The signs to understand if you suffer from doomscrolling, the addiction to “bad news”

It’s past midnight. You are in bed. You know you should turn off your phone and try to sleep but you can’t find a way out of that downward spiral of bad news. It happened to most of us. Whether it’s on the web, on social media, or through news apps, you can’t help but read the terrible news about the war in Ukraine. Or about the coronavirus pandemic. On natural disasters or racial injustice. Or on all this and much more.

While the act of continuously scrolling through your social media feeds or surfing the web and being overwhelmed by a constant torrent of bad news is nothing really new, this practice has received more attention in recent years. To the point that now it even has a name: doomscrolling.

Doomscrolling, i.e. thethe act of compulsively spending excessive amounts of screen time searching for and absorbing negative, depressing, or troubling content, became one of the Oxford Dictionary Words of the Year for 2020; since the COVID-19 pandemic has pushed people to keep up to date with daily events as much as possible. It all starts with a desire to be informed, find answers and understand what’s going on, but it soon translates into a more urgent kind of need.

By trying to keep up with the news and information regarding your safety, you begin to feel that the world is ending. In an effort to be proactive and aware of the risks around us, the strategy backfires, leaving us with a feeling of discomfort and doom. The result? We constantly jump from bad news to bad news.

Although this term has only entered the popular vernacular for a couple of years, it is more common today than ever. From the pandemic, to George Floyd to the war these days, the inflation of negativity is constant and Continued use of news can often have a drastic impact on a person’s mental health.

It’s not that being informed is bad. It is the constant intake of negative information that is a problem. Essentially, doomscrolling is focused conscious activity looking for negative stories, sad videos, or terrifying images. It feeds on emotional responses to some news that are so upsetting they can leave us drained, exhausted and shocked. Repeating this practice 5 times a day is a recipe for disaster.

Several studies have linked mental health problems to continued exposure of news during negative and traumatic events, such as terrorist attacks or natural disasters. The more news a person consumes during and after these events, the more likely he is to suffer from depression, stress and anxiety.

For example, a team of experts studied the effects of media coverage during the 9/11 terrorist attacks. More than 1,770 adults in the United States repeatedly completed a post-attack survey, which asked questions about how many television news they watched and their mental and physical health. The results showed that increased exposure to news on TV from the time of the attack was associated with post-traumatic stress symptoms even two and three years later.

Another 2014 survey interviewed more than 4,000 Americans in the weeks following the Boston Marathon bombings the previous year. Participants who followed more than six hours of media coverage per day were nine times more likely to experience symptoms of acute anxiety and stress than those who followed only a minimal amount of news.

These researches help us understand how bad news can affect our mental health, but according to some experts it is difficult to compare these last two years of our life with other events. The reason? The huge volume of negative stories.

Source: Vanity Fair

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