A deeper understanding of what you’re really seeking can help you put your phone down when the world feels out of control.
I know how social media works. I know its dirty little tricks; its psychological appeal; the myriad ways it can make us feel stressed, anxious, and lonely; and why, despite all that, we keep coming back for more. If you’d asked me on Monday last week how confident I was about managing my screentime, I’d have said “very”, but by Tuesday evening I was already wrong. And if you’d seen me doomscrolling at some point in the darkness where Friday night meets Saturday morning, my bloodshot eyes glowing like a zombie’s under the eerie blue light of my iphone, you’d see I was very wrong indeed.
Until last week my casual scrolling was innocent enough, a harmless diet of cute dog reels and tips on how to speak French like a local. It was only on the back of a particularly ghastly news cycle that my feed shifted and things started to spiral. It turns out that being a psychotherapist—no less one who wrote a book on the psychology of social media—didn’t stop me from manically swiping from one ICE atrocity to the next, barbarism on the streets of Iran, and urgent warnings of imminent global economic collapse; my cute dog algorithm had fallen off a cliff.
While I’m the first to admit that trained mental health professionals like myself are no less crazy than anyone else, the severity of my multi-day lapse still took me by surprise. But if my collapse into doomscrolling wasn’t due to ignorance, bad habits, or a lack of discipline, what could it have been?
In psychology, a symptom often presents as the opposite of its cause. Narcissism, for example, may appear like an over-abundance of self-regard, but it’s actually the inverse: a deep-seated insecurity. My doomscrolling had a similarly perverse logic. When I looked deep into my own motivations, the answer I found was paradoxical. I hadn’t been feeding on catastrophe, I’d been seeking reassurance. I wasn’t doomscrolling at all, I was hopescrolling.
But going onto Instagram or Tiktok in search of hope is like going to Las Vegas expecting to leave with more money than you came with. The casino always wins, because it rations rewards just frequently enough to keep you betting; social media platforms win by rationing hope itself. I observed that after swiping through seven or eight distressing news videos, just at the point I was about to give up in despair, something hopeful dropped in my feed—a massive protest march, an individual act of courageous resistance, or a surprise result in a snap election. But however sweet that flash of hope may have been, it was gone before it could be fully tasted—what followed was always bitter.
It turned out that I wasn’t doomscrolling because I wanted to watch the world fall apart, I was scrambling for evidence that it wasn’t; I was seeking sanity, not despair. In this I realised that doomscrolling wasn’t a failure after all, but a faulty solution to search for hope. In therapy we see this cycle all the time; anxiety provokes a behaviour (eating, checking locks, alcohol and drugs, etc.), the behaviour briefly relieves the anxiety, the relief doesn’t last, and the anxiety returns. Ultimately, the restless dissatisfaction is never fully resolved.
You instinctively turn to your screen seeking connection, but only come away from it feeling only more alienated. You scour your newsfeed in order to stay informed, only your worldview gets distorted by a thousand woes for every consolation. It’s no wonder we end up feeling isolated, burnt out, overwhelmed, and powerless. You can overcome these challenges by being honest with yourself about what you’re really looking for, stop looking for them in the wrong places, and find the right places to put them into action.
If you’re overwhelmed by the shit storm presented on your newsfeed, open your front door and look around—it probably doesn’t look nearly as apocalyptic. You can doomscroll in quiet isolation, or choose to step outside that door into a world that’s full of potential human connection where challenges can be met in solidarity and resilience alongside people who share your values. You can vent your outrage into the void or transform it into action to effect real change. Do these things and the fleeting flashes of hope you were looking for in the wrong place will begin to burn brighter, and alongside the hope of others, perhaps even ignite a revolution.
