This year has seen a lot of trends, from baking banana bread to making TikToks to binge-watching shows like Tiger King. But experts say one of the biggest trends of 2020 that pretty much everyone is getting involved in is “doomscrolling.”
Scrolling through your social media feeds and seeing negative news — and not being able to stop — has become a daily routine for most people in 2020. Of course, doomscrolling isn’t a new habit, but experts say it’s one that’s become much more prominent and much harder to break in a year like 2020, with a global pandemic, racial unrest, and a historic election to contend with and try to make sense of.
“Doomscrolling gives us a biased view of the level of danger out there,” said Dr. Pamela Rutledge, a media psychologist and director of the Media Psychology Research Center. “You load this impression of the world into your brain about how terrible it is, and you don’t have the evidence to counterbalance that, so you get a very emotional response.”
The Merriam-Webster dictionary officially added the terms doomscrolling and "doomsurfing" to its list of "Words We're Watching" in April. Merriam-Webster defines doomscrolling as "referring to the tendency to continue surfing or scrolling through bad news, even if that news is sad, discouraging, or depressing."
