Does doomscrolling cause anxiety? What 44 studies found

The honest answer to "does doomscrolling cause anxiety" is that nobody can say yet. A new review of 44 studies found that people who doomscroll more report more anxiety, depression and distress, and lower well-being. The same review rates its own certainty as very low, because nearly all the studies were one-time surveys that can't show which came first.

What we do know is narrower and more useful. In a 2021 experiment, just 2 to 4 minutes of bad-news scrolling lowered people's mood straight away. You don't have to quit the news to act on that. You need a way of reading it that has an end, and the steps further down are written for students who want to stay informed without losing an evening to it.

What counts as doomscrolling (and what doesn't)

The review defines doomscrolling as repeatedly engaging with mostly negative or threatening content and finding it hard to stop, even though it feels bad. Two parts matter: the content is bleak, and you keep going anyway.

That sets it apart from ordinary feed use. Idly flicking through friends' holiday photos is a separate issue, which we covered in our piece on passive scrolling. Doomscrolling is the refresh-for-updates loop: the war, the election, the outbreak, one more thread before bed.

The review found a moderate link with anxiety and a strong one with distress

Li and Yin's meta-analysis, published in Frontiers in Psychology in September 2026, is the first to pool numbers on this question. They included 44 studies and could combine results from 21 of them (23 separate samples) across five outcomes. The review was registered in advance and declared no funding or conflicts of interest.

The other pooled results were anxiety r = 0.35 (12 results), depression r = 0.35 (6 results), well-being r = -0.29 and life satisfaction r = -0.25. The minus signs mean more doomscrolling went with lower well-being and lower satisfaction.

A correlation is not a percentage of people affected. A rough way to read it (our calculation, not the authors') is to square it. An r of 0.35 means doomscrolling and anxiety share about 12% of their variation, and for distress it's about 26%. That is a meaningful overlap, and it still leaves most of what drives anxiety unexplained.

Does doomscrolling cause anxiety? The evidence can't tell yet

The authors rate the certainty of the evidence as "very low" for all five outcomes, using the standard GRADE system. Several things pull it down.

• Most studies were one-time surveys, which can show that two things travel together but can't show which one starts it.
• Anxious people may go looking for bad news. The authors say reverse direction and shared causes "remain plausible".
• Shared causes could drive both, such as a tendency toward negative moods, trouble tolerating uncertainty, or simply living through a crisis.
• Results varied a lot between studies. For distress, an I² of 86.5% means most of the spread reflects real differences between studies, not chance.
• 4 of the 5 distress studies came from Türkiye, so the strongest number rests on a narrow base.

Some parts hold up better. Removing any single study never flipped the direction of a result, and there was no sign of publication bias for anxiety or well-being. The paper also notes that its handling editor authored several of the included studies. On practical advice, the authors say recommendations "must remain tentative".

A preprint that claims more than its data can carry

Not everything you'll read is this careful. A Research Square preprint, which hasn't been checked by other scientists, reviewed 14 studies of 18 to 30 year olds and says the evidence "establishes" doomscrolling as a predictor of worse mental health. The peer-reviewed meta-analysis, drawing on more studies, reached the opposite view on certainty. Headlines tend to follow the louder claim.

Two to four minutes of bad news lowered mood in a lab

The one controlled experiment is older and smaller, but it can say something about cause. In PLoS One, Buchanan and colleagues randomly assigned people to a feed of COVID news, a feed of COVID-related acts of kindness, or nothing. Study 1 had 299 people on a live Twitter feed, and Study 2 had 603 people watching a YouTube video.

A few minutes of bad news immediately lowered positive mood, and in Study 2 it lowered optimism too. The kindness stories carried no such cost, and in Study 2 they reduced negative mood. That finding is where the idea of "kindness scrolling" comes from.

Keep its limits in view. Mood was measured only in the short term, and the news was about COVID in the middle of a pandemic. It shows a few minutes can dent your mood. It doesn't show that doomscrolling causes lasting anxiety.

Why the loop is so hard to break

An Emerald scoping review of 17 studies describes doomscrolling as a habit kept going by endless scroll and algorithm-picked content. There's no bottom to the page, and the feed learns that alarming posts hold your attention.

The explanations it offers are rumination (going over bad thoughts), emotional exhaustion and trouble tolerating uncertainty. That last one explains the checking. When something frightening is unfolding, not knowing feels worse than knowing, so you refresh, and the relief lasts until the next refresh.

Students are the most studied group in this research

University students made up 10 of the 29 studies in the review's main table, tied with general adults. One of them, a survey of students in Iran and the US (620 and 180 students), linked doomscrolling to existential anxiety in both countries. It was a one-time survey, so the same caveats apply.

Late nights matter as well. A 2026 survey of 663 adults in Türkiye, average age 25, linked doomscrolling to poorer sleep quality. The big review didn't pool sleep findings, so treat this as suggestive.

How to stop doomscrolling without tuning out the news

None of what follows has been tested as a programme. Some of it comes from the experiment above, and some from a Perspective article by Shabahang and Weber, which is expert opinion. They argue that how you engage matters more than how much, and that one time limit can't suit everyone, since tolerance differs between people and shifts from day to day.

1. 01
   Name what you're looking for

   Before opening news or a feed, decide what you want to know ("did the vote pass?") and close it once you have the answer.

2. 02
   Check in halfway

   If you notice you feel tense, low or irritable, take that as the signal to stop, since mood effects in the lab appeared within minutes.

3. 03
   Read a digest instead of a feed

   A once-a-day newsletter or summary gives you the information in a brief, finished form, which is what the experiment's authors suggest.

4. 04
   Set check-in times during a crisis

   Pick two slots, say 12:00 and 18:00, so the uncertainty has a scheduled answer instead of an open tab.

5. 05
   Add some kindness content

   Follow a few accounts that share good news or helpful acts, knowing the benefit in the study was short-term.

6. 06
   Remove the endless scroll

   Keep search, messages and direct links, and take away the feed that never runs out.

Don't aim for a total blackout either. Shabahang and Weber argue that full avoidance tends not to last and has costs of its own. Intentional, limited reading is the more realistic target.

When the scrolling is a sign of something bigger

Sometimes the scrolling is a symptom. If anxiety or low mood sticks around for weeks, or starts getting in the way of studying, sleep or seeing people, talk to your campus counselling service or a GP. That's our general advice rather than something from the studies, and it's worth acting on early.