How to stop doomscrolling

Doomscrolling stops when you decide in advance what time the scrolling will end. A feed, the endless list of posts and headlines that an app shows you, never reaches a last page. So the end has to come from you, and it works better when you set it before you pick up the phone.

1. Time the scrolling. Write down when you started scrolling and when you really stopped.
2. Set a stop time. Choose tonight’s stop time before the evening begins, a little earlier than the time you stopped last night.
3. Give the phone a place. At the stop time, put the phone on a charger in a room you are not in.
4. Plan what comes next. Decide what you will do after the stop time: a book, a show you chose, a walk or sleep. Have it ready before you sit down.

It helps to write the plan down as one sentence in the form “if this, then that”: if it is my stop time and I am still scrolling, then the phone goes on its charger. Psychologists call such a sentence an implementation intention, a plan that names the moment and the action in advance. A review that pooled 94 separate tests found that people who made plans of this form reached their goals more often than people who only intended to reach them (Gollwitzer and Sheeran, 2006).

The rest of this page explains the word, reports what studies of news feeds have found, and then walks through the method with clock times.

Doomscrolling is the habit of scrolling on through bad or upsetting news on a phone, long after the reading has stopped being useful. The word joins “doom” to “scrolling”, the thumb movement that pulls more of a feed up the screen.

The Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary lists doomscrolling as an informal noun. Its entry describes the action of constantly scrolling through and reading depressing news on a news site or on social media, especially on a phone.

Researchers use a similar definition. Sharma, Lee and Johnson (2022), who built a questionnaire to measure the habit, describe doomscrolling as a media habit in which social media users keep paying attention to negative information in their newsfeeds about crises, disasters and tragedies.

Three things follow from those definitions. Doomscrolling is about the feed and the news in it, not about the phone as a whole. The scrolling continues past the point of learning anything new. And doomscrolling is an everyday word, not a medical term, so nobody can be tested for it.

Doom scrolling, written as two words, is the same thing. Watching short, silly videos for hours is a different complaint, which people now call brain rot. The restless, jumpy attention some people report after hours of fast-moving clips and alerts has its own nickname too, popcorn brain.

The word doomscrolling came into wide use in 2020, the first year of the pandemic, when bad news arrived all day and many people were at home with a phone.

The clearest record of that moment is from Oxford Languages, the dictionary arm of Oxford University Press. Oxford normally picks one Word of the Year. For 2020 its editors chose to report on the year’s language more broadly, and published a report called Words of an Unprecedented Year instead (Oxford Languages).

Doomscrolling is one of the words in that report. Oxford lists it among the expressions that “typified the realities of the new normal”, meaning the words that summed up daily life in the pandemic. The report defines doomscrolling as “the action of compulsively scrolling through social media or news feeds which relate bad news”.

Oxford’s report does not say who used the word first, and this page will not guess. What the report does show is that by that year the habit was common enough for people to need one word for it.

Research on doomscrolling is young, and its clearest finding is small and specific: a few minutes of bad news on a feed can lower how positive people feel straight afterward. Three sources show what is known and where the limits are.

The first source is an experiment. Buchanan and colleagues (2021) ran two studies during the pandemic, one with 299 people and a Twitter feed and one with 603 people and a YouTube video. Each person was assigned by chance to one of 3 groups: one saw news about the virus, one saw stories of people being kind during the pandemic, and one saw nothing.

The viewing was short, between 2 and 4 minutes. In both studies, the people who saw the news reported feeling less positive afterward than the people who saw nothing. The people who saw the kindness stories did not show that drop.

Two limits matter. The feelings were measured in the minutes after viewing, so the study says nothing about weeks or years. And the people who took part were mostly young. So the finding is small: what a feed shows changes how people feel in the few minutes after reading it. Headlines about doomscrolling often claim more than that.

The second source is a measuring tool. Sharma, Lee and Johnson (2022) tested a set of questions on 401 people and kept 15 of the questions as a scale, a fixed questionnaire that gives each person a score. They then checked the scale with 502 more people. By their account, doomscrolling was less common than they had expected, and it varied a great deal from person to person.

People who scored high on that scale also tended to report using media out of habit, a fear of missing out and weaker self-control. Those are links found in a survey at one moment, so they cannot show what causes what. We read the abstract of this paper, not the full text.

The third source is about the opposite reaction, which is turning away from the news. Every year the Reuters Institute at the University of Oxford surveys how people get their news. Its 2025 report covered 48 countries and markets. In that report, 40% of people said they sometimes or often avoid the news, up from 29% in 2017.

Put together, the sources describe two different responses to the same flood of news: reading on long after it has stopped being useful, and turning away from news altogether. None of them shows that one leads to the other. A stop time is a middle way between the two: you still read the news, and you stop at a time you chose.

Scrolling is hard to stop because the feed has no end, and because scrolling is a habit that a familiar place and time set off. A newspaper, a TV bulletin and a book chapter all finish. A feed loads more for as long as the thumb moves, so the usual signal to stop never comes.

The place and the hour are what set the habit off. Habit researchers describe a habit as an action tied to a setting: once you are in that setting, you do the action without deciding to (Wood and Neal, 2007). For evening scrolling the setting is often the couch after dinner or the bed after the lights go off. You pick up the phone before you have thought about the news at all.

Economists have tried to measure how much of this is a failure of self-control. Allcott, Gentzkow and Song (2022) ran an experiment in which some people could set limits on their own future screen time. Those limits cut their use substantially. From their results the authors estimate that self-control problems account for 31% of social media use. We read the abstract of this paper, not the full text.

The useful part of that finding is when the limit was chosen. People used social media less when they set the limit ahead of time, not while they were using it. A related study of everyday bad habits found that watching closely for the moment of slipping was the strategy that worked against strong habits (Quinn and colleagues, 2010). Both studies point to the same method: decide early, and keep count of what you actually do.

To stop scrolling, set a stop time for the evening, tie it to one action, and move it a little earlier each night. The method below takes one week to set up, and all it needs is a clock and a charger in another room. Each step removes one reason the scrolling goes on too long.

1. Time tonight’s scrolling. Note the time you first open a feed this evening and the time you really put the phone down. The time between the two is tonight’s scroll window. Do not change anything yet. Two real clock times are worth more than a guess, because guesses about phone use are often wrong.
2. Set a stop time before the evening starts. Choose the stop time during the day, when you are not scrolling. Tonight’s stop time only needs to be a quarter of an hour earlier than the time you stopped last night. The aim of the first week is a small cut that you actually keep.
3. Tie the stop time to one action. Write it as a sentence with “if” and “then” in it: if it is my stop time and I am still scrolling, then the phone goes on its charger in another room. Once the sentence is written, the decision is already made. You do not have to make it while you are scrolling, which is when deciding is hardest.
4. Decide what comes next. If nothing is planned for after the stop time, you are left on the couch with nothing to do and the phone a few steps away. Plan what you will do then: a book, a show you picked, a walk or bed. Have it ready before you sit down.
5. Read the news at a set time, from a source that ends. Wanting to know what is happening is reasonable. Read the news at a set time, from a source with a last page, such as a morning briefing or a newspaper’s front page, and close it when you reach the end.
6. Move the stop time earlier, a little each night. When you stop on time one night, set the next night’s stop time a few minutes earlier. When you scroll past your stop time, keep the same stop time tomorrow. One missed night is one night, not the end of the plan.

Moving the phone to another room is the step people tend to skip, and it matters a great deal. The page on how to break phone addiction covers phone use as a whole, with a plan for cutting daily hours week by week. This page deals only with scrolling in the evening.

“The fix is to give up the phone.”

Giving up the phone completely is not what the evidence favors. Brailovskaia and colleagues (2023) assigned 619 smartphone users in Germany to three groups. One group of 200 gave the phone up for 7 days, one group of 226 used it one hour less a day, and the rest carried on as usual.

In both of those groups, life satisfaction and physical activity went up afterward. Most effects were stronger, and lasted better over the next 4 months, in the group that cut back than in the group that quit. The authors conclude that giving up the phone completely is not necessary. We read the abstract of this study.

“Staying informed means staying on the feed.”

Being informed and scrolling are different activities. A news summary that ends tells you what happened today. A feed tells you the same things again in new words, with reactions to them, for as long as you stay. The experiment by Buchanan and colleagues (2021) found that even the kind of story mattered: stories of kindness did not lower people’s positive feeling the way news of the virus did.

It is easy to believe you stopped on time when you did not. People often feel they have cut back when the hours show they have not.

A good way to run this test counts the evening from what you already write or say about it. “On my phone from nine thirty until midnight” is counted as two and a half hours, with no timer to start. Most journaling apps record how the evening felt and nothing more. You may have written that you felt “wired,” but the hours you spent scrolling are not counted.

One app built for this is Think in Numbers, a smart journaling app with time tracking built in.

You write or say your day in your own words, as it happens or all at once. The app reads what you wrote and counts the hours that went to each part of it: your phone, your reading, your sleep, and the time you never mentioned (shown as unaccounted). Then it shows those hours over days and weeks.

Write my first day

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For iPhone and Android. Try it on your own day before you pay.

The test runs for two weeks because one good week can be luck or a quiet news week. If you are still stopping on time in the second week, that is a sign the stop time has become part of your evening.

Here are two weeks of phone time for the example person, the made-up designer from the worked example. They are the second and fourth weeks of the month this person wrote down. They are the weeks that the two Fridays in the worked example came from.

In the earlier week the phone took 14h 45m, an average of 2h 6m a day. In the later week it took 6h 45m, or 58m a day. This person still used the phone every evening, but for a shorter time.

How long a change like this takes to feel automatic is a separate question. In the habit study most often quoted, Lally and colleagues (2010) asked 96 volunteers to repeat one new daily action and tracked how automatic it came to feel. The middle value, with half the volunteers faster and half slower, was 66 days, and the time varied widely from person to person. The page on how long it takes to break a habit goes through that research. What to do with the evening hours you get back is covered on the page about how to rest.

A stop time helps when the problem is a habit. On some nights the problem is something else. If the news leaves you unable to cope, or the worry stays with you through the day whatever you do with the phone, talk to someone. The NIMH, a US government research institute, advises that when stress is hard to cope with, or will not go away, it may be time to talk to a professional.

Start with a doctor. This page reports what research found and describes a way to count your own hours. It is not medical advice.

Every figure on this page links to one of these sources. Websites and reports were opened and read on the date shown. Research papers were read in full or, where the page says so, in their abstracts.

1. Buchanan, K., Aknin, L. B., Lotun, S. and Sandstrom, G. M. (2021). Brief exposure to social media during the COVID-19 pandemic: Doom-scrolling has negative emotional consequences, but kindness-scrolling does not. PLOS ONE, 16(10), e0257728.
2. Gollwitzer, P. M. and Sheeran, P. (2006). Implementation intentions and goal achievement: A meta-analysis of effects and processes. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 38, 69 to 119.
3. Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, Oxford University Press (read October 6, 2026). doomscrolling (noun).
4. Sharma, B., Lee, S. S. and Johnson, B. K. (2022). The dark at the end of the tunnel: Doomscrolling on social media newsfeeds. Technology, Mind, and Behavior, 3(1).
5. Oxford Languages, Oxford University Press (read October 6, 2026). Words of an Unprecedented Year (the Oxford Word of the Year report for 2020).
6. Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, University of Oxford (read October 6, 2026). Digital News Report 2025: executive summary and key findings.
7. Wood, W. and Neal, D. T. (2007). A new look at habits and the habit-goal interface. Psychological Review, 114(4), 843 to 863.
8. Allcott, H., Gentzkow, M. and Song, L. (2022). Digital addiction. American Economic Review, 112(7), 2424-2463.
9. Quinn, J. M., Pascoe, A., Wood, W. and Neal, D. T. (2010). Can't control yourself? Monitor those bad habits. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 36(4), 499 to 511.
10. Brailovskaia, J., Delveaux, J., John, J., Wicker, V., Noveski, A., Kim, S., Schillack, H. and Margraf, J. (2023). Finding the “sweet spot” of smartphone use: Reduction or abstinence to increase well-being and healthy lifestyle?! An experimental intervention study. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 29(1), 149-161.
11. Lally, P., van Jaarsveld, C. H. M., Potts, H. W. W. and Wardle, J. (2010). How are habits formed: Modelling habit formation in the real world. European Journal of Social Psychology, 40(6), 998 to 1009.
12. U.S. National Institutes of Health, NIMH (read October 1, 2026). I’m So Stressed Out! Fact Sheet.