I may have had a doomscrolling relapse this week.
As we have discussed, I’ve been pretty jazzed about getting the kids back in school and myself back into a routine. On an ordinary week, a good week, that routine includes exactly seventeen minutes of Morning Edition on the drive home—on live radio, so I can’t pause, rewind, or carry it into the house with me. Seventeen minutes is just enough news, I find, to make me feel both reasonably well-informed and well-balanced by the dulcet tones of A Martinez.
On a bad week—this week—I decide those seventeen minutes need a little boost.
It starts innocuously enough. I simply put on headphones for my walk. Just a current events podcast or two, I say. Next, it’s just a quick glimpse through the socials to see what a few other news outlets are saying. Then it’s just reading a comment or two. Then it’s following what another reporter said in response, then it’s reading a counterpoint or two or a thousand.
Then, six hours later, it’s emerging bleary-eyed from an endless dust cloud of unfiltered mass opinion and despair.
Then it’s on to the next story.
There’s a fine line, approximately the width of mouse dental floss (now with 50% less mice!), between being appropriately informed and being paralyzingly informed, and all I need to go sailing over it is my Twitter password and a dream.
It’s not just me. Perhaps you already know this, but doomscrolling—an addiction to consuming distressing news—is walking much of society to the edge of a mental health cliff.
What gets me is that I, too, already know this. I listen to Hidden Brain. I know my anxiety walks arm in arm with the amount of information I get, and that the comfort I’m looking for will never, ever be at the end of that two-finger slide up the trackpad.
Perhaps, like me, you already know that social media platforms operate on the same principles as a slot machine. We aren’t addicted to the content so much as we’re addicted to the hope of getting better content. There are chemicals around risk and reward in there, too, along with social validation and, of course, algorithms that know which pair of 5-pocket bike shorts you’re going to buy before you do.
But at least where doomscrolling is concerned, in the upward movement of your thumb, you’re hoping for relief. Yes, the past 300 posts have been about humanitarian and climate disasters, but if you just had one more scroll, JUST ONE MORE DAMN IT, you’d get lucky and hit a Golden Retriever picture. Or you’d land on someone who gives you enough information to feel in control. Except when you do, it’s never enough to offset the rest of it, and so you keep scrolling, a Sisyphean search for more boops and more reassurance.
I know this. And I keep doing it anyway.
Compounding the problem is that, like perfectionism and overworking and other first-world afflictions, doomscrolling is an easy habit to rationalize. It’s not, after all, a bad thing to be informed, nor to be flooded with empathy and concern in the face of a human crisis. We need to know and we need to feel.
We just don’t need to know and feel endlessly.
I don’t have the solution to this problem, as it seems to be one of those poor choices I conquer, forget about, and then relapse into in an endless cycle, probably because tech companies are paying people bajillions of dollars to ensure that I do so.
However, I did like the advice from psychologist Ariane Ling on The Current to ask yourself, as your fingernails fill with the dirt of your latest rabbit hole, “Sooo…what would I be doing if I wasn’t doomscrolling right now?”
Even as more heartbreaking news unfolds in Afghanistan and Haiti, even as the ICU beds fill in the American South, even as my fingers twitch for the infinite scroll, that advice has helped me remember that my control over these events is little to zero. It helped me remember to donate, pray, and then take a deep breath and look out a window. It helped me remember to hit golf balls, reread a few chapters of Big Magic, and throw a tennis ball for the dog. It helped me put on mascara and go to my writing group this morning.
It helped me remember how to be a person and not simply a user.
Our brains evolved to process but a fraction of the information we have access to in a day, and basically, the more we take in, the worse we function. We’re just not meant to doomscroll or even joyscroll, honestly. We’re mostly meant to be, as Jerry Seinfeld says, walkin’ around, lookin’ around.
Perhaps, unlike me, you have this one under control. Perhaps you are able to resist the siren song of your phone without tying yourself to the mast of a ship. If so, good for you, and please tell me how you do it.
If not, get yourself a good site blocking Chrome extension and come sit next to me. We picked a hell of a week to quit doomscrolling, but honestly, when the news cycle is more of an infinity symbol and you carry the information stream of every human on earth in your pocket, what week isn’t?
We can do it. Now stand up, take a few steps, and go look around. I’ll see you out there, unless I’m looking at my phone.
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