A growing body of research links doomscrolling with anxiety and poorer well-being. The harder question is which one starts the cycle.
A disturbing story breaks, and you check the news because you want to know what is happening.
One headline leads to an update. Then a reaction. Then a video, a prediction, and another refresh to see whether anything has changed. Twenty minutes later, you know more than you did before—but you do not necessarily feel more reassured.
Maybe you feel worse.
It is tempting to blame the scrolling. And research does consistently find that people who doomscroll more also tend to report more psychological distress, anxiety, and poorer well-being.
But there is a problem with treating that as a simple cause-and-effect story.
What if feeling anxious is also part of what keeps you scrolling?
That possibility changes the question. Doomscrolling may not simply produce distress, nor may distress simply produce doomscrolling. The two may sometimes reinforce each other.
The evidence increasingly fits that possibility. What it cannot yet tell us confidently is how strong each direction is—or exactly when an ordinary attempt to stay informed turns into a loop that keeps itself going.
Doomscrolling and Distress Clearly Travel Together
Doomscrolling is still a relatively young research concept. It generally refers to persistent or compulsive consumption of negative information, particularly through social media and online news—not simply reading about something unpleasant.
The association with psychological distress has appeared repeatedly.
In a series of studies involving more than 1,200 participants, researchers developed and tested a Doomscrolling Scale and found that greater doomscrolling was linked with psychological distress and poorer measures of well-being, including life satisfaction and mental well-being. Other studies have connected doomscrolling with intolerance of uncertainty and lower mental well-being.
The pattern also appears across different populations. A 2024 study of university students in Iran and the United States found that greater doomscrolling was associated with greater existential anxiety in both groups.
The association is difficult to dismiss.
The direction is much harder to establish.
Most doomscrolling research has been observational, and much of it asks people about their scrolling habits and psychological state during roughly the same period. That can reveal that two things occur together, but it cannot reliably tell us which came first.
If anxiety makes people more likely to doomscroll, a one-time survey could produce much the same correlation as it would if doomscrolling made people more anxious.
And if both are happening?
The same snapshot still cannot separate them.
Anxiety May Be Part of What Keeps the Scroll Going
Consider why someone starts checking negative news in the first place.
Something important and uncertain has happened. You want answers: What happened? Has anything changed? Does this affect me? Is there something I need to know?
Checking is not irrational. Information can reduce uncertainty.
The problem is that the next update does not always provide closure.
A 2025 study of 443 participants examined doomscrolling alongside trait anxiety—the tendency to experience anxiety across situations—and intolerance of uncertainty, or difficulty coping with not knowing what will happen. Greater intolerance of uncertainty was associated with more doomscrolling and statistically explained part of the relationship between trait anxiety and doomscrolling.
Another study of 432 adults similarly found that intolerance of uncertainty was related to both doomscrolling and poorer mental well-being.
The pattern suggests a plausible mechanism.
When uncertainty itself feels uncomfortable, another refresh offers the possibility of resolution. But unfolding news rarely ends neatly. One answer can reveal three new questions. A reassuring development may arrive with a warning. A prediction introduces another possibility to monitor.
The search for certainty can therefore generate another reason to keep searching.
That does not prove that anxiety or intolerance of uncertainty causes doomscrolling. These studies largely identify relationships among self-reported characteristics and behavior; they cannot reconstruct the sequence with certainty.
But they make one part of the story increasingly plausible: sometimes feeling bad may come before the scrolling rather than simply result from it.
That still leaves the other half of the question.
Can the scrolling itself make you feel worse?
Negative News Can Change How You Feel
Here the evidence becomes stronger in one important respect: researchers can experimentally expose people to different kinds of news and measure what happens afterward.
Long before doomscrolling became a common term, psychologists were doing exactly that.
In a controlled experiment, participants watched a 14-minute television news bulletin containing negative, neutral, or positive material. People who watched the negative bulletin subsequently reported more anxious and sad mood. They also became more likely to catastrophize worries from their own lives—even though those worries were unrelated to the news stories they had just seen.
That experiment was not a test of modern social-media doomscrolling. Watching an edited television bulletin is different from moving through an algorithmically organized stream of headlines, videos, reactions, and commentary.
But it establishes something important: negative information itself can affect emotional state.
Research closer to everyday doomscrolling points in a similar direction.
A 2024 workplace study used both time-lagged and daily-diary methods rather than relying only on a single survey. Across the studies, greater doomscrolling was associated with greater subsequent rumination—repetitive thinking about negative material—which was in turn associated with lower work engagement.
That gets closer to showing a sequence in time, although it still cannot prove that doomscrolling alone caused every downstream change.
And the distinction matters. Evidence that negative news can worsen mood in the short term does not establish that doomscrolling causes an anxiety disorder or lasting mental-health problems.
What it does establish is that reverse causality cannot comfortably explain the whole picture.
Feeling anxious may encourage more checking.
What you encounter while checking may also give you more to worry about.
The Best Model May Be a Loop
Put those pieces together and doomscrolling starts to look less like a one-way cause and more like a feedback loop.
Something threatening or uncertain happens. You feel uneasy, so you look for information. The information includes more threats, possibilities, and unresolved questions. Worry or rumination continues. That discomfort gives you another reason to check.
In simplified form:
uncertainty or distress → checking → more negative information → more worry or rumination → more checking
Several pieces of evidence fit this model. Anxiety and intolerance of uncertainty are associated with doomscrolling. Experimental research shows that negative news can worsen short-term emotional states. Repeated-measures research suggests doomscrolling can precede rumination.
But fits the evidence is not the same as has been proven.
Researchers have not yet convincingly demonstrated this entire two-way cycle in large groups of adults by repeatedly measuring both emotional state and actual negative-news consumption over time.
The field has other limitations too. Doomscrolling is a relatively new research construct. Many studies depend on self-reported behavior, and some use relatively young or otherwise specific populations.
So describing doomscrolling as a self-reinforcing loop is best treated as a plausible model, not an established psychological law.
Still, it explains something that a simple “phones make us anxious” story misses.
Someone can keep doing something that leaves them feeling worse because the behavior continues to promise something useful: information, preparation, or relief from uncertainty.
The problem is that the promise keeps renewing itself.
When Does Staying Informed Become Doomscrolling?
Reading upsetting news is not automatically doomscrolling.
During severe weather, an election, a conflict, or another rapidly changing event, information may genuinely matter. Spending time reading bad news may simply mean something bad is happening.
Research also does not give us a magic number of minutes after which useful news consumption becomes harmful.
A more revealing distinction is what the next check is accomplishing.
Suppose you open the news because you need to know whether something important has changed. You find the answer, understand the situation better, and know whether there is anything you need to do.
The checking served a purpose.
Now imagine the fifth refresh. Nothing has changed that affects what you know or can do. Instead, you encounter another prediction, another alarming possibility, and another reason to check for an update about that.
The difference is not simply how many minutes you have spent scrolling.
It is whether the scrolling is resolving uncertainty or continually renewing it.
That leads to a more useful question than “Have I been on my phone too long?”
Is the next check likely to tell me something useful—or mostly give me another reason to keep checking?
Research does not yet show that asking yourself this question will improve mental health, and evidence for interventions aimed specifically at doomscrolling remains much thinner than the evidence linking doomscrolling with distress.
But the question captures the paradox at the center of the behavior.
We often keep checking because we want uncertainty to shrink.
The next scroll can make it larger.
So, does doomscrolling make you feel worse, or do you doomscroll because you already feel worse?
Current evidence does not justify choosing only one.
People who are anxious or uncomfortable with uncertainty may be more inclined to keep searching for threatening information. Negative information can also worsen mood in the short term and provide new material for worry and rumination. Doomscrolling-specific research has not yet cleanly separated those directions or established how strongly they reinforce one another.
The most defensible answer is also the more useful one:
Doomscrolling may sometimes be both a response to feeling bad and part of what keeps that feeling going.
