Doomscrolling: why you can't stop scrolling, and how to stop

Doomscrolling is scrolling through a feed, often of bad news, long after you meant to stop. You can't stop because the feed never ends and nothing in it tells you to. So the stop has to come from outside the feed, decided before you open it: a stopping point you choose in advance, a limit you don't snooze, autoplay off, and somewhere for the phone and your hands to go when you get there.

In 2017, Adam Alter stood on the TED stage and described something most of us had stopped noticing. "Stopping cues were everywhere in the 20th century," he said. You finished a newspaper and folded it away. A chapter ended and you decided whether to read on. A TV show ended, and the next episode was a week away. "But the way we consume media today is such that there are no stopping cues. The news feed just rolls on, and everything's bottomless" (TED, 4:52).

Alter, a professor of psychology and marketing at New York University, is the author of Irresistible, a book about why products like these are so hard to put down (Penguin Random House). At the same conference, Tristan Harris, a former design ethicist at Google, described the endless feed from the inside, as part of a race for your attention. If what's missing is a stopping cue, you can build your own: four ways to set one up before you open a feed, and three for the moment you reach it.

Why can't I stop scrolling?

Harris traces the race through autoplay. "YouTube wants to maximize how much time you spend. And so what do they do? They autoplay the next video." Netflix followed with the next episode, he says, and Facebook with the videos in your feed (TED, 2:09).

You can see the drift in how people use their phones. Researchers at the London School of Economics filmed 37 young adults in the UK, France and Germany through small cameras on their glasses for at least three days. When people opened something while they were already on the phone, it held them for about 104 seconds on average, against 46 seconds for something opened at the start of a pick-up; Facebook, Instagram and the browser ran longest (Heitmayer & Lahlou, 2021). One participant put it this way: "I pick it up for something, then I forget what I wanted to do and check all the things."

Being tired may make it worse. Gloria Mark, who studies attention at the University of California, Irvine (our article on attention span covers her research), agreed on Armchair Expert that the more drained you are, the more distractible you are: "you also lose the ability to guard against distractions" (Armchair Expert, 1:10:02). Anna Lembke, a psychiatrist at Stanford whose views on breaks we cover in our article on the dopamine detox, describes her own version after long clinical days: "I was just gonna watch this one video, you know, and there I am two, three hours later." She doesn't count it as rest: "I don't think it's actually relaxing for our brains" (The Mel Robbins Podcast, 1:12:20 to 1:12:29).

How to stop doomscrolling before it starts

1. Decide where you'll stop, and tie it to something that happens anyway

Alter ties his own rule to an event. "It's easy to say, between 5 and 6pm, I'm going to not use my phone. The problem is, 5 and 6pm looks different on different days." So when dinner starts, his phone goes "as far away as possible. Because we're really bad at resisting temptation" (6:57). Our article on phubbing covers phones at the table. The same works inside a session: one video, this thread, until the kettle boils, or the thing you opened the app for.

Say it before you open the app, because once you're in, you forget. Lembke's advice is to make a list of what you'll do on the device before you pick it up, since "the instant our brains are exposed to those screens, all of a sudden we forget" (1:02:35).

If it's news you scroll, the same rule applies with one extra question. Mark asks herself before she clicks: "Do I really need to read the news right now?" (1:07:57). Catherine Price, author of How to Break Up with Your Phone, deleted her news apps after finding herself reading every article compulsively; she now reads the news on her computer or in the Sunday paper and says she's still well informed (10% Happier, 36:08). The American Psychiatric Association's advice is to notice how what you're seeing affects your mood, and take a break if it starts to leave you stressed (American Psychiatric Association).

2. Set a daily limit at your own ideal, and don't snooze it

In a 12-week trial, 1,933 US adults with Android phones could set daily limits of their own choosing on six apps, including Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. The limits cut use of those apps by about 22 minutes a day, and 78% of people kept them through the final weeks (Allcott et al., 2022). They would have cut about 53 minutes; the economists who ran it say the gap was "primarily because users snooze the limits."

So set the limit at the time you'd actually like to spend on the app that takes most of yours, and make it hard to wave away. On Android, an app timer closes the app when the time runs out, and a PIN protects it (Google). Our guide to how to reduce screen time covers the rest of the setup.

3. Turn autoplay off where the app lets you

Autoplay is the setting Harris singled out, and switching it off removes the next video before it starts. Not every app offers the switch, and no trial has tested it on its own. Where it's missing, your stopping point from step 1 does the job.

4. Put a pause in front of the feed you open without deciding

Researchers tested an app called one sec, which makes you wait a few seconds and breathe before a chosen app opens, then offers a way out. Among 280 people who used it for six weeks, about a third of attempts to open those apps ended with the person backing out. There was no comparison group, and one of the authors created the app. In a separate online experiment with 500 people, the option to back out did more than the wait itself (Grüning et al., 2023). Your phone's own app limit puts a similar step in front of the feed at no cost, though no one has tested it as a pause.

What to do when you reach your stop

5. Put the phone down before you decide anything

The stop is the moment the feed is designed to carry you past, with one more video or one more post. Lembke's general rule is to set up a barrier in advance, so that you can "press the pause button between desire and consumption" (1:00:13). Applied here, the phone goes back to its place (a shelf, a bag, another room) when you reach your stop, and only then do you decide whether you want more. Using her idea at the end of a session is our step, and no one has tested it there.

6. Don't open a second app

Stopping one feed often means opening another. In a trial with about 35,000 US adults who were paid to switch off Facebook or Instagram for six weeks in 2020, about three-quarters of the time freed from Facebook, and all of the time freed from Instagram, went to other apps on their phones (Allcott et al., 2025). It's a working paper, and eight of its 27 authors were affiliated with Meta. In the limits trial, about half of the time a limit saved moved to other apps. So your stop covers the next app too, and the app that takes over may need a limit of its own. Our article on the digital detox looks at what those breaks did and didn't change.

7. Have the next thing ready, especially at night

The gap after a stop fills fast, so decide what goes in it. For hard days, Lembke suggests planning in advance something that calms you down without a screen, such as seeing friends or going for a walk (1:12:29). Mark's advice when you're drained is similar: pull back, and take a walk if you can (1:06:51). At night, the simplest version is a phone that charges outside the bedroom; Lembke's plan for a better morning starts the night before, with "no digital devices in the bedroom" (1:00:49). Our piece on revenge bedtime procrastination covers why the late-night scroll is so hard to end.

The folded newspaper

The newspaper, the chapter and the weekly episode each told you when to stop. A feed never will, so the cue has to be one you set up yourself, before you start. In Alter's words: "when you have a stopping cue that, every time dinner begins, my phone goes far away, you avoid temptation all together."

The 1h Protocol to Take Control of Your Phone gives a whole chapter to this: the moment you meant to put the phone down. Its free first chapter uses a few questions and your phone's own numbers to find your pattern and gives you one thing to do today. The full program takes about an hour: you set up your phone as you go and leave with a personal protocol, a lock-screen card and day-7 and day-14 reviews, with four short check-ins over 30 days. Start free

Frequently asked questions

What is doomscrolling?

Doomscrolling is scrolling through a feed, often of bad or upsetting news, long after you meant to stop. The American Psychiatric Association's advice is to stay aware of how what you're seeing affects your mood, and to take a break if it starts to make you feel envious or stressed.

Why can't I stop scrolling?

Because nothing in the feed tells you to. Adam Alter calls this the loss of stopping cues: newspapers and TV episodes end, and feeds don't. Autoplay removes another chance to stop, and in a filmed study, apps opened mid-session held people more than twice as long as the first one they opened (Heitmayer & Lahlou, 2021).

How do I stop scrolling at night?

Decide your stop before you open the app, tie it to something that happens anyway, such as brushing your teeth, and charge the phone outside the bedroom. The pull is harder to resist when you're tired, so make the late-night stop a setting, like a daily limit, instead of a decision you make in the moment.

Is doomscrolling bad for you?

The research can't say it causes harm, and minutes alone aren't the issue. In a review of 71 studies of short-form video with about 98,000 people, feeling unable to stop was linked with feeling worse far more than minutes watched were; most studies were snapshots, so cause and effect can't be separated (Nguyen et al., 2025). Our article on phone addiction explains why control matters more than hours.

Do app limits help you stop?

Yes, partly. In a 12-week trial with 1,933 US adults, limits people set themselves cut use of six apps by about 22 minutes a day (Allcott et al., 2022). Most of the shortfall came from snoozing, and about half the time saved moved to other apps, so make the limit hard to override and watch the app that takes over.

Sources

This article draws on Adam Alter's TED talk and his publisher's description of Irresistible, Tristan Harris's TED talk, interviews with Gloria Mark (Armchair Expert), Anna Lembke (The Mel Robbins Podcast) and Catherine Price (10% Happier), and the studies listed below.

• Adam Alter, Why our screens make us less happy (TED talk, 2017)
• Adam Alter, Irresistible (book, publisher page, 2017)
• Tristan Harris, How a handful of tech companies control billions of minds every day (TED talk, 2017)
• Heitmayer & Lahlou, Why are smartphones disruptive? An empirical study of smartphone use in real-life contexts (filmed field study of 37 adults aged 21 to 29, 2021)
• Armchair Expert, Gloria Mark (podcast episode, 2022)
• The Mel Robbins Podcast, ep. 363, with Anna Lembke (podcast episode, 2026)
• American Psychiatric Association, What is Technology Addiction? (public information page, 2024)
• Nguyen et al, Feeds, feelings, and focus: a systematic review and meta-analysis of the cognitive and mental health correlates of short-form video use (meta-analysis of 71 studies, Psychological Bulletin, 2025)
• Allcott, Gentzkow & Song, Digital Addiction (randomized trial, 1,933 US adults, American Economic Review, 2022)
• Allcott et al, The Effect of Deactivating Facebook and Instagram on Users' Emotional State (two randomized trials, about 35,000 US adults, NBER working paper, 2025)
• Grüning, Riedel & Lorenz-Spreen, Directing smartphone use through the self-nudge app one sec (field study and online experiment, 2023)
• #133 Catherine Price, Redefining Your Relationship with Your Phone (podcast episode, 10% Happier with Dan Harris, 2018)
• Google Android Help, Manage how you spend time on your Android phone with Digital Wellbeing (how-to page)