What Happens When You Stop Doomscrolling

A note on mental health.

Right now, I’m thinking about the last time I tried to have a serious conversation about any of the things with one of my best friends.

About that friend:

Like me, she’s a professor (or a former professor). We’ve known each other for going on twenty years. We’ve been friends since grad school. We had classes together. We went to conferences together. We even read each other’s dissertations, the academic version of an unbreakable blood pact.

We traveled to see each other. Our kids played together. She held my daughter when she was a baby. For most of that time, we could talk about anything. We could talk shop. We could trade academic gossip. We could trash talk our bosses. But as I learned, there’s one thing we couldn’t discuss:

Climate change.

Last year, we were talking about why I was quitting my job and moving. To everyone I knew, it sounded like a sudden decision. They wanted to know why I was leaving academia. They wanted to know why I was relocating to a specific place in the country, without necessarily trying to find a job first. It felt like I owed my friends a real, thoughtful explanation. The moment I mentioned the climate crisis, an intense silence settled over the phone. It was immediately apparent that I’d crossed some kind of red line. I kept waiting for her to say something…

Anything…

The silence lingered. It was even worse than those moments when you toss out a question to your students, and they just sit there.

So, I changed the subject.

The conversation recovered. We started talking about universal healthcare and living wages for grad students and teaching assistants. We talked about it at length. We talked about colleagues leaving the field over low pay.

The same thing has happened with every single one of my other close friends, people I’ve known since college. It’s not just when I try to talk about the planet. Our conversations preclude a range of subjects. It’s a lesson in limits. Even our kindest, smartest, most liberal, most progressive friends aren’t dealing with the core problems we’re facing. They don’t want to talk about any of it.

That’s why some of us started “doomscrolling.”

We were looking for friends.

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Every now and then, it’s a good idea to take off your doom goggles for a minute and drive around the greater internet.

You learn a lot.

You see what our fellow citizens really want to think about. I’m not talking about posts that might net a few hundred likes. I’m talking about the influencers here and elsewhere getting tens of thousands of likes every day, for posting about flowers, yoga, and diet routines. I’ve got no problem with most of that content, but it bothers me that we’re collectively consuming it to the exclusion of other important topics. A lot of Americans aren’t talking about affordable housing or living wages at all. They’re not talking about the homelessness crisis at all. They’re not talking about public health or eugenics at all. They’re not talking about immigration or geopolitics at all. At best, they’re talking about artificial intelligence, a little bit.

They live on a different planet.

When you cruise the greater internet, you see how the term “doomscrolling” has evolved from a joke to a mental health condition. You’d think it was listed in the DSM-5-TR, but it’s not. It’s just one more word that’s been appropriated and twisted to fit a convenient neoliberal narrative.

For years now, lifestyle influencers have encouraged their followers to stop consuming the news. They tell everyone it’s bad for our mental health to be informed about what’s going on in the world. They condition their fans to believe they can’t do anything about it, so they should simply tune out. Instead, they should focus on their own personal health and happiness. If they’re worried about slipping into poverty, they should focus on building their own wealth.

They tell us it’s futile to engage in politics, even though politicians make decisions that impact every inch of our lives.

The last few years in particular, we’ve seen an unprecedented surge in personal health, personal wellness, personal finance, and personal spirituality. You could almost think of it as a sixth estate. You have the clergy, the nobility, the commoners, the mainstream media, and the alternative media.

Then you have the lifestyle estate.

In fact, some cultural theorists have already started using this term to describe the digital media platforms and their algorithms that steer public opinion and discourse on… everything. The way I see things, the sixth estate serves the billionaires. They serve the CEOs. They serve the banks. They spout a particular kind of propaganda that encourages everyone to divest from collective orientations toward society and to concentrate on their own selfish pursuits. They immediately pounce on any suggestion that we should pay attention to the news, to politics, or ever think we can change anything other than our own status in the capitalist hierarchies that are killing the planet and our souls.

The sixth estate has convinced the vast majority of Americans to ditch the news and live in a world surrounded by an endless stream of comforting content steeped in nature, yoga poses, and sports cars.

They use the word “doomscrolling” to dismiss any content that might demand we address emergencies before they happen or make us feel empowered to do something about them, even if it’s just writing a letter, calling a senator, or posting your “divisive” opinion online, so the world knows where you stand. The word “doomscrolling” now encompasses a wide range of content that talks about any of our problems with any sense of urgency.

Algorithms suppress that content.

Talk about anything that doesn’t further the agendas of the decider class, and you’re shadow banned, demonetized, suspended.

We see the result:

It might feel like there’s a resistance, but it’s comparatively small to the number of Americans who are completely blissed out.

Until recently, I underestimated how many of our fellow citizens aren’t thinking about anything we consider remotely important.

To them, that’s all doomscrolling.

They’re not even arguing with us anymore. They’re not even trying to convince us the world is going to be okay. Somewhere in there, they know it’s not, but they feel so powerless and depressed about it, they’re just going to self-medicate with enormous amounts of “uplifting” content.

They’ve moved to lala land.

There’s a huge market for this uplifting, distracting content. There’s entire websites and publications now devoted exclusively to offering up media that helps people avoid reality. Not to wag fingers, but some of our supposed allies enabled this descent by dogpiling on the “doomers” and gleefully participating in the public shaming rituals that drove many of us into hiding over the last few years. Now those people are getting a taste of their own medicine, because nobody wants to listen to them anymore either. Suddenly, they’re also too negative.

Now they see how it feels.

Not great.

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The behaviors everyone calls “doomscrolling” have never been about the aimless consumption of bad news. It was always about trying to find information to keep ourselves and our families safe.

We scrolled our phones at night because we were living through dark times, and we weren’t getting the information we needed.

Many of our institutions were, in fact, lying to us about the risks we faced. They’re still doing it, more than ever. The mainstream media has made things even worse, running sensational headlines like, “Is This New Disease Going to Kill You?” only to fall back on the tedious phrase, “there’s no need for panic,” or “the risk remains low for now.” That’s not exactly helpful.

That created the anxiety that kept us up at night.

Nobody would tell us the truth.

So we tried to find it on our phones. We scrolled and scrolled. Some of us found sources and experts who were willing to tell us the truth, even if it wasn’t comforting. They risked their own careers to do it. They pointed us toward scientific journals and helped us learn how to decipher the nerdspeak.

We tried to share that information with our friends. We tried to convey the urgency. We were trying to help them.

Over time, we lost ground to the peddlers of toxic positivity and the comforting lies that everything was going to be fine.

That generated despair.

So we tried to convey that despair. We tried to communicate our emotions, and we got shut down. We got shamed. Still, we scrolled and scrolled. We shared and shared. It might’ve looked like compulsive behavior, but we were desperately looking for like minds, and we found them.

For some of us, we never stopped “doomscrolling.” Those habits matured into social media literacy. We built networks around our fears and anxieties and helped each other learn to manage them, better than any therapist who simply told us to stop reading the news, go outside, and touch grass. We started delving into science, psychology, and history for answers to the questions that kept us up at night. Eventually, we found the answers.

We found a certain kind of peace.

We validated each other.

Now, we don’t have to doomscroll anymore. We know where to find the information the rest of the world doesn’t want to hear. We share it among ourselves. We talk about getting ready for it, practically and emotionally.

For some of us, our mental health improved.

Our mental health didn’t improve because we stopped doomscrolling in favor of more uplifting content, although we make room for that now. It didn’t improve because we stopped talking about the world’s problems. It improved because we built communities online where we don’t feel so isolated, alienated, and judged. We developed habits and skills to process our negative emotions while remaining grounded in the world and oriented toward action.

We’ve stopped bothering our friends, relatives, and coworkers because we found the places and the circles where we can be our real selves. We’ve learned how to look for the signs and wait for when they’re ready to talk.

It took a little while, but we’re here.

We can handle the load now.

Some of us are still working on this, but we’re making progress. We’re getting there. It’s not linear, but it’s healthy.

There’s a difference between what we’ve done and what the rest of the world has done. So many people out there decided to repress and sublimate their fears and anxieties. When you sublimate, you divert emotions and impulses into other areas of your life instead of dealing with them. Anyone who actually understands psychology and mental health knows how disastrous that is.

Burying your emotions doesn’t help you control them.

It puts them in control of you.

Suppression and sublimation only mask the negative emotions we’re feeling. They might make us more productive at work or more pleasant to be around at the dinner table or the dance club. It doesn’t make us happier.

It only makes us miserable.

There’s another term from psychology that helps explain all this. It’s called the third layer of fear, or anticipatory dread. It happens when someone becomes so afraid of something, they don’t even want to think about it anymore. Instead of addressing their fears or doing something about their problems, they develop avoidance behaviors. Eventually, the avoidance behaviors interfere with their lives. It hurts them, in concrete ways.

That’s where the world has gone.

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A few months ago, I had an interesting experience at the DMV. The guy in line behind me fell down twice and couldn’t get up. He grabbed my arm. I tried to help him but he wasn’t saying anything. I asked him if he was okay. I grabbed my phone and started to dial 9-1-1, briefly looking around at everyone else. They were like statues. One person even told me to stop trying to help.

“Let the professionals do that,” he said.

We didn’t use to be like this.

Look at our government. They’re completely giving up on their problems. They tell us every day. They’ve chosen to wallow in denial, while giving our money to billionaires and telling us to look at the pretty flowers.

That’s what the world is doing, blissing out. This blissed out mindset crumbles at the first sign of trouble. It’s making everyone fragile. It’s eroding their ability to engage in acts of compassion, and it’s dissolving their ability to respond to disasters and emergencies. When danger comes for them, when bad things happen, they don’t have the capacity or bandwidth to deal with any of it. They’re having meltdowns, giving up, or trying in vain to save only themselves.

This isn’t just something I’ve made up. I’m seeing this happen in the real world. I’m seeing people stand around and stare with cold indifference when someone falls down on the ground and starts trembling. I’m watching them shut down when you bring up anything that might feel uncomfortable. It’s happening, and it’s going to keep getting worse unless we do something.

We chose a different path.

So, what happens when you stop doomscrolling?

You develop genuine emotional wellness.

You stop being afraid.

You live.