Doomscrolling
The behaviour is older than the word and the older version was studied first. Mean world syndrome was set out in the 1970s. Watch enough violence on television for long enough and the world starts to seem more dangerous than it is. Everything the current term describes was already visible when the delivery mechanism was a broadcast schedule.
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What is new is that the schedule ended and nothing replaced it.
How infinite scrolling removed the stopping cue
The elimination of pagination in favour of continuously loading content is attributed to Aza Raskin, and he has since described it as one of the first products designed not simply to help a user but to deliberately keep them online as long as possible.
That is the mechanism. Pagination provided a stopping cue; a page ended and the reader decided whether to continue. Infinite scrolling removes the decision. People who study usability count a missing stopping cue as an accessibility failure, and the same absence has been named as a route into trouble with phones and with social media alike.
Two other design features compound it. Platforms amplify negative content because it holds attention, and their business models depend on time on site: longer sessions mean more advertisements seen and more behavioural data collected. A 2022 study from the Cyprus University of Technology found news environments increasingly emphasising rapidly evolving high-impact stories, which produces cycles of repeated verification and prolonged scrolling.
What the doomscrolling surveys actually measured
A Morning Consult survey in 2024 found approximately thirty-one per cent of American adults doomscrolling regularly, rising with youth: forty-six per cent of millennials and fifty-one per cent of Gen Z.
The more interesting finding sits beside it. People who initially said they did not doomscroll were subsequently found to be doing it, which is a gap between recognising the word and recognising the behaviour. Self-report is measuring vocabulary as much as conduct.
Research indicates the practice is more common among men, among younger people, and among those who actively follow political events. A 2019 study by the National Academy of Sciences linked it to declines in mental and physical health.
Why it continues once it has started
Three explanations are offered and they are compatible.
Negativity bias is the first: negative events have a larger impact on wellbeing than positive ones, and attention is drawn to potential threats from a baseline of contentment. Jeffrey Hall of the University of Kansas makes that point, and a psychiatrist at the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center gives the evolutionary version, that knowing how a creature could injure an ancestor allowed the fate to be avoided.
The second is the mechanism that keeps the loop closed. Studies show that seeing upsetting news leads people to seek more information on the same topic, which is a self-perpetuating cycle rather than a preference, and the same loop cyberchondria runs on a narrower subject. The clinic director at the Perelman School of Medicine's Center for the Treatment and Study of Anxiety describes the expectation precisely: people have a question, want an answer, assume getting it will help, keep scrolling, and end up feeling worse.
The third is fear of missing out, which has its own numbers. A Statista study in 2013 found more than half of Americans experienced it on social media, with 67 per cent of Italian users reported in 2017 and 59 per cent of Polish teenagers in 2021. Mandliya and colleagues showed in 2024 that users repeatedly refresh news channels to avoid missing rapidly developing events, which converts the fear directly into sustained exposure.
When doomscrolling entered the dictionaries
The origins are unclear and the first documented usage was a tweet in 2018. Credit usually goes to Ashik Siddique, for a tweet that went out the same day.
Dictionary.com had it as their leading trend for the month in August 2020. Macquarie Dictionary gave it their committee's choice for word of the year in 2020. Merriam-Webster recognised it as an official word in September 2023, after three years on its watch list.
The events that carried it are listed in the material and read as a period in themselves:
- the COVID-19 pandemic
- the George Floyd protests
- the 2020 United States presidential election
- the storming of the Capitol in 2021
- the Russian invasion of Ukraine from 2022
- the Gaza war and the wider Middle Eastern crisis from 2023
Why the pandemic made doomscrolling unavoidable
The World Health Organization described the pandemic as accompanied by widespread misleading information, conspiracy theories and false reports, calling it an infodemic.
Phones in that period were called society's main lifeline, and an addictive one, which is the dependence nomophobia names. The dilemma the material identifies is the honest one: users needed timely information and also needed to disengage periodically, and those two demands cannot both be satisfied by a feed with no end.
Told apart
Often confused with Doomscrolling
- Fear of Missing OutFear of missing out is one of the three named explanations for doomscrolling rather than a separate behaviour, and Mandliya and colleagues showed in 2024 how it converts directly into sustained exposure through repeated refreshing.
- Eco-AnxietyDoomscrolling has been discussed in relation to the climate crisis, and the two reinforce each other: the anxiety supplies the reason to keep reading and the reading supplies more anxiety.
- Health Anxiety From Online SearchingCyberchondria is the same loop with a narrower subject. In both, a question is asked in the expectation that an answer will help, and the search continues past the point where it does.
Common questions
Questions about Doomscrolling
- Is there an older version of this?
- Mean world syndrome, described in the 1970s: the belief that the world is more dangerous than it actually is, produced by long-term exposure to violence-related content on television. The behaviour predates the internet. What changed is that a broadcast schedule ended and a feed does not.
- Who invented infinite scrolling?
- It is attributed to Aza Raskin, who eliminated pagination in favour of content that loads continuously. He has since described it as one of the first products designed not simply to help a user but to deliberately keep them online as long as possible. Pagination provided a stopping cue and its removal removed a decision.
- How many people do it?
- A Morning Consult survey in 2024 put it at approximately thirty-one per cent of American adults, rising to forty-six per cent of millennials and fifty-one per cent of Gen Z. The same research found that people who initially said they did not doomscroll were later observed doing it, so the figures measure recognition of the word as much as the behaviour.
- Why does upsetting news make people read more of it?
- Because seeing it prompts seeking more on the same topic, which studies describe as a self-perpetuating cycle. The clinic director at the Perelman School of Medicine's Center for the Treatment and Study of Anxiety puts the expectation plainly: people have a question, want an answer, assume getting it will help, keep scrolling, and end up feeling worse.
- When did it become a real word?
- Progressively. Dictionary.com made it the top monthly trend in August 2020, Macquarie Dictionary named it the 2020 Committee's Choice Word of the Year, and Merriam-Webster recognised it officially in September 2023 after three years on its watch list.
Added 2026-08-23 · Revised 2026-08-26
Nearby in the catalogue
Related entries
- Fear of Missing OutThe 2004 article that named FOMO also named FOBO, fear of a better option. One is about what happens elsewhere, the other about the choice already in hand.
- Eco-AnxietyNot a diagnosis, and the researchers say so before anything else. Two people are credited with the name, and every figure in circulation is self-described.
- Health Anxiety From Online SearchingTwo in five say the web raises their medical anxiety and about half say it lowers it. The condition is a minority outcome of a majority behaviour.
- Distrust of AlgorithmsAlgorithm aversion is rejecting from a system the advice you would take from a person. It reverses by task, which is what makes it a judgement rather than a fear.
- Fear of Being Without a PhoneThe Oxford English Dictionary records nomophobia from 1803, meaning fear of laws. The phone version is a portmanteau produced by a survey in 2008.
- Fear of ChemicalsBy weight, 99.99 per cent of the pesticides in a diet are grown by the plants, and twenty-nine of the fifty-seven natural ones tested cause cancer in rodents.