By Darren Wong (24S03C)
It’s 7.30 pm.
It’s been a long day of classes and CCA and you’re tired.
You quickly take a shower and sit down to eat your dinner. It’s 8.15 pm.
You flop down on your bed. Nothing has ever felt more comfortable.
You reach for your phone and almost reflexively, Instagram is open. It’s 8.36 pm.
“I should go study…” you think, “but it’s 8.36… I’ll start at 8.45. Nice number.”
Your hands move instinctively. TikTok is open.
Swipe. You let out a chortle. Then another swipe. You giggle. Just one more. Another laugh, repeat.
It’s now almost 10.00pm.
You look up at the time, and can’t help but let your mouth hang agape as you scramble to remember where the past hour and a half disappeared to.
A Monster Among Us
Sounds familiar?
You, like many others, are probably a victim of the vicious, time-wasting monster that is doomscrolling.
The monster is sneaky. It creeps up on you when you’re not looking and when you’re at your most vulnerable—comfy in your soft bed after a long day or bored on a weekend afternoon.
The monster is oddly captivating. You’re tapping, swiping, scrolling away, lost in the fantastically hypnotic world of the 30-second video playing on your screen. How can you help but scroll to the next one—it’s right there!
And of course, the monster is dangerous. It’s so easy to give in to just 5 minutes of scrolling—but it never really is just 5 minutes of scrolling, is it? It’s 15, then 20, then 30, or however many minutes it takes for you to look up at the time and go: Oh crap. I’m screwed.
Understanding Your Enemy
Doomscrolling? Yah, I do that every day.
Anonymous Victim #1
Doomscrolling, originally defined as the overconsumption of distressing news updates, has now evolved to cover a broader phenomenon among internet users: the excessive, almost addictive pattern of scrolling through short-form content on social media platforms such as TikTok or Instagram Reels without a sense of time passing.
The doomscrolling monster is great at many things. It’s the number one destroyer of to-do lists; procrastination’s best friend; the immovable roadblock to productivity. In fact, I will confess that even in the writing of this article, I too was felled by the doomscrolling monster, taking a few regrettable pit-stops before I got it done.
Perhaps more concerningly, excessive doomscrolling can also take a toll on your mental health, especially when it begins to interfere with your life—potentially setting you behind on work, interrupting your sleep, or even affecting your relationships with the people around you.
It’s indisputable that doomscrolling is unhealthy, and we all know it. So why do we still do it?
The Big Bosses
The choice to doomscroll is not a conscious one—most sessions start as a quick break to check in on your social media feeds, but inexplicably eventually transform into hours of mindless scrolling.
I just can’t stop… it’s like my TikTok scrolls itself
Anonymous Victim #2
It is oh-so-easy to slip into a doomscroll; the captivating allure of endless content and the constant stream of new stimuli effortlessly draw us deeper and deeper into the abyss. And once you start, momentum builds, making it even harder to overcome inertia and break out of the doomscroll.
The good news is, it’s not actually your fault. Social media websites are designed to keep you hooked—it’s how they make money—and experts have spent years of their lives thinking about the best ways to retain your attention.
The bad news is, well, also that social media websites are designed to keep you hooked. To make things worse, our young, vulnerable, developing minds are “less able to disengage from addictive experiences and are more sensitive to distractions”, the American Psychological Association says.
Well then, how am I supposed to resist doomscrolling if the apps are quite literally built for me to fail?
Escaping the Matrix
Thankfully, it’s not completely hopeless.
The first step in avoiding doomscrolling is being aware that you’re doomscrolling. Make a conscious choice to look out for the time when you’re on social media. This can come in the form of setting screen time limits, or even just a post-it note on your wall that forces you to be mindful about what you’re doing.
However, sometimes awareness isn’t enough—the compulsion to procrastinate for just a bit longer takes over and you just can’t peel yourself away. In cases like these, my personal suggestion is to turn off your phone and throw it as far away as possible (metaphorically, of course, this article is not liable for any damage!). You can’t scroll if there’s nothing to scroll on.
We can also curate our social media feeds to be less conducive to doomscrolling. Harvard Business Review recommends varying the type of content that you consume so that your feed isn’t a continuous stream of information that feels impossible to escape.
Befriending the Monster
When you can’t beat them, join them.
Eliminating doomscrolling from our lives completely is a tall order for many of us. It’s not completely bad: it can help us relieve stress after a long day, and the shared experience of doomscrolling brings many of us closer.
Rather than trying to eliminate doomscrolling from our lives completely, set reasonable boundaries for yourself that you can trust yourself to follow. By consciously choosing when and how we engage in doomscrolling, we regain agency and control over our behaviour.
So maybe we can have a little doomscrolling, as a treat. Make friends with the doomscrolling monster—shake his hand, talk it out—and you can take a little of the doom out of doomscrolling.
But watch your back, and stay vigilant, because you never know when he’ll turn on you, and lead you down another five-hour-long journey through the interweb.