"Doomscrolling," or consuming sad and devastating news, increases anxiety, often without you realizing it.
Something so many people do every day: You lie down in bed, turn off the lights , and grab your phone to check Twitter or Facebook one more time.
You see that the toxicity from the COVID-19 has increased, perhaps your children cannot return to school, while the economy is in collapse.
Still, you may browse endless news of doom and gloom for hours, sinking into despair without realizing it.
This self-destructive behavior has become so common that a new word has entered our lexicon to easily characterize it: "doomscrolling."
The recent wave of devastating news related to the coronavirus, combined with safety measures and lockdowns, has fueled our tendency to read bad news. But this habit is eroding our mental health, according to experts.
Karen Ho, a financial reporter at Quartz, has been tweeting about doomscrolling every day for the past few months, often accompanying them with a motivation to get people to stop and seek out healthier alternatives.
Ho first saw the term in a Twitter from October 2018, although the word may have originated much earlier.
"The habit of doomscrolling is almost a normalized behavior for many journalists, so when I saw the term I thought, 'Oh, this is a habit I've had for several years,'" he says.
If Ho's daily reminders on Twitter aren't enough to break this habit, clinical psychologist Dr. Amelia Aldao warns that doomscrolling traps us in a "vicious cycle of negativity" that fuels our anxiety.
«The mind is programmed to look for threats. The more time we spend scrolling, the more dangers we find, the more absorbed we are, the more anxious we become.»
This sad content can then put a dark filter on how you see the world, Aldao said.
«You look around, and everything seems bleak, everything makes you worry, and you go back to look for more information.»
Aldao , Director of Together CBT , a clinic specializing in cognitive behavioral therapy, has worked with her patients to reduce doomscrolling.
Check out some of her tips on how to curb this destructive habit:
Set a timer
«I work primarily with clients who are stressed, and part of what I do with them for weeks, or months, is actually set limits on the amount of time they have to scroll. And I literally tell them, ‘Set a timer.’”
You want to learn what's going on in the world, so the solution isn't to never go online again, but to set boundaries and not succumb to doomscrolling.
Stay informed
«"Open your phone by reminding yourself why you're doing it, what you're looking for, what information you're trying to find. And then, regularly do a self-check, asking yourself if you've found what you were looking for."
Change “vicious cycles” to “positive cycles”
"Whether it's ice cream, hanging out with friends, sending a funny text to a friend, these are the things we need to spend more time on in order to build positive emotions in our lives."
Combine Aldao's advice, create a schedule, find more productive habits, and doomscrolling will slowly "break".
