Why Can’t We Stop Doomscrolling? A CAS Conversation with Chris Tripoli
We’ve all been there: a quick check of the news turns into a 45-minute loop of crisis-driven headlines, scary news stories, and outrageous click bait. Welcome to the age of doomscrolling—that irresistible urge to keep scrolling, even when we know it’s not doing us any good.
While the term doomscrolling first gained traction during the COVID-19 pandemic when we were glued to our phones during waves of unsettling news, it doesn’t just refer to bad news, and the behavior hasn’t dissipated. As Department of Psychology Professorial Lecturer Chris Tripoli explains, doomscrolling is less about the tone of the content and more about the behavior involved: a compulsive, often unconscious pattern of consuming endless information, hitting refresh in search of clarity—or control—and only finding more anxiety.
The key problem? Doomscrolling overwhelms us, distracts us, and quietly chips away at our well-being.
In this CAS Conversation, Tripoli breaks down why our brains are so drawn to doomscrolling, how it affects our mental health, and most importantly, how we can begin to break free.
Let’s dig in.
PH: We all know that doomscrolling is compulsive. So, why do we compulsively do something that makes us feel so bad?
CT: Compulsive behaviors share a couple of characteristics. One is a disconnect between “wanting” and “liking.” In other words, we crave these behaviors, but don’t always find them pleasurable in the moment. The behavior is eventually performed not out of enjoyment, but to alleviate anxiety or just to feel “normal.”
Another aspect of compulsive behaviors is an element of insatiability. The high we achieve is never enough and keeps us coming back for more.
PH: Do we doomscroll looking for bad news? Is that really what we’re doing?
CT: Some describe doomscrolling as an addiction to negative information, but I believe this is a little off the mark. The psychological rewards provided by scrolling often include feelings of safety, certainty, and moral righteousness, but due to the nature of the modern news cycles, these highs are few and far between.
Research shows that intermittent rewards are highly addictive (like how the occasional big win motivates chronic gambling), and so we are continuously winding ourselves up on the way to each short-lived relief. By the time good news comes around on our feed, we are desperate for it—but we are more anxious than when we started.
PH: How does social media encourage this behavior?
CT: Social media is supposed to addict us in this way. For these platforms, engagement—measured in clicks, shares, and likes—is the bottom line. Just as humans learn to score cheap pleasure by scrolling online, a social media algorithm learns to give you more of the stuff you keep clicking on. The platform gets better over time at commanding your attention. Further, deliberate design features such as the infinite scroll (the feature that lets users scroll seamlessly through posts rather than clicking through pages) are optimized to keep you locked into the addictive dynamic.
PH: How do we stop this dynamic?
Curate—or Delete—Your Feeds
A middle ground I have personally found useful is to remove social media from my phone. Your phone travels everywhere with you—to the store, the bathroom, on public transit—and is easily accessible for cheap reinforcement. It is probably the first and last thing you look at every day. For me, deleting Facebook, Instagram, and Reddit from my phone has cut my doomscrolling time down substantially and made me more deliberate with my news consumption.
Set Time Limits
If deleting social media is too big an ask, there are more intermediate options available to help people with doomscrolling—and with screen time in general. You can use technology like Apple’s Screen Time feature on iPhones, which lets you track your time scrolling, schedule time away from the screen, and set time limits for app use. Another option is the Flora app, which rewards you by growing virtual trees while your phone is at rest—this exemplifies a highly successful behavior modification strategy known as “Differential Reinforcement of Alternative Behavior (DRA),” which aims to eliminate or reduce maladaptive behaviors by replacing them with adaptive alternatives.
Move Your Phone
Alternatively, you can make a habit of keeping your phone connected to a charging port in a different room to gradually reduce the reflex of grabbing for it every time you are bored or anxious.
Distract Yourself
It is a lot easier to resist problem behaviors when we have alternative rewards available. Getting into a book, talking to friends and family, and exercising are all great ways of broadening your repertoire away from your phone.
PH: And what about the argument that it’s important to know what’s happening in the world at all times?
CT: We’ve reached a point in technological progress that requires us to be very intentional with how we spend our time and attention. Well-informed people used to read the news once a day; this is still an option. (Nowadays, news tends to come at us from all directions, but we can build the skill of not engaging with it more than we intend to).
It also bears mentioning that being informed is not a substitute for active citizenship; endless doomscrolling might never deliver the high it promises, but participating in the improvement of society is much more fulfilling.
About Professor Chris Tripoli
Chris Tripoli is a Professorial Lecturer in ĢƵ’s Department of Psychology. He graduated from Skidmore College in 2013 and received his doctorate in Behavior, Cognition, and Neuroscience from ĢƵ in 2021. He has conducted research into the effects of motivational states on behavior, drug addiction, and related topics. He is passionate about teaching and lectures on memory, learning and conditioning, animal and human cognition, and more.