How to stop doomscrolling

The short version: to stop doomscrolling, take the news out of the feed and give it a time and an end. Pick one or two sources that finish (a morning briefing, a weekly paper), read them at a set time, and turn off breaking-news alerts. Then put something that ends, like a book chapter or a walk, in the gaps where you used to scroll.

What doomscrolling is

Merriam-Webster describes it as the feeling when you can’t stop scrolling through posts or news you know will make you sad, anxious or angry. The word was in use on Twitter by October 2018, and it spread in 2020, when there was always another coronavirus headline.

Doomscrolling is mostly about bad news, which sets it apart from ordinary mindless scrolling through videos and memes. If your problem is the second kind, read how to stop mindless scrolling. If it happens mostly in bed, our guide to doomscrolling before bed covers sleep. This page is about the rest of the day: the news check at your desk, the thread you open in a queue, the hour lost after a big story breaks.

What the research links it to

The research is young, and nearly all of it is surveys taken at one point in time. It shows that heavy doomscrolling and poor wellbeing go together. It can’t show which causes which.

• Problematic news consumption. In a 2022 online survey of 1,100 US adults, published in Health Communication, 16.5% showed signs of severely problematic news consumption: they found it hard to stop reading or watching the news, and it got in the way of work or school. Of that group, 73.6% reported mental ill-being “quite a bit” or “very much”, against 8% of everyone else. For physical symptoms like fatigue and poor concentration, it was 61% against 6.1%. The authors note they couldn’t establish the direction of the link, because the data came from a single point in time.
• A doomscrolling scale. Turkish researchers built a questionnaire to measure doomscrolling and tested it in three studies with 378, 419 and 460 adults, mostly in their early twenties. Higher scores went with more psychological distress and lower life satisfaction, mental wellbeing and harmony in life. The correlations were moderate (around 0.3 to 0.4), and the authors point out the design was cross-sectional and self-reported.
• Hours of crisis coverage. After the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings, a national survey of 4,675 US adults found that six or more hours a day of bombing-related media in the following week was associated with more acute stress than having been at or near the marathon. Again, a cross-sectional study: the authors say stressed people may seek out more coverage, so the link may run both ways.

You don’t need a study to tell you how you feel after an hour of it. The research mostly confirms that the people who scroll the most bad news also feel the worst, and that it’s common.

Why bad news is so hard to put down

People tend to react more strongly to negative information than to positive information. Researchers call this negativity bias. In lab experiments with 1,156 people in 17 countries, participants watched real news clips while their skin conductance and heart rate were measured. On average, their bodies reacted more to negative stories than to positive ones. The authors also stress that people varied a lot, so this is a tendency, not a rule.

A feed adds two things to that bias. It has no last item, so nothing tells you that you’re done. And news that is still developing promises an update, so checking again always feels reasonable. Willpower against both of those, many times a day, is a hard fight. The steps below work by changing the setup instead.

Seven ways to stop doomscrolling

1. Give the news a time. Choose one or two short slots, for example 15 minutes after breakfast and 15 after work. Outside those, you don’t check. When you feel the urge, tell yourself you’ll catch up at the next slot. The story will still be there.
2. Choose sources that end. A daily email briefing, a news podcast episode, or a weekly paper or magazine all have a last page. A social feed or a live blog never does. Read the news from a publisher you trust rather than from reactions to it on X or Reddit.
3. Turn off breaking-news alerts. On Android, go to Settings, then Notifications, then App notifications, pick the news app and switch off the categories you don’t need. You can also long-press a notification to reach the same switch. In a study with 221 people, participants reported more inattention and hyperactivity in a week with alerts on and the phone nearby than in a week with alerts off and the phone away.
4. Cap the session, not just the day. Set a timer before you open a news app, and close it when the timer goes off. For a daily limit, Android’s Digital Wellbeing has free app timers: when you run out of time, the app closes and its icon dims until midnight. For many people that is enough.
5. Move the apps. Take news and social apps off your home screen, or log out of them on your phone and keep them for your laptop. Every extra step gives you a moment to decide.
6. Ask what you’ll do with it. Before another refresh, ask whether the next update will change anything you do today. If the answer is no, you can wait for the summary.
7. Replace it with something that ends. Doomscrolling fills small gaps: a bus ride, a queue, the five minutes before a meeting. Have something ready for those gaps that has a last page, like a novel, a crossword or a short walk. Removing a habit leaves a hole, and the feed will fill it if nothing else does.

Swaps that have an ending

Staying informed is fine, and the CDC says as much. Its advice for managing stress is to take breaks from news and social media, because constant information about negative events can be upsetting. You also wouldn’t be alone: in the Reuters Institute’s 2025 survey across 48 markets, 40% of people said they sometimes or often avoid the news, up from 29% in 2017.

When the phone is the problem

If the steps above are enough, you don’t need another app. Free tools and a paper book will do. Some people find that every limit they set gets switched off within a day, because the feed is one tap away and the limit asks nothing of them. That’s the case FirstPage was built for.

• Lock the apps where the scrolling happens. Pick X, Reddit, Instagram, a news app or any other app, and set a daily reading goal in pages or minutes. Until you’ve read today’s goal, opening a locked app shows how many pages are left and a button back to your book.
• Something that ends is already open. The built-in reader opens your own EPUB and PDF files, plus free classics from Project Gutenberg, so the swap in step seven is one tap away.
• Lock everything for a while. When a big story is breaking and you know you’ll keep checking, you can lock your apps on purpose for 30 minutes, an hour or two hours.
• See the trade. Stats show your reading time next to your time on social apps, day by day, so you can tell whether the changes are working.

The lock is optional, and the free version covers two locked apps and one book. FirstPage is on Google Play for Android. There’s no iPhone version yet, but there is a waitlist. If you want to compare options first, see the best reading app blockers or how to reduce screen time on Android.

Sources

• Merriam-Webster, On ‘doomsurfing’ and ‘doomscrolling’.
• McLaughlin, Gotlieb and Mills, Health Communication, 2022. Problematic news consumption and mental and physical ill-being in 1,100 US adults; summary in Taylor & Francis Newsroom.
• Satici et al., Applied Research in Quality of Life, 2023. Doomscrolling Scale: personality, distress, social media use and wellbeing.
• Holman, Garfin and Silver, PNAS, 2014. Media’s role in broadcasting acute stress after the Boston Marathon bombings.
• Soroka, Fournier and Nir, PNAS, 2019. Cross-national evidence of a negativity bias in reactions to news.
• Kushlev, Proulx and Dunn, CHI 2016. “Silence your phones”: notifications, inattention and hyperactivity.
• Google, Control notifications on Android and Digital Wellbeing app timers.
• CDC, Managing stress; Reuters Institute, Digital News Report 2025.

This guide is general information, not medical advice. If news or anxiety is affecting your daily life, talk to a doctor or a mental health professional.