Why is doomscrolling so hard to stop?

You open your phone to check one thing.

A few minutes later, you're still scrolling.

There is no particular reason to continue. There is simply something new appearing every few seconds.

This is one of the defining patterns of modern internet use, and researchers have started giving it a name: doomscrolling.

But what exactly is doomscrolling? And why can it feel so difficult to stop?

What the research says

Doomscrolling is a relatively new subject in psychological research. One of the early efforts to study it systematically was a 2023 paper that developed and validated a Doomscrolling Scale.

Across three studies, researchers examined doomscrolling in relation to personality, social-media use, fear of missing out, psychological distress, and wellbeing. They found significant associations between doomscrolling and several of these factors. PubMed Citation ↗

That does not mean doomscrolling causes poor mental health. The study was largely examining relationships between variables. That's an important distinction.

A later two-wave longitudinal study of 301 adolescents in Turkey provides another piece of the puzzle. Researchers found that social-media addiction at the first measurement was associated with later doomscrolling. They did not find that earlier doomscrolling significantly predicted later social-media addiction. PubMed Citation ↗

The direction of these relationships is therefore more complicated than the usual internet narrative suggests.

Why does the behavior continue?

One possibility is that modern feeds remove many of the natural stopping points that existed in older forms of media.

• A newspaper has a final page.
• A television episode ends.
• A book has chapters.

An infinite feed simply presents another item.

That doesn't mean every infinite feed creates problematic use. But it does mean the user is repeatedly presented with another opportunity to continue. And when the next item could be interesting, useful, funny, surprising, or emotionally relevant, there is always a reason to check one more time.

The problem with "just use willpower"

Telling someone to simply stop scrolling assumes that the important decision happens when they consciously decide whether to continue.

Often, the more interesting moment happens earlier: Why did they continue without making a decision at all?

That is where friction becomes interesting. A small interruption can create a gap between:

That gap is one of the core ideas behind Dedoom.

What Dedoom takes from this research

Dedoom isn't designed around the idea that everyone needs to stop using social media. The goal is narrower: make automatic use a little less automatic.

That can mean hiding highly distracting content, introducing a pause, asking what you intended to do, or simply making the next action more conscious.

The research on doomscrolling is still developing. So is our understanding of what works. That's precisely why we think digital wellbeing should be approached as a behavioral design problem rather than a morality test.

Sources: Satici et al., Applied Research in Quality of Life; Akat & Hamarta, Journal of Addictive Diseases.