Day and night, thumbs up, thumbs down. Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, are just some of the applications we spend hours on, daily, without realizing it. Apocalyptic scrolling or doomscrolling as it is known in English, affects our mental health and more. Find out important aspects of this phenomenon and how much it affects you.
Apocalyptic scrolling has harmful effects on mental health
The Covid pandemic caused millions of people to end up staying at home, so the night ended the same way the day began: with endless scrolling on social networks. This harmful habit has acquired the name of doomsurfing or doomscrolling, or apocalyptic scrolling.
The constant stream of news and social media never ends. This was happening late into the night and is one of the harmful habits that therapists often hear from couples where one partner is accused of not paying attention.
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Covid deaths, rising unemployment rates, street protests and more all represent a non-stop data tap. Always, out of our desperation, we look for a positive answer, a news that will improve our harsh reality, and we often resort to the habit of scrolling endlessly.
According to Nicole Ellison, who studies communication and social networks at the University of Michigan’s School of Information, this is “a huge demand on cognitive processing,” but it does nothing but add to the stress and anxiety we already feel.
For years people have questioned the net benefits of platforms like Twitter and Facebook, and while some studies have found that social media, when used responsibly, can have positive effects on mental health, it can also lead to , to anxiety and depression.
And that’s just the result of looking at too many photos or links to celebrity gossip. Add in a global pandemic and civil unrest, and the possibility that social networks will be incentivized to inject trending topics into your feeds, and the problem escalates.
However, the doom and gloom is not all the media’s fault. Mesfin Bekalu, a researcher at the Lee Kum Sheung Center for Health and Happiness at Harvard’s TH Chan School of Public Health, notes that while a lot of news is bad, “as humans we have a ‘natural’ tendency to pay more attention to bad news.”
Doomscrolling affects your mental health by increasing anxiety and stress
Your timeline is more important
This, along with social media algorithms , makes doomscrolling and its impact almost inevitable. The effects of doomscrolling also vary depending on who is doing it. So the doomscrolling continues.
The actual origins of the term are a bit murky, though many point to this tweet from October 2018 as a possible ancestor. More recently, doomscrolling was named one of Merriam-Webster’s words to watch, and Dictionary.com named it one of its new words we created because of the coronavirus.
However, there is more to the etymology. Especially in the word doom. Originally the word had connotations linking it to judgment day and the end of the world, but now it is just as likely to be associated with destruction or ruin. Doomscrolling will never stop doom itself.
This phenomenon is gaining momentum, becoming a real marathon towards poor mental health, especially in the case of people who have a great need for peace. So, do not hesitate to check the timer that is present in the case of every smartphone to see how much time you spend on social networks and reduce it. Remember that your life is here and now, and the virtual one will not matter when the years have passed, your timeline being the most important, compared to the one on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter.