How 'doomscrolling' can lead to 'stress, anxiety and poor health': report

06 September 2022

The term “doomscrolling” refers to surfing the internet, including social media, in search of bad news — and the subject could be anything from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to climate change to White nationalist terrorism in the United States. During the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021, coronavirus-related doomscrolling was common.

The journal Health Communication recently published a study on doomscrolling, which — according to researchers Bryan McLaughlin, Melissa R. Gotlieb and Devin J. Mills — can lead to greater anxiety, higher levels of stress and worse physical and mental health.

Reporting on the study in an article published by The Guardian on September 5, journalist Caitlin Cassidy explains, “There’s no shortage of bad news in the media to ‘doomscroll,’ from a global pandemic to the war in Ukraine and an impending climate crisis, but new research suggests the compulsive urge to surf the web can lead to poor mental and physical health outcomes. Doomscrolling is the tendency to ‘continue to surf or scroll through bad news, even though that news is saddening, disheartening or depressing’ — a practice researchers found has boomed since the onset of the pandemic.”

Roughly 1100 people were surveyed for the report, and 16.5 percent of them showed signs of “severely problematic” news consumption — leading to, Cassidy notes, “greater levels” of “stress, anxiety and poor health.”

According to McLaughlin, “For these individuals, a vicious cycle can develop in which, rather than tuning out, they become drawn further in, obsessing over the news and checking for updates around the clock to alleviate their emotional distress. But it doesn’t help, and the more they check the news, the more it begins to interfere with other aspects of their lives.”

McLaughlin found that severe doomscrolling is more “widespread” than the researchers expected and that “a lot of people appear to be experiencing significant amounts of anxiety and stress due to their news consumption habits.”

Cassidy notes that the most “problematic” doomscrollers, according to the report, “demonstrate a more compulsive obsession with the media, and struggle to detach themselves from the bad news they’re reading.”

“These respondents scored high on five problematic news consumption dimensions listed by the researchers: becoming absorbed in news content, being preoccupied with thoughts about the news, attempting to reduce anxiety by consuming more news, finding it difficult to avoid the news and having news consumption interfere in their daily life,” Cassidy reports. “And those with higher levels of problematic news consumption were ‘significantly more likely’ to experience poor mental and physical health, the survey found, even when controlling for demographics, personality traits, and overall news use.”

Cassidy adds, “If those with severely problematic consumption levels, 74 percent reported experiencing mental health problems, and 61 percent reported physical problems compared to 8 percent and 6.1 percent of all other study participants.”

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