OK, that's probably a bit of an overstatement, but most people would agree we're living in interesting times. For those of us who who start our days by reading the odd news source or twelve, those interesting times can make the whole exercise feel overwhelming. Particularly if a few of those sources are social media, where the ease with which you are moved from one story to another, slightly worse, variation on the theme makes putting down the device a harder exercise than it should be.
Baudelaire's description of doomscrolling, 1860s-style, could equally apply to the 2020s. "Every newspaper, from the first line to the last, is nothing but a tissue of horrors. Wars, crimes, thefts, licentiousness, torture, crimes of princes, crimes of nations, individual crimes, an intoxicating spree of universal atrocity. And it’s this disgusting aperitif that the civilised man consumes at breakfast each morning … ."
For many people, this pre-breakfast news consumption is necessary for their work. It also tends to be something they enjoy and, arguably, an awareness of current affairs is something all conscientious citizens should maintain. But how do you avoid the excessive time with increasingly negative content that is the definition of doomscrolling?
Five tips to stop doomscrolling (or at least manage it)
Try to form habits which will give you time to recuperate by creating distance from anxiety-causing stressors within your news consumption. This could include choosing to jump online only at certain times - perhaps at breakfast, and then once more at the end of your day. Or, if your role requires you to be across current events, identify a couple of trusted sources that can offer a summary of the key information, and leave the deep dives for a limited time each evening. The temptation of a late-night flick through social media, which ends up with you still hunched over the phone at 3am, can be hard to resist, so make it easier on future you by leaving your devices outside the bedroom.
While it’s important to ensure you’re reading trustworthy, reliable information, thinking critically may no longer be enough. Critical ignoring means choosing what to ignore and where to invest your limited attention. Cognitive strategies for critical ignoring include self-nudging, the selective removal of sources and materials from the digital environment; lateral reading, fact-checking by verifying information elsewhere ; and the do-not-feed-the-trolls heuristic, which sees most of us trying (not always successfully) to avoid giving attention to bad actors.
Game the algorithm
Choose to follow pages and people on social media with more positive stories. That doesn't mean fluffy kitten pages (although that wouldn't be the worst thing) but it could mean museums or galleries, philosophy or science pages, public figures like David Attenborough or Brian Cox, or pages about trees - they exist. You can also throw the odd like to posts with more positive content. It doesn't mean you can't also continue with your current content, but it'll help change what the algorithm sends your way. We have some more tips here to help you cultivate your feed. The occasional hard prune of who and what you follow is good practice too. What served a purpose at a point in time might not be serving you so well now.
In a recent interview the actor talked about turning off the colours on his phone, the notifications and the sounds. One of the ways to break bad habits, and the cycle of cue-craving-response-reward, is to make the cue invisible. Without the bright colours, and audio and visual prompts, a phone and its lure is more easily resisted. This change in settings might not be permanent, but it might help break the long-term learned Pavlovian habits of reaching for your device every time it lights up, pings or vibrates. And if you do return to the full suite of colour and movement, you'll at least be more likely to notice your reactions to its prompts.
Where are your shoulders - up around your ears? That's not good. Nor is a racing heart, more shallow or faster breathing, a hunched position or general feeling of rage, anxiety or sadness. All of these are signs that the content you're consuming is having a deleterious impact on you. Stand up, switch off and move around. Consciously choose to read or watch something very different and positive or at least neutral, like a time lapse video of a rare flower blooming. Even better though is to stand up, move around and see what's happening in the world around your desk or couch.
It would be a rare few who could completely and permanently disconnect from the online world, and probably even fewer who would actually want to. A more pragmatic approach is to refine how we engage with digital content, and shape an experience for ourselves which is informative, empowering and even (every now and then) joyful.
Susannah Goddard, 27 January 2025
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