bad day six to eight hours later..
