There are real upsides to wanting to know what is happening in the world. Wanting to stay informed, to feel less alone in a bad week, to not be caught out by something important: none of that is a flaw in you.
The trouble starts with the part that makes it doomscrolling rather than reading the news. The honest answer is that the useful bit and the loop are two different things, and only the loop is the problem.
Does doomscrolling have any benefits?
Some, if you separate the information from the scrolling.
Knowing what is going on can help you make decisions, talk to people, and feel less blindsided. Seeing others react to the same event can feel like company. Those are ordinary reasons people open a feed, and they are fair ones.
One caveat on evidence. None of the research I can point to here tested doomscrolling itself, so I will not claim it proves or disproves a benefit. What follows is what is known about the habits around it, plus plain observation.
The observation is simple. The benefit tends to arrive in the first few minutes: you learn the thing you wanted to know. Everything after that is the loop, and the loop is not giving you more information. It is giving you more scrolling.
Can doomscrolling be good for you?
The scrolling itself, not really. The evidence on heavy feed use points the wrong way.
A 2025 meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin pooled 71 studies covering roughly 98,299 people. Heavier short-form video use was linked to poorer attention and, most strongly, poorer inhibitory control, which is the ability to stop yourself doing something. It was also linked to more stress and anxiety. These are correlations, so they do not show which way the arrow points, and short-form video is not identical to a news feed.
Still, the pattern fits what many people describe: you meant to look for a minute, and the part of you that would normally say "that is enough" seems to be the quietest. That is an observation, not something the research establishes for feeds.
Source: Nguyen et al., Psychological Bulletin, 2025.
Does doomscrolling have to be negative news?
Probably not. My own inference is that the bad news is not what keeps you there, though no research I can point to tested this.
Dopamine researchers distinguish between wanting something and liking it, and the two run on separate systems. Berridge and Robinson describe dopamine as driving wanting, not liking. That is general neuroscience, not a finding about feeds, but it may help explain why reaching for something and enjoying it can come apart.
What feeds wanting may be uncertainty. Fiorillo, Tobler and Schultz found that dopamine neurons respond most to uncertain rewards. A feed is uncertain by design: the next item might be important, or shocking, or nothing. And in the older behavioural research, Ferster and Skinner found that variable-ratio schedules, where rewards arrive unpredictably, produce the highest and most persistent response rates.
Putting those together is my inference, not a tested result: the content may matter less than the shape. Bad news is a strong hook because it feels like it might matter. But a feed of good news, or hobby clips, or other people's holidays, has the same unpredictable next-item structure, and I would expect people to get stuck in those too.
So "doomscrolling" may be partly a misleading name. The doom may be the flavour and the loop the mechanism.
Sources: Berridge & Robinson, American Psychologist, 2016; Fiorillo, Tobler & Schultz, Science, 2003; Ferster & Skinner, Schedules of Reinforcement (1957).
Can doomscrolling be positive?
It can be, briefly, when it is a choice with an end.
Most smartphone interactions are not prompted by a notification. Heitmayer and Lahlou's observational study of real-life use found that about 89% were started by the user. That is uncomfortable to read, but it also has a useful side: if you start most of the checks, most of them are open to a different decision.
A check that goes "I want to know whether the thing I am worried about has happened, I will look once, and then I will stop" is closer to staying informed. A check that goes "I will see what is happening" has no end built in, so the feed supplies one: more.
The difference is not discipline in the moment. It is whether there was a stopping point before you started.
Source: Heitmayer & Lahlou, Computers in Human Behavior, 2021.
What is it linked to, even when it feels like it is helping?
Mostly attention and sleep, and those are the ones people notice last.
Fournier and colleagues found that social media notifications during a focus task caused a brief slowdown in processing, and the size of the effect tracked notification volume and checking habits rather than total screen time. Frequent small interruptions cost something even when each one is short.
Sleep is the other place it shows up. A 2025 meta-analysis in Frontiers in Psychiatry pooled 21 cohort studies covering 548,338 people. Each extra hour of daily screen time was associated with a bedtime about 13.2 minutes later, about 3 to 5 minutes less sleep, and higher odds of difficulty falling asleep. These are associations, not proof that screens cause the sleep loss. My observation is that late-night scrolling is when a worried person is especially likely to do it, so it is worth watching for there.
Sources: Fournier et al., "Attention hijacked," Computers in Human Behavior; He et al., Frontiers in Psychiatry, 2025.
Is there a better way to stay informed?
Yes, and it keeps what was good about the habit.
- Decide the question first. "What do I need to know today?" has an answer. "What is going on?" does not.
- Give the check an end. A set time, one source, or one pass through the headlines. When you reach the end, you are done, rather than the feed deciding.
- Move it out of the late hours. If you do one check a day, make it earlier. In my experience, evenings are when worry and tiredness make the loop feel strongest.
- Name what you are feeling. Lieberman and colleagues found that putting feelings into words reduced amygdala response. "I am anxious and I want reassurance" is a more accurate description than "I need to see the news," and it points at a different fix.
- Close the loop with something that ends. A newspaper, a podcast episode, a conversation. They finish. A feed does not.
This does not need an app. If you want a voice during the first few minutes after you close the feed, Boredom has a short guided reset for that gap, but the steps above work without it.
Source: Lieberman et al., Psychological Science, 2007.
The short version
Wanting to know what is happening is reasonable, and the first few minutes of checking can be useful. The endless part is not doing that work for you.
My read is that the hook is uncertainty, not bad news, which is why a feed of pleasant things may trap you just as well. If you want the benefit without the cost, the fix is giving the check a beginning and an end, not feeling worse about wanting to look.