“Hi, are you doomscrolling? Our bodies were not designed to be anxious and stressed for this long.”
Back in the very anxious year of 2021, a friendly little bot on Twitter — the Doomscrolling Reminder Bot — came along to offer mindfulness reminders like this. Created just after doomscrolling became the 2020 word of the year, the Doomscrolling Reminder Bot soon became a kind of anxiety index. It gained its largest bump in followers during Elon Musk’s chaotic takeover of Twitter.
The Bot quit posting new content in 2023, as a lot of the service’s less chaotic creators were heading for the exits; even so, its follower count has never dipped below 100,000 Twitter users.
These days, however, you don’t need a bot to tell you you’re doomscrolling. If you’re on social media at all, you’re doomscrolling. With nightmare fuel coming thick and fast, with trolls in charge of the news cycle, even an aggregator like Google News or Apple News offers potential for doomscrolling. Heck, any feed featuring multiple photos of the world’s richest man doing a, uh, “Roman salute” practically screams doomscroll!
And in 2025, even a cursory check in on Facebook — where Mark Zuckerberg has long been trying to lower the algorithmic importance of news stories — can turn into an hour of sad rubbernecking as your family appears to tear itself apart.
You might think you have more productive ways to spend your time — at least, if you have any hope of being part of the solution. You’d be right. The main reason we doomscroll, as psychotherapist Tess Brigham puts it, is that it’s a “way of feeling in control in a world that feels out of control all the time.”
You’ve been getting self-care all wrong. It’s a political act and always has been.
But after a certain point, you’re not informing yourself; you’re filling your head with images and worries that may disturb your sleep and thus make you feel more ragged the next day. A world on fire needs you at your best; the world does not need you to obsess over bad things or their potential to get worse.
Deny the doomscroll
So if the mere nudges of a mindfulness bot can’t prevent us from filling our tanks on nightmare fuel, how to stop?
Like trying to break any compulsive smartphone-based behavior that delivers dopamine to your brain — also known as a habit — ending the doomscroll is not as easy as it sounds. I quit Twitter on election night (and decided on a conscious effort to avoid as much news as possible through the end of 2024), but for days after that it was touch-and-go: I would often catch my finger hovering over that awful X icon in my iPhone’s “Communication” folder, one I open all the time.
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