You are anxious about something, so you pick up your phone to find out more. Twenty minutes later you know more and feel worse, and the pull to keep going has not eased at all.
It is reasonable to ask whether the scrolling did that, or whether you were already anxious and the scrolling just came along. The honest answer is a bit of both, and the research is more careful than the headlines about it.
Does doomscrolling cause anxiety?
It is linked to it, and it plausibly feeds it. Nobody has shown that it is the sole cause.
A 2025 meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin is a major piece of evidence in this area. It pooled 71 studies covering about 98,299 people. Heavier short-form video use was linked to poorer attention and, most strongly, poorer inhibitory control. It was also linked to more stress and anxiety.
The word to hold onto is linked. These are correlational studies, so they cannot say whether scrolling raises anxiety, whether anxious people scroll more, or whether both are true at once.
Source: Nguyen et al., Psychological Bulletin, 2025.
One caveat on scope: that research is about short-form video in general, not about news doomscrolling specifically. Doomscrolling is a pattern of use rather than a separate technology, and I am not aware of a result in this evidence that isolates it. Treat the findings as closely related, not identical.
How does doomscrolling cause anxiety?
Nobody has mapped one clean pathway, but two pieces of research point at plausible parts of it.
The first is a survey of 439 people in Psychological Reports. It found that "brain rot", defined as cognitive fatigue, was linked to depression indirectly. The route ran through burnout, then stress and anxiety. A survey cannot prove the order or show how things change over time. One way to read it, which is my interpretation rather than the study's finding, is as a tired mind that gets more strained the longer the feed continues.
Source: Batmaz, Özsağır & Arslan Şekkeli, Psychological Reports, 2026.
The second is about why stopping is so hard. Variable-ratio schedules, where a reward arrives unpredictably, produce the highest and most persistent response rates in Ferster and Skinner's classic work. Dopamine neurons also respond most strongly to uncertain rewards. A feed is unpredictable by design: the next item might be nothing or might be the thing you were afraid of.
Source: Ferster & Skinner, Schedules of Reinforcement (1957). Fiorillo, Tobler & Schultz, Science, 2003.
Put those together and you get a reasonable guess, not a proven mechanism. An anxious mind wants certainty, the feed offers it in unpredictable doses, and checking never quite delivers enough.
Does doomscrolling make anxiety worse?
The best direct evidence is an experiment, not a survey.
In 2025, Castelo and colleagues ran a randomised trial in PNAS Nexus with 467 participants. Mobile internet was blocked on their smartphones for two weeks, while calls and texts still worked. The trial reported improvements in mental health, subjective well-being and sustained attention. Increased nightly sleep was one of the mechanisms.
That is the closest this evidence gets to saying that less scrolling helps. It was a block on mobile internet, not a measure of doomscrolling alone, and the improvement it reported was in mental health generally.
Source: Castelo et al., PNAS Nexus, 2025.
Sleep is a likely part of the loop. A 2025 meta-analysis of 21 cohort studies, covering 548,338 people, associated each extra hour of daily screen time with a bedtime about 13.2 minutes later, a few minutes less sleep, and higher odds of difficulty falling asleep. A late night of scrolling can plausibly make the next day's worry harder to carry.
Source: He et al., Frontiers in Psychiatry, 2025.
Does doom scrolling help anxiety?
It feels like it does, which is exactly why it is so sticky. I could not support a claim that it actually reduces anxiety, so this part is observation rather than a finding.
The relief is real but brief. Checking answers the urge to know, and for a moment the tension drops. Then the feed produces something new to be uneasy about, and the urge returns. Because the relief arrived quickly, it teaches your mind that checking is how you cope.
If you notice this in yourself, it is not a character flaw. It is a very ordinary way for an anxious mind to try to protect you.
Is it the scrolling or the anxiety that comes first?
Often the anxiety comes first and the scrolling follows, and then the scrolling adds to it. This is my reading of how the evidence fits together, not a result any single study reports.
That matters in practice because it changes the target. If scrolling were only a symptom, blocking the feed would do nothing. If it were only a cause, anxious feelings would vanish when you stopped. Most people sit in between, and the useful move is to break the loop at the point where you can: the reaching.
What can you do in the moment?
A few things are practical, and none of them require believing the research is settled.
- Name the feeling. Putting feelings into words reduced amygdala response in an imaging study. Saying "I am anxious about the news and I want certainty" is a small step, but it is a step the feed will never take for you. Source: Lieberman et al., Psychological Science, 2007.
- Make a specific plan for the worry. Unfinished goals kept intruding on thought until people made a specific plan to complete them. If the worry is about something you can act on, write down the one next action. Source: Masicampo & Baumeister, JPSP, 2011.
- Decide when you check, ahead of time. One set time for news beats a hundred small checks, and it makes the rest of the day a place where the answer is "not yet".
- Leave a gap and sit in it. Two-minute silent pauses lowered heart rate and blood pressure in one study of listeners, more than the slow music around them did. Silence is a small tool, but it is an available one. Source: Bernardi, Porta & Sleight, Heart, 2006.
If your anxiety is constant or is getting in the way of daily life, that is worth raising with a doctor or a therapist. A feed is not the whole story, and you deserve more help than a phone setting can give.
If you want a voice in the gap, Boredom's Daily Reset is three guided minutes placed where the reaching usually starts. It is optional, and everything above works without it.
The short version
Heavier short-form scrolling is linked to more stress and anxiety, and a randomised trial found that two weeks without mobile internet improved mental health. What the evidence cannot yet do is isolate doomscrolling, or say how much of the anxiety the scrolling creates versus how much it simply feeds.
The loop, though, is easy to describe: worry, check, brief relief, new worry. You can interrupt it at the check, and doing that once is more informative than any article about it.