Investigative journalist Karen K. Ho knows a thing or two about doomscrolling—the habit of obsessively refreshing your newsfeed and losing yourself in headlines, tweets and comments about the pandemic, the wildfires, the election and systemic racism.
Twice—once when she was in graduate school, and once when she was working on her first Time cover story—Ho had a friend lock her out of her Twitter account to help her break her habit. Since April, she’s been tweeting nightly reminders to get offline, get some sleep, drink water and tend to IRL hobbies and relationships. These PSAs have earned her a large following of others, myself included, struggling to curb their social media use during this chaotic year.
“We were all taught ‘knowledge is power’ and there’s the hope that reading something will help us have a better grasp and guidance on what is happening right now and how to move forward,” Ho tells me in an email. “The level of bad news and uncertainty about the future means there are real limits to this saying, especially with how much disinformation is now being disseminated on social media on a mass scale.”
Why do we doomscroll?
San Francisco therapist Ken Stamper sees many clients whose internet use leads to anxiety, and says the reasons for doomscrolling are complicated. First, there’s our desire to share in a collective experience at a time when many of us feel alienated and disconnected. “It could be a collective trauma, in the case of the fires. It could be this sense of, ‘We’re all in it together, we’re all here.’” he says. “Especially when this is all happening in a pandemic, where we can’t connect like we normally could.”
Another factor, he suspects, is a sense of excitement, even when it’s bad news. “There’s this sense of, ‘What’s going to happen now?’ There’s kind of an aliveness in that that people get.”
