What can start innocently, ‘I have had a busy day at uni’, ‘I have been in the library basically all day’, ‘I have been writing this essay for 2 hours straight, I will just check my phone’, can quickly become something more. ‘I’ll just respond to this message’ can become an hour of news headlines, relationship advice videos, and life updates from complete strangers online. Your sleep is delayed, your eyes feel strained and your brain is overloaded, unable to slow down.
This is doomscrolling.
Spending excessive amounts of time online watching short form video content, and intaking large quantities of user generated content is called doomscrolling, and is far more common than you would first realise. And with keeping up with the news a task simpler than ever before, thanks to 24/7 access to information with social media, it is easy to get sucked into negative headlines for extensive periods of time.
Doomscrolling describes the habit of continuous consumption, something that can devastate our wellbeing as it can lead to feelings of intense overwhelm. It entails consuming negative content online, even when it makes us feel worse, made all too easy on platforms like Instagram and TikTok, where algorithms are designed to keep us emotionally engaged for as long as possible.
University students tend to be increasingly vulnerable to it, but why? Well, university life comes with the pressures of deadlines, finances and future career anxiety. Add to this constant access to other people’s seemingly perfect lives on social media, and insight into various global crises, and students can become mentally drained before the day has even begun. Unlike previous generations, we are navigating the transition to adulthood with 24/7 exposure to news, comparison and commentary. Doomscrolling typically occurs first thing in the morning or late at night just before bed, in the moments when our mind is most vulnerable, and this can affect our sleep, motivation, and mood.
For many of us, it is not just the negative news headlines that suck us in. Instead, you may be watching other people succeed online, whilst you feel stuck. It could be videos on productivity culture making you feel as though you aren’t nearly doing enough. It can be absorbing break up content when you’re already dealing with heartbreak.
One of the reasons doomscrolling is hard to control, is that it gives the impression of feeling productive, as it makes you feel as though you are staying connected and informed. However, emotionally, it can lead to increased anxiety, difficulty concentrating on university work due to the easily accessible distractions, and lowered self-esteem through comparison. In addition, seeing everyone else glued to their phone has normalised this kind of behaviour, making it even harder to recognise and challenge.
In reality, we cannot just delete our social media entirely, but there are boundaries you can put in place to help avoid doomscrolling behaviours.
- Avoid scrolling first thing in the morning, or just before bed
- Mute or unfollow accounts that spike anxiety
- Set app limits
- Replace late night doomscrolling with something grounding, such as reading or journaling
- Curate your feed with content that will inspire you
Doomscrolling is an easy habit to pick up, due to the design features of modern social media platforms. Recognising habits and patterns is powerful. Paying attention to how content makes you feel and responding to these feelings is important, as we as students already have enough pressure to process, without the additional stress of our feeds.