How to stay informed without doomscrolling on election week

If you want to know how to stay informed without doomscrolling during the US midterms on Tuesday, November 3, the most useful move is to decide how the news reaches you before results start trickling in. Write down the two or three things you actually need to know, get them from a results page you picked instead of a feed, set check-in times with a hard stop, and keep the news out of bed.

You don't have to tune out completely, and you don't need extra willpower. One honest caveat up front: nobody has yet run a trial testing anti-doomscrolling methods. What follows is built from the strategies researchers say are most worth testing, plus what people who manage their news habits report actually doing.

Slow vote counts are ideal doomscroll fuel

Close races can take days to count. That leaves you with a big unresolved question and a refresh button, which is about as good a setup for doomscrolling as exists.

An interview study published on 29 October in MDPI's Social Sciences found that people kept scrolling during crises because they were waiting for good news. The researchers spoke to 35 adults in Türkiye from three generations. A recurring theme was the pull between wanting to stay informed and needing to limit the emotional strain.

Election news also refuses to stay on news sites. It turns up in your ordinary social apps, between a friend's dog photos and a recipe video, so a quick check of anything can become an hour of commentary you never went looking for.

The doomscrolling research shows a link, and very little certainty

The largest review so far, a Frontiers in Psychology meta-analysis published in September, pooled studies on doomscrolling and mental health. Doomscrolling went along with more anxiety and distress and lower well-being. I went through it in more detail in what 44 studies found about doomscrolling and anxiety.

Now the caveats. Certainty was rated "very low" for all five outcomes, the studies varied a lot, and the authors say the evidence "does not establish causality." Four of the five studies behind the distress figure came from Türkiye. The fair reading is that heavy doomscrolling and feeling bad tend to show up together, and nobody knows yet which drives which.

The authors say practical advice "must remain tentative." The approaches they think are worth testing include paying attention to your goals, noticing your emotional reactions, using stopping cues, and deciding how much information is enough. That last idea is the backbone of the plan below.

Looking away from some of the news is fine

If part of you worries that stepping back makes you a lazy citizen, the research offers some reassurance. In the MDPI interviews, one participant said cutting off completely felt bad, while distancing from certain content felt good.

The Frontiers authors point the same way, naming "bounded engagement rather than complete avoidance" as a direction to test. It isn't proven. It does match what most people want this week, which is to know who won the races they care about without spending three evenings soaking in speculation.

How to stay informed without doomscrolling, step by step

1. 01
   Write down what you need to know

   List two or three things, such as the results of your own races and your polling place, so you can tell when you have enough.

2. 02
   Pick one or two results pages

   Bookmark a results page you trust and check that, instead of opening a social feed to find out what's happening.

3. 03
   Turn off breaking-news alerts

   Silence push notifications from news and social apps until the count is done, and mute candidate names as keywords in the apps you keep.

4. 04
   Switch to a chronological feed

   Where an app offers a "Latest" or "Following" view, use it so you see posts in order instead of whatever the algorithm thinks will hold you.

5. 05
   Set check-in times and a hard stop

   Pick, say, three times a day to check results and a time after which you're done until morning.

6. 06
   Remember that refreshing won't speed up the count

   The number you're waiting for arrives at the same moment whether you reload once or fifty times.

These line up with what the MDPI participants did on their own: muting, blocking, choosing their sources, turning off notifications and switching X to its "show latest posts" view. They also line up with the Frontiers list of goals, stopping cues and a sense of how much is enough.

One warning from the same study. Even people who felt their feed was under control found it hard not to go back to it. Curating changes what you see, and it does much less for how often you open the app. That's why the check-in times matter more than the mute list.

Late counts make bed the riskiest place to check

Results that land after midnight are exactly the kind that turn a quick look in bed into an hour of reading.

The American Academy of Sleep Medicine recommends at least seven hours of sleep and no handheld screens for 30 to 60 minutes before bed. In its survey, half of adults use a screen in bed every day, and 26% put phone time ahead of getting enough sleep.

For election week, a results-in-the-morning rule does most of the work. Whatever is decided at 2 a.m. will still be decided at 7. If bed is where you usually slip, here's how to stop scrolling in bed without relying on willpower.

Only a quarter of people who tried to cut back did really well

If you've tried to rein in your news habit before and slid back, you have a lot of company. In a Pew Research Center survey of US adults this summer, 53% said they spend too much time on their phones, and 45% had tried to cut back in the past year.

Put that next to the MDPI finding that people who controlled their feed still kept going back to it, and a pattern appears. Deciding to scroll less in the moment tends to lose. Changing the setup ahead of time (no alerts, a bookmarked page, a fixed stop) leaves you fewer moments where you have to decide at all.

Keep the evidence in proportion, too. The interview study is 35 people in one country, the review is correlational, and none of these steps has been tested in a trial. They are cheap, reasonable bets for a stressful week, and that's all I'd claim for them.