digital wellbeing
Doomscrolling
Compulsively scrolling negative news long past the point of usefulness — a designed behavior, not a personal failing.
Doomscrolling is the compulsive consumption of negative news far past the point of usefulness — refreshing feeds about crises you cannot affect, feeling worse with every swipe, and continuing anyway.
It is a designed behavior, not a personal failing: negativity captures attention (an old evolutionary bias), and infinite feeds remove every natural stopping point. The combination is a machine for anxious engagement. Countermeasures in ascending strength: scheduled news windows, deleting news apps, and carrying a device that physically cannot scroll — at which point news becomes something you seek rather than something that happens to you.
Related Terms
View all →Digital detox
A deliberate reset of your relationship with screens — done well, environment redesign rather than temporary abstinence.
Infinite scroll
A feed that loads forever, removing every natural stopping point — the design pattern that turns checking into losing an hour.
Variable reward
The slot-machine trick — unpredictable rewards — that makes checking your phone compulsive by design.