Doomscrolling is continuing to read bad news past the point of information: scrolling a feed of catastrophe long after it has stopped telling you anything, because stopping feels worse than continuing. The word appeared on Twitter around 2018, spread worldwide in March 2020 during the first pandemic lockdowns, was named a word of the year by the end of 2020 and entered the major dictionaries in 2023. This explainer covers what Doomscrolling means, where the word came from, its siblings (Bed Rotting, Brainrot, Dopamine Detox, Touch Grass, Digital Detox), what the research does and does not show, and the handful of practical steps that actually work.
The dictionary's definition is short, and adds that it is "the rare coinage that named a behaviour people already recognised in themselves". That is the reason it stuck. Most internet words describe something new; this one described something everyone had been doing for years without a name.
What doomscrolling means
The word is "doom" plus "scrolling", and the definition has two parts. The content is bad: news of disaster, illness, war, politics, the climate, or simply other people arguing. And the behaviour is compulsive: you keep going past the point of learning anything, usually late at night, usually in bed, usually while telling yourself you will stop after one more. The feeling afterwards is the diagnostic sign. Reading the news leaves you informed; doomscrolling leaves you worse and no better informed than an hour earlier.
The variant "doomsurfing" exists for the same thing done on a browser, and never caught on, because the behaviour belongs to the phone. Three features of the modern feed make it possible. The For You Page and its equivalents serve content you did not ask for, from people you do not follow, and are good at guessing what will keep you there. The Algorithm learns that fear holds attention better than calm. And the feed has no bottom: infinite scroll, introduced on social platforms around 2010, removed the natural stopping point that a last page used to provide.
Where the word came from
The earliest known uses are on Twitter in 2018, where "doomscrolling" appeared as a self-description among journalists and heavy news readers. It stayed rare until March 2020, when the pandemic put half the world indoors with a phone and a feed of infection counts. The word went from niche to universal in a few weeks, helped by a finance journalist, Karen Ho, who posted nightly reminders to stop doomscrolling and go to bed, which thousands of people replied to as if she were a lighthouse.
The dictionaries moved fast by their standards. Merriam-Webster listed it among its "words we're watching" in 2020; the Macquarie Dictionary in Australia named it the committee's word of the year for 2020; Oxford Languages, which declined to choose a single word for 2020, put it in its report on the year's vocabulary. Merriam-Webster added "doomscroll" to the dictionary proper in September 2023. The dictionary you are reading dates the word to 2018 and marks it alive, which it is; it is one of the few pandemic coinages still used without irony.
The sibling words
Doomscrolling has a family, and the family tells the story of how people talk about their phones.
The diagnoses. Chronically Online and Terminally Online (both 2020) describe being so online that your opinions no longer make sense offline; the dictionary notes that it suffers from the condition itself. Brainrot (2023) is content optimised past the point of meaning and the state of having consumed it, and the first internet term that is also a self-diagnosis; Oxford made it word of the year in 2024. FOMO, from 2004, is the older, milder ancestor, the fear of missing out that keeps you refreshing. Screen Time (Shame) is the weekly report from the phone itself, posted as a confession.
The bed. Bed Rotting (2023) is staying in bed all day, rebranded as wellness, named by TikTok and gone within a year. Goblin Mode, deliberate, unapologetic squalor, was Oxford's word of the year in 2022 and died the moment the press release went out. Both are doomscrolling's natural habitat described as a lifestyle choice. Sleepmaxxing (2024) is the opposite reflex: optimising sleep with mouth tape, magnesium and a ban on screens until going to bed becomes a project.
The cures. Digital Detox (2012) is not looking at your phone, sold as a retreat you could book; fading because nobody completes one. Dopamine Detox (2019) is abstaining from all stimulation for a day to "reset" a reward system, a Silicon Valley practice criticised by neuroscientists for describing nothing that dopamine does. The Dumb Phone, a joke name from 2010, became by 2024 a considered purchase by people who had read a book about attention. And Touch Grass (2020), the instruction to go outside issued to anyone whose position could only have been formed indoors, is the most efficient insult of the decade and, as advice, correct.
The counter-genres. Hopecore (2023) is edits of strangers helping strangers, cut to swelling music, TikTok's designed antidote to doom. Corecore (2022) is unrelated clips over sad piano until they mean something, which is doomscrolling turned into an art form. Neither stopped anyone scrolling.
What the research says, and does not
There is a body of research on doomscrolling now, most of it from 2021 onward, and it is worth being precise about what it shows. Survey-based studies in several countries have found that people who report more doomscrolling also report more anxiety, lower life satisfaction, worse sleep and, in some samples, a stronger sense that the world is unjust or unsafe. Studies of news consumption during the pandemic found that heavy exposure to crisis coverage was associated with worse mood on the same day.
What the research does not show, yet, is direction. Almost all of it is correlational and self-reported: anxious people may doomscroll more, rather than the other way round, and most likely both are true. Sample sizes are often small and drawn from students. There is no agreed clinical definition, no validated threshold at which reading the news becomes doomscrolling, and no evidence that the word describes a disorder rather than a habit. The honest summary is that doomscrolling is reliably associated with feeling worse, that people can recognise it in themselves, and that the mechanism is probably the ordinary one: bad news plus sleep loss plus no stopping point.
Two findings are more solid than the rest. Late-night phone use is associated with poorer sleep in study after study, independent of content. And people are bad at estimating how long they have been scrolling; the screen-time report is almost always higher than the guess.
One more caveat. The studies measure doomscrolling by asking people whether they do it, and the word itself changes the answer: once a behaviour has a name, people report it more, which is part of why the numbers rose so sharply between 2020 and 2022. The rise in the word is not the same as a rise in the behaviour, and nobody has yet measured the second thing directly.
How to stop doomscrolling
The methods that work are not clever, which is why they work. They remove the conditions rather than relying on willpower at 1 a.m.
Give the feed a bottom. Follow specific sources rather than a For You feed for news, and read them at a fixed time: once in the morning, once in the early evening, not in bed. A newsletter or a news site's front page has an end; a feed does not.
Put the phone somewhere else at night. The single most effective step in the research on sleep is charging the phone outside the bedroom. If that is impossible, the settings help: a scheduled Do Not Disturb, greyscale mode after a certain hour (colour is part of what holds attention), and app limits that require a deliberate override.
Notice the diagnostic feeling. The definition is "past the point of information". The question to ask, when you notice you are scrolling, is whether the last ten minutes told you anything you could act on. If the answer is no, that is the moment to stop, and the recognition itself is most of the cure.
Replace, do not just remove. People who stop scrolling and sit in silence go back to scrolling. A book, a podcast, a walk, a person: the old advice about touching grass is unkind in tone and right in substance.
Mute, do not detox. A weekend without a phone does nothing on Monday. Muting the accounts, words and topics that reliably produce the feeling is a small permanent change and beats a large temporary one.
Finally, accept the limit of the word. Doomscrolling named a behaviour; it did not invent one. People read the whole newspaper during wars too. The difference now is that the newspaper never ends, and the fix is to build the ending yourself.
FAQ
What does doomscrolling mean?
Continuing to scroll through bad news or upsetting content on a phone long past the point where it tells you anything, usually compulsively and usually at night. The word combines "doom" and "scrolling".
Who coined the word doomscrolling?
No single person. The earliest known uses are on Twitter around 2018. It became common in March 2020 during the pandemic, and the journalist Karen Ho became associated with it through her nightly reminders to stop.
Is doomscrolling in the dictionary?
Yes. Merriam-Webster added "doomscroll" in September 2023, after listing it as a word to watch in 2020. Macquarie Dictionary named it word of the year for 2020.
Is doomscrolling bad for your mental health?
Studies since 2021 consistently find that people who doomscroll more report more anxiety, worse sleep and lower wellbeing. The research is mostly correlational, so it cannot prove doomscrolling causes these, but the association is reliable.
What is the difference between doomscrolling and brain rot?
Doomscrolling is compulsively reading bad news; brain rot is consuming low-quality content until it affects how you think. One is about dread, the other about mush. Both are done on the same phone at the same hour.
