What is doomscrolling (and why a pause helps)

Doomscrolling is the habit of scrolling through bad news or upsetting posts long after it stops being useful. Merriam-Webster defines “doomscroll” as spending “excessive time scrolling” through online content, “especially news,” that makes you feel sad, anxious or angry. People now use the word for any feed they can’t put down, like Instagram, TikTok, X or Reddit late at night.

This page covers what the word means, where it came from, why today’s apps make it so easy, and what actually interrupts it. We make Calma, an app blocker for iPhone, and we explain where a blocker fits and where it doesn’t.

What does doomscrolling mean?

Doomscrolling is continuing to scroll through negative news or posts that make you feel sad, anxious or angry, even after it stops being useful or teaching you anything new. Two things set it apart from ordinary scrolling:

• The content is negative. Crises, disasters, outrage, bad news. In a 2022 paper that built a scale to measure the habit, Sharma, Lee and Johnson define doomscrolling as persistently attending to “negative information” in your newsfeed about crises and tragedies (Technology, Mind, and Behavior, 2022).
• It is hard to stop. You meant to check one thing, and then it’s midnight.

In everyday speech the word has stretched. Many people say “doomscrolling” for any long, joyless scroll, even when the posts aren’t bad news. The fixes below work for both.

Where does the word doomscrolling come from?

The word doomscrolling combines “doom” and “scroll.” It was spotted on Twitter in October 2018 and spread in 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic. Merriam-Webster added “doomsurfing” and “doomscrolling” to its Words We’re Watching list during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, when many people were reading one bad headline after another.

The word is older than the pandemic. Merriam-Webster’s article quotes an April 14, 2020 Business Insider piece: Quartz reporter Karen Ho, who often reminded people on Twitter to stop doomscrolling and go to bed, had found the term in a tweet from October 2018.

Merriam-Webster added the word to its dictionary in September 2023. The dictionary entry for doomscroll gives 2020 as its first known use, which in that dictionary means the earliest use its editors could date for that meaning, not necessarily the very first.

How common is doomscrolling?

Doomscrolling is less common than you might think, and it varies a lot from person to person, according to a 2022 survey study. When Sharma and colleagues built and tested their scale with online survey panels (401 people across OECD countries, then 502 more), they found doomscrolling “was less prevalent than anticipated, but variable.”

In their data, men, younger adults and people who follow politics closely were more likely to doomscroll. Doomscrolling was also linked with fear of missing out, habitual and passive social media use, anxiety and poor self-control. These are survey correlations, so they don’t show which causes which, and they are self-reported.

Why do feeds make doomscrolling so easy?

Feeds make doomscrolling easy because many apps are designed to remove natural stopping points. Human-computer interaction researchers have a name for this. A 2023 review by Monge Roffarello, Lukoff and De Russis at the ACM CHI conference analyzed 43 papers and described eleven “attention capture damaging patterns”, “from Time Fog to Infinite Scroll,” linked to people feeling dissatisfied with their time on these apps. Three common designs make doomscrolling especially easy.

Infinite scroll: a feed with no bottom

Infinite scroll loads more posts as you reach the end, so there is never an end. Aza Raskin, who designed it in 2006, told the BBC in 2018 that if you don’t give your brain time to catch up with your impulses, “you just keep scrolling,” and that he felt guilty about it.

A 2023 field study of 46 people over one week (Rixen et al., ACM) described infinite scroll as a loop that people feel caught in. Most of the reasons people gave for finally leaving a session were not about the app at all. They came from the rest of their day, like what else was going on around them.

Autoplay: the next video starts on its own

Autoplay removes the decision to keep watching. In a survey of 120 US YouTube users (Lukoff et al., CHI 2021), autoplay and recommendations were the features that most undermined people’s sense of agency, while playlists and search supported it.

Pull-to-refresh: maybe something new this time

Pulling down to refresh can bring something new, or nothing, and you can’t know until you try. Former Facebook employee Sandy Parakilas told the same BBC program that “social media is very similar to a slot machine.” A related finding on phones: a 2012 study described a “checking habit” reinforced by small, near-instant rewards of new information (Oulasvirta et al.).

Most phone checks are also self-started. A 2021 study that filmed 37 people’s phone use found 89% of 1,130 interactions began with the user, not a notification (Heitmayer and Lahlou). Turning off notifications helps, but the reach for the phone often starts with you, in a familiar place like bed or the couch.

How do you stop doomscrolling?

You put a stopping point back where the app removed it. Most of these change the setup ahead of time, so you need less willpower in the moment.

1. Turn off autoplay where you can. On YouTube it’s Settings > Autoplay (YouTube Help). Without it, each next video is a choice.
2. Use the app’s own break reminder. Instagram has Take a Break reminders and YouTube has Remind me to take a break. They are reminders, not blocks, so treat them as a nudge.
3. Start from search, not the feed. If you open YouTube to find one thing, search for it. In the Lukoff study, search and playlists helped people feel in control.
4. Make an if-then plan. “If it’s 10 PM, then the phone charges in the kitchen.” Plans in this form help people reach goals in general, according to a meta-analysis of 94 tests. That research was not about phones.
5. Add a pause before the app opens. In a 2023 PNAS study of the one sec app, people closed the app about a third of the time when a short pause came first. Our guide to whether a pause before opening an app works covers the details and the limits.
6. Rest the apps at the time you slip. If doomscrolling happens in bed, block those apps from bedtime to morning. iPhone’s free Screen Time Schedule (called Downtime in iOS 26) can do this, as Apple explains, though by default you can tap past its reminder (or Ignore Limit on a time limit) unless you set a Screen Time passcode. Calma vs Screen Time compares the two.

Start with one or two of these for a single app, not all six at once.

Can an app blocker stop doomscrolling?

An app blocker can interrupt doomscrolling when you know when and where you slip, and a reminder isn’t enough. It doesn’t change the news or the feed. It changes whether the feed is one tap away at 11 PM.

Calma is a gentle app blocker for iPhone. You pick the apps, like Instagram, TikTok, X or Reddit, and the times, like every night from 10 PM to 7 AM (the ready-made Night Peace routine). During that window, opening the app shows a calm screen that says the app is resting, with one button: Back to calm. Blocks run on Apple’s Screen Time, so they keep working when Calma is closed.

Two other options suit doomscrolling:

• Open limits. Allow an app 3 or 5 opens a day. Each open shows an Open app button and lasts 15 minutes.
• Daily limits. Allow an app 30 minutes a day. When the time is used, it rests until midnight.

How to get past a Calma block: a scheduled block or a daily limit shows only Back to calm, so getting the app back early means switching that Moment off in Calma. A focus session can be ended early with a 3-second hold. Calma blocks apps only, not websites, so pair it with Screen Time’s website limits if you doomscroll in Safari. It is free to download, and blocking needs Calma Pro: $3.99 a week or $39.99 a year in the US as of September 25, 2026, after a 3-day free trial.

For step-by-step setups, see how to block Instagram, TikTok or YouTube on iPhone. For how Calma works overall, see the gentle app blocker page.

Is all late-night scrolling doomscrolling?

No. Scrolling that you enjoy and can stop is just scrolling. A useful test is how you feel afterward, and whether you stopped when you meant to. If you close the app feeling fine, there is nothing to fix. If you keep scrolling past the point of enjoying it, the steps above are worth a try.

Sources

Checked September 25, 2026.

1. Merriam-Webster, On ‘Doomsurfing’ and ‘Doomscrolling’ (Words We’re Watching, 2020, updated when the word was added in September 2023), and dictionary entry: doomscroll.
2. Sharma, B., Lee, S. S., and Johnson, B. K. (2022). The dark at the end of the tunnel: Doomscrolling on social media newsfeeds. Technology, Mind, and Behavior, 3(1).
3. Monge Roffarello, A., Lukoff, K., and De Russis, L. (2023). Defining and identifying attention capture deceptive designs in digital interfaces. CHI 2023.
4. BBC Panorama, Hilary Andersson, Social media apps are ‘deliberately’ addictive to users, July 3, 2018.
5. Rixen, J. O., Meinhardt, L.-M., Glöckler, M., et al. (2023). The loop and reasons to break it: Investigating infinite scrolling behaviour in social media applications and reasons to stop. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact., 7 (MobileHCI).
6. Lukoff, K., Lyngs, U., Zade, H., et al. (2021). How the design of YouTube influences user sense of agency. CHI 2021.
7. Oulasvirta, A., Rattenbury, T., Ma, L., and Raita, E. (2012). Habits make smartphone use more pervasive. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 16.
8. Heitmayer, M., and Lahlou, S. (2021). Why are smartphones disruptive? Computers in Human Behavior, 116.
9. Gollwitzer, P. M., and Sheeran, P. (2006). Implementation intentions and goal achievement: A meta-analysis. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 38.
10. Grüning, D. J., Riedel, F., and Lorenz-Spreen, P. (2023). Directing smartphone use through the self-nudge app one sec. PNAS, 120(8).
11. YouTube Help, Autoplay videos; Instagram Help Center, Edit reminders to take a break; Apple Support, Set schedules with Screen Time on iPhone.