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3. Doomscrolling: The Anxiety Metronome

A symptomatic neologism of our time, doomscrolling describes the compulsive habit of continuously checking distressing news, caught between a search for meaning, an attempt to soothe oneself, and a spiral of anxiety.

Doomscrolling is a neologism that combines the darkness of “doom,” meaning fate, calamity, or collapse, with the act of “scrolling,” the finger’s movement that steadily moves through a page’s content. It has now earned a place in English dictionaries. Merriam-Webster defines to doomscroll as “spending an excessive amount of time online scrolling through content that makes one sad, anxious, or angry.” Oxford describes it as “continuously scrolling and reading depressing news.” Dictionary.com emphasizes the compulsive aspect, fueled by the anticipation of negative outcomes.

The recent history of the term mirrors our most immediate crises. It became widely used in 2020 during the pandemic, after first appearing on Twitter in 2018, and gained traction during lockdowns, prolonged states of emergency, social and economic crises, and, more recently, in our region, in response to images showing corpses, destruction, and suffering. Researchers emphasize its links to anxiety, mental health, feelings of helplessness, and even a sense of fatalism.

A search of the web unveils expressions such as, “I found myself doomscrolling late into the night,” “Since the war, my day is spent doomscrolling,” and “I try to break this obsession, but every notification pulls me back in.” The term is used in various ways: as a verb (to doomscroll, I doomscrolled), as a noun (“doomscrolling exhausts me”), and sometimes as an adjective (“doomscroll mood”), conveying an emotional tone of seriousness, a hidden fascination, and an inability to stop. It reflects the very rotation of a spiral that has become compulsive.

Picture the scene: the body remains still, the index finger or thumb acting like a metronome, the bluish glow of the screen cutting through the night and replacing the outside world with an endless algorithmic stream. On the horizon, there is no concluding note, only the next “just one more.” How can we make sense of this phenomenon?

Doomscrolling can be seen as a defense mechanism against anxiety. It therefore has a protective aspect, offering a sense of control and a temporary calm, but it becomes harmful when it traps the individual in repetition, heightens anxiety, and weakens their connection to reality, the hand scrolling through the screen as if lifting, page by page, a curtain of disasters.

Beneath this distinctly contemporary gesture, something very old is at work. Freud might say that our psychic apparatus erects a protective barrier against overstimulation, a controlled sensory saturation that cushions a deeper, more intimate turmoil. Instead of diffuse anxiety, we summon facts, figures, maps, and live feeds. The formless becomes structured, and worry takes on a new texture, moving from the body to the mind, from the heartbeat to the paragraphs. The illusion of control sets in: “If I know everything, I can cope.” Intellectualization fulfills its role, distancing the emotion, isolating it, and making it tolerable. Even the ritual itself, tapping, swiping, clicking, takes on the gentle, mechanical rhythm of a lullaby, a small reprieve, a temporary stitch over a wider void.

This defense, however, has its downside. By repeatedly turning to the worst, by seeking the next piece of bad news as if searching for the exact point of a pain, we reignite what we thought we had extinguished. Repetition takes control. We read the same alert phrased differently, scroll through the same images with tiny variations, and wait for the updates that will give the sense of finally being “up to date.” It is a paradoxical form of control that keeps anxiety in view while simultaneously feeding it.

In 1920, S. Freud described the compulsion to repeat as the subject’s persistent return to what troubles them, as if trying to manage anxiety by replaying the scene that set it off and in doing so working it through. We scroll to follow the unfolding disaster, convinced that knowing a little more—be it a number, a video, or a piece of information—will ease our anxiety. In reality, repetition alone cannot achieve this. With every swipe, the device delivers not an answer but a signal, an added layer of worry that triggers the next dose.

This slope we are drawn to is close to the death drive, a descent into inertia, beyond the “pleasure principle.” Relentlessly scrolling through stories of collapse and threat keeps us close to disaster. There is a morbid fascination at play, a way of staying glued to what causes pain.

At its core, this gesture speaks of a lack of protection. D. Anzieu might have described a fissured skin-Ego, the screen becoming a makeshift membrane, a luminous covering that holds the edges of the self together when the times chip away at its boundaries. We press against it to feel that we are still intact, and soon all we notice is this friction. In this survival system, each alert reassures while wearing us down at the same time. W. Bion would say that we are seeking a container to hold our anxiety, but instead we encounter an amplifier that intensifies it. Thought stops imagining and just reacts, overloaded with raw “beta elements” it cannot process.

Lacan noted that knowledge is never transparent; it is erotic, conflicted, and at times persecutory. The drive to “know everything”—to lift the veil, to see behind the curtain—is also what exposes the subject to the unbearable. Doomscrolling then emerges as an endless search for excessive knowledge, the kind that never satisfies and instead demands constant proof. Notifications act like oracles, promising imminent truth but delivering only renewed anticipation.

The superego also plays a role in this behavior, using the language of social injunctions: “If you don’t stay informed, you are a bad citizen,” “you must know what is happening and being said,” “you can’t close your eyes as if everything were normal.” Doomscrolling thus takes on a moral dimension: we judge ourselves, forcing ourselves to stay connected to the world’s misfortune in order to remain close to the drama. And when we stop, guilt arises: “What if I missed something important?” or “Am I really so indifferent?” The constant scrolling reflects the boundlessness of the psyche; there is no longer a bottom to the page, and the sense of lack is ever present. We take refuge in a perpetual cycle of “doing.”

In sum, doomscrolling can be seen as a product of our times, a way of coping with modern anxiety. It is not something to dismiss—it can provide a fragile kind of protection, improvised as best it can be—but it becomes harmful when repetition replaces understanding. The goal is not to eliminate the habit, but to give it a proper role: a way to keep anxiety at bay, not to let it settle in permanently. Between healthy curiosity and the pull toward grim obsession lies the fragile thread of the speaking self. This thread must be strengthened, word by word, breath by breath, so that the constant flow of news no longer feels like a threat of collapse.