There is no shortage of bad news in the media for doomscrolls, from a global pandemic to the war in Ukraine to a looming climate crisis, but new research suggests that the compulsive need to surf the web can lead to poor mental and physical health outcomes.
Doomscrolling is the tendency to “keep browsing or scrolling through bad news, even if that news is sad, disheartening, or depressing,” a practice the researchers found has burst since the start of the pandemic.
The study, published in the journal Health Communication, found that 16.5% of some 1,100 people surveyed showed signs of “severely problematic” news consumption, leading to higher levels of stress, anxiety and health problems.
Associate Professor Bryan McLaughlin, lead author of the study and a researcher at Texas Tech University, said the 24-hour news cycle could trigger a “constant state of high alert” in some people, making the world seem like “a dark and dangerous. place”.
“For these people, a vicious cycle can develop where instead of switching off, they dig deeper, obsessing over the news and looking for updates 24 hours a day to ease their emotional distress,” he said.
“But it doesn’t help, and the more they check the news, the more it starts to interfere with other aspects of their lives.”
Some 27.3% of respondents reported “moderately problematic” levels of news consumption, 27.5% were minimally affected, and 28.7% experienced no problems at all.
While some readers can comfortably receive news updates with no tangible psychological effects, others demonstrate a more compulsive obsession with the media and struggle to distance themselves from the bad news they are reading.
These respondents scored high on five problematic dimensions of news consumption listed by the researchers: being engrossed in news content, being preoccupied with thoughts about the news, trying to reduce anxiety by consuming more news, having difficulty avoiding news and that news consumption interferes. in your daily life.
And those with higher levels of problematic news consumption were “significantly more likely” to experience mental and physical health problems, the survey found, even when demographics, personality traits and general news use were controlled for.
Of those with severely problematic drinking levels, 74% reported experiencing mental health problems and 61% reported physical problems compared to 8% and 6.1% of all other study participants.
“We anticipated that a sizeable portion of our sample would show signs of problematic news consumption. However, we were surprised to find that 17% of study participants had the most severe level,” said McLaughlin.
“This is certainly worrying and suggests that the problem may be more widespread than we expected. Many people seem to be experiencing significant amounts of anxiety and stress due to their news consumption habits.”
Dr. Kate Mannell, a media studies researcher at Deakin University in the Australian state of Victoria, said Covid-19 made the public “more inclined” to engage in doomscrolling due to the amount of bad news , along with additional free time.
Mannell studied the impact of news consumption on Victorians affected by strict Covid-19 lockdowns in 2020. He found partial news evasion was beneficial for the well-being of the surveyed participants, who reported being less distracted and calmer at home.
“People weren’t completely avoiding it, but they were taking conscious steps to limit their news consumption after realizing [it] it had become unhealthy,” he said.
“They found strategic ways to stay informed … by doing a longer news engagement or going directly to public health.”
Mannell said that for news addicts the key was to recognize when it became unhealthy, rather than encouraging people to completely disconnect from the media.
“We are in an unstable world,” he said.
“We are going to have increasingly greater climatic catastrophes: the crisis contexts around Covid will be more frequent.
“Being stressed and anxious is a legitimate natural reaction to the world around you, but it’s important… people can gauge when [news consumption] it becomes troublesome.”
