People ask this when they have lost an hour to a feed and want to know whether it was worse than the hour they would have spent on a game or a show. Fair question.
The honest answer is that nobody has run that comparison cleanly. What exists is research on each activity separately, which still tells you something useful about where the real differences are.
Is doomscrolling worse than gaming?
Not in any way the research can prove, and gaming is not a single thing.
One study took people who did not play video games and trained them on an action game for an hour a day over 10 days. They improved on visual attention tasks compared with a group who played Tetris. That is one training study, and it says nothing about the effect of marathon sessions or what gaming does to sleep. It does show that "games rot your brain" is too blunt a claim.
Source: Green & Bavelier, Nature, 2003.
The evidence on feeds points the other way. A meta-analysis of 71 studies and about 98,299 people found that 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. That is correlational: it cannot say the videos caused the difference, and it covers short-form video in general rather than negative news specifically.
Source: Nguyen et al., Psychological Bulletin, 2025.
So there is a stronger case against heavy feed use than against gaming as a category. That is different from saying one costs you more.
Is doomscrolling worse than watching TV?
The TV evidence is mostly about children, and it is contested.
One large national survey linked more daily TV at ages 1 and 3 with attention problems at age 7. A later reanalysis of the same dataset found the link appeared, if at all, only at very high viewing levels, and vanished after adding two further factors. Its authors concluded the earlier findings were not robust. A different study, of 2,441 children, found more screen time at 24 and 36 months was associated with poorer developmental screening scores later, with small effects and parent-reported data.
Source: Christakis et al., Pediatrics, 2004 and Foster & Watkins, Child Development, 2010. Also Madigan et al., JAMA Pediatrics, 2019.
The content matters too. In a randomised experiment with 60 four-year-olds, nine minutes of a fast-paced cartoon led to worse immediate performance on executive-function tasks than an educational cartoon or drawing. It was one small study, and the effect may have been temporary.
Source: Lillard & Peterson, Pediatrics, 2011.
Taken together, TV is not clearly harmless, and it is not clearly worse than a feed. Whether the pace of the content matters more than the screen is a guess: the only pace evidence here is that one small experiment, and nothing compares pace with the screen itself.
What actually makes endless scrolling different?
Mostly its structure, and this part is observation rather than a finding from a head-to-head study.
A show ends. A level ends. A feed does not. There is no credit roll and no "save point" to prompt you to stop, which means every stop is a decision you have to make from scratch while tired.
Add unpredictability. Variable-ratio schedules, where rewards arrive at irregular intervals, were found to produce the highest and most persistent response rates. Separately, dopamine neurons respond most strongly to uncertain rewards. A feed delivers something good at irregular intervals, and neither of those findings was about feeds. They explain why it is plausible that the pull feels so strong.
Source: Ferster & Skinner, Schedules of Reinforcement (1957). Also Fiorillo, Tobler & Schultz, Science, 2003.
One more piece: "wanting" and "liking" run on separate brain systems, and dopamine drives wanting, not liking. That fits the common experience of scrolling for an hour while enjoying very little of it.
Source: Berridge & Robinson, American Psychologist, 2016.
Is it the habit or the screen time that matters?
Possibly the habit, at least for interruptions.
In an observational study of real-life smartphone use, about 89% of interactions were started by the user rather than prompted by a notification. That suggests notifications are not the whole story, though the study does not tell us where the pull comes from or whether changing settings would help.
Source: Heitmayer & Lahlou, Computers in Human Behavior, 2021.
Another study 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. That is a hint that how you use a screen can matter as much as how long.
Is doomscrolling worse than alcohol?
I cannot rank them, and I would be wary of anyone who does.
Nothing I can cite from the research compares the two, and they differ in kind: one is a substance with its own physical effects and risks, the other is a behaviour. Putting them on one scale makes the comparison sound tidier than it is.
What can be said is narrower. People who scroll compulsively are not weak, and the feeling of being pulled is not imaginary. If alcohol is also part of your picture, that is worth raising with a doctor, not settling with a ranking article.
What should you do with this?
- Stop asking which is worst. The useful question is which of your habits has no ending and which you do when you meant to do something else.
- Look for edges. A game, a show or a book has a point where it stops. Give your phone one, such as a time or a place, so that stopping is not a fresh decision every minute.
- Notice what you wanted. If the answer is "relief" or "something to happen", scrolling is a poor tool for either, and a different small thing will often do better.
- Judge by how you feel afterwards. Some TV and some gaming leave people satisfied. In my own observation, not a research finding, an hour of feed more often leaves a gap where the hour was.
If you want help with the stopping part, Boredom blocks the apps you choose and fills the gap with a short guided reset. As plain advice rather than something shown to work, a timer and a phone left in another room may do some of the same job.
The short version
No one has shown that doomscrolling is worse than gaming or TV, and the research on those two is more mixed than the headlines suggest. What does stand out about endless feeds is the missing ending, the unpredictable rewards, and a link to poorer attention and inhibitory control that is real but correlational.
If you are choosing between them for the next hour, pick the one with an end built in.