Hello everybody, Welcome back to the show. Welcome back to the podcast, new listeners, old listeners. Wherever you are in the world, it is so great to have you here, back for another episode as we, of course break down the psychology of our twenties. It is a pretty wild thought to realize that we have more information in our fingertips than any generation ever before. We are more in touch any terrible news story, any terrible tragedy, any groundbreaking discovery, niche profile piece like. We can access that from our phones at any hour, in any instance, and it's great in many many ways. We are very informed people. But it is quite frankly, not something that humans have necessarily evolved to deal with. I was watching this YouTube video the other day, very very random. It's going to sound strange, but it was like a day in the life of a medieval peasant. And I was watching this video and I was thinking, this individual would have only had to worry about the world that was ten to twenty kilometers around him or her. They would only have the information given to them by the church, or by their neighbors, or by whoever the king, their queen. They didn't know what was going on halfway across the world in Persia or Rome, and how that would affect them. They didn't know about the natural disasters in Asia or Africa, like the discoveries in Australia. It seemed almost a lot simpler that way. And it is such a privilege to have access to the information that we have now, and it's definitely improved the ways in which we are very conscious global citizens. But it has its downsides. And as people in our twenties, we are one of the first generations to have grown up this way. We have grown up always having this constant information so in the palm of our hands, and it's given rise to this phenomenon known as doomscrolling. Doom scrolling has a few meanings, but at its core, it is when we accidentally or consciously spend way too much time consuming online negative content, whether it is news articles, news contents about tragedies and terrors, or just actually hateful content like nastiness in any form on the Internet. You know, seeing me in comments, seeing cruel videos that are constantly like somehow thrown in our face by the algorithm that is not policed. This has a very deep, yet i would say hidden, emotional and psychological consequence for us. And we all know that we don't feel very good when we spend too much time online, But I think we also need to get better at labeling why that is and controlling the reasons why we do it. Anyways, you know, despite feeling like all this dark, terrible, horrible news content is making us feel worse about ourselves, we often can't stop. And I'm one of those people. I know that this is going to make my mental state worse, but I cannot look away. I keep looking for new information. In part, I think that it's because we are addicted to our phones, but also there is this element of seeking out more information is a way that we soothe ourselves, and in this day and age, like when everything is quite stressful and there are a lot of reasons to feel unhappy about the world. By scrolling on our phones and using social media, that is a form of distraction from those feelings. But it can also end up meaning that we are more constantly exposed to situations that are honestly quite harmful to be viewing all the time. We also then feel this obligation right like, I want to be informed, I want to know what's going on. You can kind of see the trap that we're falling into. It's the same formula for any toxic habit. It is both like the devil and our savior. Doom scrolling and like reading the news or being informed makes us feel better for a second, and then it makes us feel worse, and then we try to feel better by going back and scrolling some more, and we get back to the same place that we started. So today I want to focus in specifically on a rise in doom scrolling, how it has been slowly changing our brains and how we think about the world, especially as people in our twenties, and what we can kind of do about it. You know, we are seeing all these consequences, but we also don't want to be someone who is out of touch. We want to know what's going on. So how do we get into a healthy space and a healthy place with scrolling, with the news, with accessing the internet, whatever it is? What are the alternatives excited for this episode? This is something that I personally needed to hear about. I know that there is like a lot of just a lot of tension and stress and like political angst in the world at the moment, understandably, and this is an important topic to talk about in this time because when we speak about mental health, it is a huge contributor. So, without further ado, my lovely listeners, let's get into the psychology of doom scrolling. So doom scrolling we have a definition already. It's basically when we spend an excessive time consuming or being shown negative news content or online content that ultimately ultimately makes us feel pretty pessimistic. But it's also a really new term, and it was coined during the pandemic. So I am sure we all clearly remember how we were glued to our phones for any type of news or updates to do with lockdowns, case numbers, vaccine rollout during that like that, during that time, during twenty twenty to twenty twenty one, I have very distinct memories actually of checking the case numbers in my area, like in my city, three four, five, ten times a day to see if they'd gone down, and reading every article, reading any press release that could potentially tell me that numbers were decreasing or we like had a cure, which neither of those things were never true. So basically, during that time, researchers and a little psychologists were seeing that because everything was so unknown and so scary, we just wanted as much information as we could get. We just wanted to know more. It was very soothing in a strange way. But we also had all this empty time and space to consume more and more social media content than ever before, and we were taking full advantage of that. And these two kind of factors are what led to doom scrollings, what led to people just feeling completely overwhelmed by some of the content that they were accessing. Now, obviously we are no longer actively in a pandemic, but there are still a lot of things that have taken place in you know, the last few months. It's ironic, I'm literally recording this like a week after the US election, and I'm sure a lot of us are doom scrolling at the moment and will be in the next few months. But if you want some numbers around just how common this is, twenty twenty four survey that interviewed five thousand American adults who are pretty good sample size found that about thirty one percent of adults will doom scroll on a regular basis. But this percentage is a lot bigger the younger you are, so for millennials, it's forty six percent. For gen Z it's fifty one percent. That's half of us, half of us. And honestly, you know, I'm not even surprised by that number, considering all the people I talk to who are like, yeah, of course I feel really burdened by this. Of course I can't stop as well. It's a very very common thing. Something we have got to take note of here though, before we go any further, is that there are actually two types of doom scrolling. There is passive and active. So the passive doom scroll is when you can't you know, you're not really going in search of any more information. You're not seeking out negative news. You may not even be on like a news website, but you find it anyway, especially on Instagram, especially on TikTok or Twitter, whatever it is. We have, like in our normal environments, we have semi like a little bit of control over what we see. Like when you're in your home, you get to choose the furniture, you get to choose the people that you invite in, you get to choose all those things. You know, you have a way of controlling your environments and based on your preferences and based on what you like. When you go online, you do not have that control. You have no control over what you're going to see, even if you try and train your algorithm to be suited to what you want to consume. About one third of us, according to a recent study by the National Institute of Health, we get our news online even when we don't follow news sites, because it pops up, because it's the thing that is noteworthy, because lots of people interact with that content. And I think even that is shocking and its own right. A third of us using social media as our primary news source. But that's kind of the day and age that we are in, and news sites and newspapers have adapted to us, have adapted to that, and you know, I guess it's better than nothing. But it's not just news, right, It's not just the news. It's watching an Instagram reel and opening the comments and seeing all the trolls. It is the videos that are toxic or mocking or mean that also leaves a negative mark, especially considering how high a lot of our screen times are at the moment. You know, if you spend two to three hours on social media a day, which is the average amount that people spend a lot of stuff is going to be filtering through a lot of stuff that you know. Can you just imagine this. It's like you're scrolling, You're like, oh, beautiful picture of my friend, picture of a celebrity, picture of a puppy twenty dead in landslide. That is still information that is coming into your brain. So that's passive. The second type of doom scrolling is active doom scrolling, and it's what we typically think of when I say doom scrolling. It's like more of a conscious habit of constantly scrolling through news headlines and most of the time news that isn't very good, because then it wouldn't be noteworthy. I will say, we do have to pay attention to what is going on in the world, and it is important to stay informed, and it's important to know what is happening around you in politics, with the environment, with foreign policy, with human rights. But we can do this in a way that doesn't become crippling. I have a friend Erin who has been a guest on the show before. We Love Erin, big friend of the show, and she I hope she doesn't mind using the story. I don't think she will, But she is incredibly invested in climate change, in the state in the environment, Like that's what she does for work. She protects wetlands in Australia, like she goes to protests. She's studying horticulture next year. She's so passionate, she's so invested. One of the most beautiful souls and most passionate, you know, just souls for these issues. But she was telling me, you know how dark that can get for her, because she's so drawn to seeking out further information, as much information as possible about the state of all of these things, about the state of the environment, about what species is going extinct, what government is not protecting, which habitat, And it's become a bit of a compulsion needing to find out more, not wanting to be in the dark, and therefore consuming all of the worst content and all the worst headlines day in and day out. And as her friend, you know, it's it's very hard to see because you obviously know she cares a lot, and this is an element and an aspect of how much she cares. But it can make people incredibly pessimistic. Why do we do it other than just the fact that we want to know more. Why is it? Well? The first reason is that when we feel that we know more, we assume that that's going to make us more equipped in the future. So even though it's terrible, at least we are not in the dark. At least it is not uncertain. At least we have all the details. So this explanation is really based in anxiety and one psychiatrist from the Media Psychology Research Center, he put it really really well in an article that I was reading when I was researching this episode. What he said was that basically, doom scrolling is just a compulsive need to try and get answers when we're afraid. And not only is it a compulsive need, that's a very human need right, more information, more details, that provides more of an illusion of security. So doom scrolling is actually this really twisted, dark and I would say counterintuitive self soothing behavior. I always think about it like, maybe this won't make sense. I think it will. When you go through a breakup and you keep checking on your ex's social media to make sure they're not with someone new, to see who they're following. You want to know exactly how their post relationship journey is going, even though it's painful. That is very similar to what we're doing here, because the alternative hypothetical of not knowing that is exponentially worse in our brain. And that's anxiety for you. Anxiety. As we know, it loves to feed on the empty spaces. It loves to feed on the unknown. It loves to feed on a lack of answers because that is where it can do its most like the most of it's catastrophizing, right, that's when it can have the most fun. Like, it's a pretty sneaky being. So doom scrolling is just to really wrap that up. It's control seeking, it's information seeking for the sake of certainty. This behavior is also really rooted in our brain's limbic system, according to some recent research at Harvard. So you've probably heard of our limbic system before. It is basically our lizard brain. It is our old animal brain, very ancient part of us. And our limbic system is what promotes and is responsible for self preservation. It drives our fight or flight response to danger, and it is typically what fuels us to scroll for threats. You know, we are being hypervigilant. We are scanning the danger using the resources that we have now, which is the Internet, and the more you scroll, the more you feel you need to know. There are two groups who are more prone to this than anyone else. According to that same paper from Harvard, it's women and it's people with the history of trauma. Why is that. It's because the need for hyper vigilance in those two populations runs deep. It is in our DNA, it is in our bones, it is in our memories. And you know, there was this really it was fascinating, but it was also just actually quite devastating. It was a study into refugees and refugees who had recently immigrated to a new country and the rate at which dooms growing happened in these communities, and what they found was that it was so much higher, especially when you think about, you know, news from their home countries. You know, they may still have family there, they may still have loved ones there, and the fear and the need for knowledge really extends beyond them. And it's not like the news industry or journalists are helping us through this. Even for the average person, they know that we are more drawn in by news stories that elicit a sense of urgency and fear our brains are trained to pay attention to those into instances and stimulus and environments and whatever that is creating that kind of emotional reaction, and so they publish more of that stuff, They make the titles more grappy. Everything seems disastrous, and we're paying so much more attention to that compared to the overall picture of what the world is really like. So why do we do this? Well, firstly, we do this because of something called the negativity bias. The negativity bias is basically this cognitive bias whereby we tend to pay more attention and we remember negative information more than positive information because it's more important for our survival. And one way that we are really seeing this and that we know that this applies to news that we see on our phone or just news in general, is because of some amazing researchers at McGill in in Canada. So these researchers invited some participants to come into their lab and they said, come into our lab. We're going to do this study on eye tracking. We just want to see, like how your eyes move in response to images. Of course that's not true. What they wanted to know was are we automatically and immediately drawn more to good news, neutral news or bad news or is it just all the same? Is it just you know, our brain scans from top to bottom. So basically, they had these people in a room and they were like, oh, you know, before we like get into the actual experiment, just pick like some news articles that you want to read while you wait, like you can just have a little browse. They were then asked to read them. It didn't really matter if they actually read them. It was just kind of like to keep up appearances. And then they did the study and what they found was that overwhelmingly, when they were given this site, and there was an equal amount of negative, positive and neutral stories, overwhelmingly the place our eyes go to first worthy most scary, negative, distressing headlines, things about corruption, death, natural disasters, and not the neutral stories. And when they asked them afterwards, and this is the second component to this study that is so interesting, When they said, okay, do you think that the news these days is it more good? Is it more bad? Is it more you know, neutral, almost all of them were like, oh no, the news is so bad. Everything is going so wrong at the moment. You know, the majority of the stories I saw on that news site were negative, despite the fact that it was completely even we grab onto negative information because it is novel, because it is noteworthy, and because we think that it's more important. I think this is really important to be aware of whenever you're surfing like the ABC or the Guardian or the New York Times or whatever it is. I think that it's not all bad, but we are tricked by both external forces like the mainstream media, but also internal forces like our negativity bias into believing. So I want to give you one final explanation as to why before we go into how we can stop it, and it actually comes down to the psychology of how social media apps are designed. No surprises here. Social media is addictive. Probably also not a surprise. It was made that way because your attention is money. That's the whole business model of these apps. The more they can keep your attention, the more that you will buy things from ads. So it's really don't beat yourself up if you find it really hard to set those digital boundaries like they are doing everything in their power to make sure that doesn't happen. Instagram and Facebook. Actually, I remember at one stage I read an article about how they had literal neuroscientists on their payroll on their teams. They were paid employees, and their job was b basically like tell us how we can keep people hooked. And one of the ways that they were like, hey, this is a way you can do this, it's called the infinite scroll. And this plays a really important part in why we doom scroll. So the infinite scroll means that we are never going to run out of content to see. I remember, like back in the day, in like the early like twenty tens, when Instagram was first released, like twenty thirteen, twenty fourteen, you would go on Instagram and when everybody, when you'd seen everything, when basically everyone that you followed had posted within the last five days and you'd seen it, it would just be the end of the screen, like you couldn't go any further. You would hit like a wall. And nowadays, no, no, no, that is not happening. That is not happening. They do not want you to exit the app. They want you to stay on the app. And so you'll start seeing recommended content, You'll start seeing all this other stuff that you're not necessarily following, but you stay hooked because it's just like all this dopamine flooding into your brain. It's junk food for the mind. And I say this metaphor quite literally. The information that we feed our brains just like what we feed our body. It really matters. You become a product of what your brain is receiving, and that really influences your worldview. And if you are a doom scroller, I'm included in that, so there is no criticism here. But if you are a doom scroller, what you're receiving is going to be pessimistic and it's going to be bleak, and that results in a lot of anxiety, a lot of like apathy, like oh my god, who cares? Like the world is just so terrible. It results in a lot of existential anxiety, which is like a sense that like the world is just there's no point, what does life even mean? It can also give us something that we call popcorn brain. I don't know if you've heard about this recently, you will be hearing about it more in the future. But I read another article I think either in Yale or Harvard Magazine. Can't remember. I'll keep you updated if I find it, But basically this article is like popcorn brain happens when you spend too much time online and your brain is actually so overstimulated with information that it almost feels like it's popping. It feels so overstimulated that you're like pop pop, like you're moving from one thing to another, and like it's just fast and fast and fast. That is not normal, and that makes it really hard to engage with the real world, and it makes us feel really anxious. And feeling anxious and numb about the world is not normal, and it's not something that I think we should normalize, and it's not something that I think should define our life. Luckily, though, the same way that we get trapped in a doom scrolling cycle, we can also get out of it, and we can find a way to have a healthy relationship with our news, with our content, with our phones, whatever it is. So I want to talk about how we can find our way out and the kind of behavioral and mental shifts that can get us there. After this short break, I'm just going to quickly repeat what I said before, because I think it's a really important point. You can still be informed and know what's going on and not be addicted to the negative news cycle. Or you can have both. You can still acknowledge that the world is harsh and cruel at times and feel happy, joyful, grateful, not despite of it, but in spite of it. Everything might say more ful. Well, you are going to be the reason that someone doesn't think that today. You are going to pour a little bit more harmony, a little bit more peace, a little bit more kindness into the world. And this is something that really helped me a few months back, maybe like six months ago, and I discussed it on the podcast at the time, but I got into a pretty heavy, dark headspace around my social media consumption, and I was just convinced, based on what I was seeing in the comments that I was receiving, that everyone was just me, Everyone was just judgmental. It was everywhere, and I know now I was selectively paying attention to what was confirming my bias. But one of the ways that I got out of this was really starting to leave positivity where I saw negativity. If I saw a bunch of trolls, you know, I'd make sure to comment something nice, that kind of thing. It's all about diluting the bad, sad, downright depressing stuff with a little bit of light like drop by drop. You know, imagine that you have a full glass of wine and it's red, and you know it's very hard to see through murky, and then you put it under a tap and you keep the tap on slowly that wine glass is diluted and the water going into that wine glass. That is your kindness when it seems really really gloomy. Part of it seems so is because we feel like we can't do anything about it. We feel like we can't fix the world's problems. And at times that's true. You can't fix the whole world, but you can fix your circle. You can fix your part of the universe, your little corner of the world, by doing it kind to people, doing it really really rough, by donating to charity, by donating your time, by cooking for your elderly neighbors, by planting native plants in your garden or on your balcony. That is the most beautiful way, in my mind, to counteract a mindset that says the world is fucked based on doom scrolling. It's to say, yeah, the world is fucked, but where I am, what I choose to do, I'm not going to be a representation of that. Just because the news is bad doesn't mean that I'm going to take that and mean that I'm going to make it worse. You know, I have a friend who has her garden like filled with flowers just for her honeybees, And it's just one of the first things I do when I go over to her house, Like, she has these poppies that are like specifically for honey bees, bumblebees, whatever you call them, And I love checking on her bees. It's just like so pretty and it's just like, oh, there is something that's alive. There is something that's good. My friend has honey bees in her backyard, Like yay, that's a great news story in my life. You can also really help yourself break the toxic negative cycle that contributes to doom scrolling by rethinking the content that you see. You know, make a conscious decision to start following positive news sites or newsletters or pages that is, like you diluting the negative news. I love, for example, the good News movement, which started during the pandemic to kind of counteract the very thing that we are talking about today, which is doom scrolling. I also like the Dodo It's it's not really news, it's just animal stories. That's it. It's just really cute animal stories. And you know what, it's really delightful to see. The Good News Network is also another really really good one positivenews dot com. You know, you're not limiting yourself, you are diluting it. You have to start showing your mind, giving your mind healthy examples that it's not all bad, even if that remains your prevailing emotion for a while. Part of getting out of that headspace is really offering alternative information and evidence to our brain, feeding it well, feeding it with nutritious information, making sure that your diet isn't just rich your media diet isn't just rich in all of this really intense information, and that's the only thing that you're giving your brain. It's also really important to have balance there. And I'm going to carry on the metaphor of food and eating and feeding, but having a balanced informational diet. And this was something that was introduced to me by someone I interviewed recently who's coming on for our December twelve Days of Guests. I won't spoil who it is, but she was talking about how you can't just give yourself one source of news or information that is what gets us stuck in informational bubbles. That's what gets us stuck in only seeing the world in a certain way, not being able to think about other people opinions. And it also means that we're only going to see a negative perspective from one side of things. So having a few newspapers that you read, having your news podcast, but then also including something bright, something less serious, having some fiction, having like a fun book that you're reading on the side something less serious. That is a really important way to diversify what you are consuming so that it doesn't just all become stale and all become one way. Now, I also want to turn to kind of like curtailing or rethinking our social media habits, because I think this is a huge culprit in passive doom scrolling. This is one we really need to zoom zoom in on. You know, if we're going to talk about how to stop doom scrolling, we can't talk about that without talking about how to be have a healthier usage of social media. And I'll start with one of my favorite reminders for how to do this. If you want to change anything, you have to start by changing how that thing shows up in your routine. You cannot just think your way into a happier mental state. You can't say, you know, yeah, it'd be nice to control my social media. I really wish I would get to that, and then not do that because it's just I've tried it, it doesn't work, You're not going to do it. I think one of the big reasons that we have a negative relationship with social media and the news is because we let it be in control rather than having good mental hygiene habits. And yes, I did say hygiene, because that is how I like to see it. You know, you wash your face every night, You brush your teeth hopefully please do that. You know, you wash your towels, you shower, You take care of yourself physically. Now it's time to apply those same hygiene routines to taking care of yourself mentally, specifically in terms of your relationship with your phone. So here are some tried and tested measures for having better social media hygiene better mental hygiene. Right off the phone off before bed. Your phone cannot be the last thing you see before you sleep, and it definitely cannot be the first thing that you see when you wake up in the morning, because that just means that you are literally plugged in day and night. There is never a break. The moment you are conscious, you are consuming content. The moment before you are unconscious, you're consuming content. So sleep with it in a separate room and just buy an alarm clock, because I know that's a big reason why a lot of people are like, oh, I have to have my phone in my room because my alarm. Go to your local reject shop, go to your local A two dollars store, go to go on Facebook marketplace, find an alarm clock, like a good old fashioned alarm clock, and start using that instead. You will just see amazing changes. I didn't realize how anxious I was by having my phone just right next to my bedside. And the other thing that I did was I started doing one thing in the morning before I went on my phone. Obviously, I work for myself, so there is like big tendency, and it's like the most toxic habit, bad habit that I need to break. I'm very bad at it, but I'm getting there slowly. And it's that before I go on my phone, I do something else. I do something else so that I don't check my emails. And of course once I check my emails, I check my social media, and of course once I check my social media, suddenly there is something that has happened overnight, like in the US or in the UK, or across the world. Because I live in Australia, that is like completely you know, torn the world apart. So that is really really important. Social media tim is. I don't think they always work because you can just just kind of dismiss them. How I get around that is that I actually delete my social media from my phone between ten am to four pm during the week. I definitely have the urge, and I even notice that, like I go to pick up my phone to like check my social media, to like aimlessly scroll or to like check like a new site. But because there is that additional level of difficulty, like I would have to read download those apps onto my phone, I'm like, I'm just not going to do that, and I stop myself. It's like I have created this point of questioning, this point of inflection where I have to be like, oh, do I actually want to do that? Probably not. I made a conscious decision earlier in the day to not let myself do this today. I don't want to go against her, go for a walk instead. That's a great way as well, just to feel a little bit less way down as being outside and returning to the environments that we are meant to be, and so we feel more human and we experience the sensations that make us human and make us natural creatures of this environment. You know, fresh air, the smell of the trees, seeing nature, seeing other people. That is so important when you are feeling crippled by anxiety and frustration and angst to do with the news. You've got to clock out. You've got to take us to back. You've got to go into nature. You've got to go into an outdoor environment, leave the space and just breathe, experience your senses and disconnect for a while. You know, this is not just a U issue. This is the result of some serious rapid societal shifts and just like changing life of just the whole world is changing very quickly in the past few years. You know, our parents never had to worry about dooms growing. Maybe they had to worry about watching the news for too long, but you know only went for two hours that they had to watch Brady Bunch. I don't know what was on back then. Brady Bunch that we're going to go with that. So you know, it is an increasing problem for us. We are the first generation that has had to find a healthier relationship with it. Who doesn't know life without it. I will say, also, get a newspaper. I did this for a while when I was like living in Melbourne. I would get my newspaper delivered super super strange to think that we could do that still, but they do still offer that service. And it meant that my news wasn't only selective and it wasn't only coming from my phone. There are ways around this, and there are ways to be aware but not overwhelmed and not fearful all the time and not just quite frankly depressed and I think doom scrolling. If you want to manage it, you have to manage the scrolling part, and you have to manage your relationship with your phone and that anxious need to seek out more information because it's not helping you and it's not leading to a better outcome. So hope this has been the encouragement you need to rethink those practices. I most certainly hope that you feel less alone. I'm there with you a lot of you know, what was the statistic fifty one percent of people in gen Z, so people in their twenties are experiencing the effects of doom scrolling. So there is no shame if your digital habits and you'll need to be informed and are getting out of hand. You know, I hate to say, it's better than not being informed at all, even if it feels terrible, and you've already got that down pat You've already got the empathy to want to know more. Now it is time to have the empathy for yourself to have some space in your day to actually just be able to process it all and to be able to experience life. So if you enjoyed this episode, as always, please feel free to leave a five star review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, wherever you are listening right now, make sure you are following along. Twelve Days of Guests is coming up. That is our December period where we just do twelve days of guest episodes with like some of my favorite people who I get the privileged interviews, so you don't want to miss any of those. Make sure that you are following us on Instagram at that Psychology podcast. And until next time, stay safe, stay kind, be gentle with yourself, please and thank you and we will talk very very soon. One

Hello everybody, Welcome back to the show. Welcome back to the podcast, new listeners, old listeners. Wherever you are in the world, it is so great to have you here, back for another episode as we, of course break down the psychology of our twenties. It is a pretty wild thought to realize that we have more information in our fingertips than any generation ever before. We are more in touch any terrible news story, any terrible tragedy, any groundbreaking discovery, niche profile piece like. We can access that from our phones at any hour, in any instance, and it's great in many many ways. We are very informed people. But it is quite frankly, not something that humans have necessarily evolved to deal with. I was watching this YouTube video the other day, very very random. It's going to sound strange, but it was like a day in the life of a medieval peasant. And I was watching this video and I was thinking, this individual would have only had to worry about the world that was ten to twenty kilometers around him or her. They would only have the information given to them by the church, or by their neighbors, or by whoever the king, their queen. They didn't know what was going on halfway across the world in Persia or Rome, and how that would affect them. They didn't know about the natural disasters in Asia or Africa, like the discoveries in Australia. It seemed almost a lot simpler that way. And it is such a privilege to have access to the information that we have now, and it's definitely improved the ways in which we are very conscious global citizens. But it has its downsides. And as people in our twenties, we are one of the first generations to have grown up this way. We have grown up always having this constant information so in the palm of our hands, and it's given rise to this phenomenon known as doomscrolling. Doom scrolling has a few meanings, but at its core, it is when we accidentally or consciously spend way too much time consuming online negative content, whether it is news articles, news contents about tragedies and terrors, or just actually hateful content like nastiness in any form on the Internet. You know, seeing me in comments, seeing cruel videos that are constantly like somehow thrown in our face by the algorithm that is not policed. This has a very deep, yet i would say hidden, emotional and psychological consequence for us. And we all know that we don't feel very good when we spend too much time online, But I think we also need to get better at labeling why that is and controlling the reasons why we do it. Anyways, you know, despite feeling like all this dark, terrible, horrible news content is making us feel worse about ourselves, we often can't stop. And I'm one of those people. I know that this is going to make my mental state worse, but I cannot look away. I keep looking for new information. In part, I think that it's because we are addicted to our phones, but also there is this element of seeking out more information is a way that we soothe ourselves, and in this day and age, like when everything is quite stressful and there are a lot of reasons to feel unhappy about the world. By scrolling on our phones and using social media, that is a form of distraction from those feelings. But it can also end up meaning that we are more constantly exposed to situations that are honestly quite harmful to be viewing all the time. We also then feel this obligation right like, I want to be informed, I want to know what's going on. You can kind of see the trap that we're falling into. It's the same formula for any toxic habit. It is both like the devil and our savior. Doom scrolling and like reading the news or being informed makes us feel better for a second, and then it makes us feel worse, and then we try to feel better by going back and scrolling some more, and we get back to the same place that we started. So today I want to focus in specifically on a rise in doom scrolling, how it has been slowly changing our brains and how we think about the world, especially as people in our twenties, and what we can kind of do about it. You know, we are seeing all these consequences, but we also don't want to be someone who is out of touch. We want to know what's going on. So how do we get into a healthy space and a healthy place with scrolling, with the news, with accessing the internet, whatever it is? What are the alternatives excited for this episode? This is something that I personally needed to hear about. I know that there is like a lot of just a lot of tension and stress and like political angst in the world at the moment, understandably, and this is an important topic to talk about in this time because when we speak about mental health, it is a huge contributor. So, without further ado, my lovely listeners, let's get into the psychology of doom scrolling. So doom scrolling we have a definition already. It's basically when we spend an excessive time consuming or being shown negative news content or online content that ultimately ultimately makes us feel pretty pessimistic. But it's also a really new term, and it was coined during the pandemic. So I am sure we all clearly remember how we were glued to our phones for any type of news or updates to do with lockdowns, case numbers, vaccine rollout during that like that, during that time, during twenty twenty to twenty twenty one, I have very distinct memories actually of checking the case numbers in my area, like in my city, three four, five, ten times a day to see if they'd gone down, and reading every article, reading any press release that could potentially tell me that numbers were decreasing or we like had a cure, which neither of those things were never true. So basically, during that time, researchers and a little psychologists were seeing that because everything was so unknown and so scary, we just wanted as much information as we could get. We just wanted to know more. It was very soothing in a strange way. But we also had all this empty time and space to consume more and more social media content than ever before, and we were taking full advantage of that. And these two kind of factors are what led to doom scrollings, what led to people just feeling completely overwhelmed by some of the content that they were accessing. Now, obviously we are no longer actively in a pandemic, but there are still a lot of things that have taken place in you know, the last few months. It's ironic, I'm literally recording this like a week after the US election, and I'm sure a lot of us are doom scrolling at the moment and will be in the next few months. But if you want some numbers around just how common this is, twenty twenty four survey that interviewed five thousand American adults who are pretty good sample size found that about thirty one percent of adults will doom scroll on a regular basis. But this percentage is a lot bigger the younger you are, so for millennials, it's forty six percent. For gen Z it's fifty one percent. That's half of us, half of us. And honestly, you know, I'm not even surprised by that number, considering all the people I talk to who are like, yeah, of course I feel really burdened by this. Of course I can't stop as well. It's a very very common thing. Something we have got to take note of here though, before we go any further, is that there are actually two types of doom scrolling. There is passive and active. So the passive doom scroll is when you can't you know, you're not really going in search of any more information. You're not seeking out negative news. You may not even be on like a news website, but you find it anyway, especially on Instagram, especially on TikTok or Twitter, whatever it is. We have, like in our normal environments, we have semi like a little bit of control over what we see. Like when you're in your home, you get to choose the furniture, you get to choose the people that you invite in, you get to choose all those things. You know, you have a way of controlling your environments and based on your preferences and based on what you like. When you go online, you do not have that control. You have no control over what you're going to see, even if you try and train your algorithm to be suited to what you want to consume. About one third of us, according to a recent study by the National Institute of Health, we get our news online even when we don't follow news sites, because it pops up, because it's the thing that is noteworthy, because lots of people interact with that content. And I think even that is shocking and its own right. A third of us using social media as our primary news source. But that's kind of the day and age that we are in, and news sites and newspapers have adapted to us, have adapted to that, and you know, I guess it's better than nothing. But it's not just news, right, It's not just the news. It's watching an Instagram reel and opening the comments and seeing all the trolls. It is the videos that are toxic or mocking or mean that also leaves a negative mark, especially considering how high a lot of our screen times are at the moment. You know, if you spend two to three hours on social media a day, which is the average amount that people spend a lot of stuff is going to be filtering through a lot of stuff that you know. Can you just imagine this. It's like you're scrolling, You're like, oh, beautiful picture of my friend, picture of a celebrity, picture of a puppy twenty dead in landslide. That is still information that is coming into your brain. So that's passive. The second type of doom scrolling is active doom scrolling, and it's what we typically think of when I say doom scrolling. It's like more of a conscious habit of constantly scrolling through news headlines and most of the time news that isn't very good, because then it wouldn't be noteworthy. I will say, we do have to pay attention to what is going on in the world, and it is important to stay informed, and it's important to know what is happening around you in politics, with the environment, with foreign policy, with human rights. But we can do this in a way that doesn't become crippling. I have a friend Erin who has been a guest on the show before. We Love Erin, big friend of the show, and she I hope she doesn't mind using the story. I don't think she will, But she is incredibly invested in climate change, in the state in the environment, Like that's what she does for work. She protects wetlands in Australia, like she goes to protests. She's studying horticulture next year. She's so passionate, she's so invested. One of the most beautiful souls and most passionate, you know, just souls for these issues. But she was telling me, you know how dark that can get for her, because she's so drawn to seeking out further information, as much information as possible about the state of all of these things, about the state of the environment, about what species is going extinct, what government is not protecting, which habitat, And it's become a bit of a compulsion needing to find out more, not wanting to be in the dark, and therefore consuming all of the worst content and all the worst headlines day in and day out. And as her friend, you know, it's it's very hard to see because you obviously know she cares a lot, and this is an element and an aspect of how much she cares. But it can make people incredibly pessimistic. Why do we do it other than just the fact that we want to know more. Why is it? Well? The first reason is that when we feel that we know more, we assume that that's going to make us more equipped in the future. So even though it's terrible, at least we are not in the dark. At least it is not uncertain. At least we have all the details. So this explanation is really based in anxiety and one psychiatrist from the Media Psychology Research Center, he put it really really well in an article that I was reading when I was researching this episode. What he said was that basically, doom scrolling is just a compulsive need to try and get answers when we're afraid. And not only is it a compulsive need, that's a very human need right, more information, more details, that provides more of an illusion of security. So doom scrolling is actually this really twisted, dark and I would say counterintuitive self soothing behavior. I always think about it like, maybe this won't make sense. I think it will. When you go through a breakup and you keep checking on your ex's social media to make sure they're not with someone new, to see who they're following. You want to know exactly how their post relationship journey is going, even though it's painful. That is very similar to what we're doing here, because the alternative hypothetical of not knowing that is exponentially worse in our brain. And that's anxiety for you. Anxiety. As we know, it loves to feed on the empty spaces. It loves to feed on the unknown. It loves to feed on a lack of answers because that is where it can do its most like the most of it's catastrophizing, right, that's when it can have the most fun. Like, it's a pretty sneaky being. So doom scrolling is just to really wrap that up. It's control seeking, it's information seeking for the sake of certainty. This behavior is also really rooted in our brain's limbic system, according to some recent research at Harvard. So you've probably heard of our limbic system before. It is basically our lizard brain. It is our old animal brain, very ancient part of us. And our limbic system is what promotes and is responsible for self preservation. It drives our fight or flight response to danger, and it is typically what fuels us to scroll for threats. You know, we are being hypervigilant. We are scanning the danger using the resources that we have now, which is the Internet, and the more you scroll, the more you feel you need to know. There are two groups who are more prone to this than anyone else. According to that same paper from Harvard, it's women and it's people with the history of trauma. Why is that. It's because the need for hyper vigilance in those two populations runs deep. It is in our DNA, it is in our bones, it is in our memories. And you know, there was this really it was fascinating, but it was also just actually quite devastating. It was a study into refugees and refugees who had recently immigrated to a new country and the rate at which dooms growing happened in these communities, and what they found was that it was so much higher, especially when you think about, you know, news from their home countries. You know, they may still have family there, they may still have loved ones there, and the fear and the need for knowledge really extends beyond them. And it's not like the news industry or journalists are helping us through this. Even for the average person, they know that we are more drawn in by news stories that elicit a sense of urgency and fear our brains are trained to pay attention to those into instances and stimulus and environments and whatever that is creating that kind of emotional reaction, and so they publish more of that stuff, They make the titles more grappy. Everything seems disastrous, and we're paying so much more attention to that compared to the overall picture of what the world is really like. So why do we do this? Well, firstly, we do this because of something called the negativity bias. The negativity bias is basically this cognitive bias whereby we tend to pay more attention and we remember negative information more than positive information because it's more important for our survival. And one way that we are really seeing this and that we know that this applies to news that we see on our phone or just news in general, is because of some amazing researchers at McGill in in Canada. So these researchers invited some participants to come into their lab and they said, come into our lab. We're going to do this study on eye tracking. We just want to see, like how your eyes move in response to images. Of course that's not true. What they wanted to know was are we automatically and immediately drawn more to good news, neutral news or bad news or is it just all the same? Is it just you know, our brain scans from top to bottom. So basically, they had these people in a room and they were like, oh, you know, before we like get into the actual experiment, just pick like some news articles that you want to read while you wait, like you can just have a little browse. They were then asked to read them. It didn't really matter if they actually read them. It was just kind of like to keep up appearances. And then they did the study and what they found was that overwhelmingly, when they were given this site, and there was an equal amount of negative, positive and neutral stories, overwhelmingly the place our eyes go to first worthy most scary, negative, distressing headlines, things about corruption, death, natural disasters, and not the neutral stories. And when they asked them afterwards, and this is the second component to this study that is so interesting, When they said, okay, do you think that the news these days is it more good? Is it more bad? Is it more you know, neutral, almost all of them were like, oh no, the news is so bad. Everything is going so wrong at the moment. You know, the majority of the stories I saw on that news site were negative, despite the fact that it was completely even we grab onto negative information because it is novel, because it is noteworthy, and because we think that it's more important. I think this is really important to be aware of whenever you're surfing like the ABC or the Guardian or the New York Times or whatever it is. I think that it's not all bad, but we are tricked by both external forces like the mainstream media, but also internal forces like our negativity bias into believing. So I want to give you one final explanation as to why before we go into how we can stop it, and it actually comes down to the psychology of how social media apps are designed. No surprises here. Social media is addictive. Probably also not a surprise. It was made that way because your attention is money. That's the whole business model of these apps. The more they can keep your attention, the more that you will buy things from ads. So it's really don't beat yourself up if you find it really hard to set those digital boundaries like they are doing everything in their power to make sure that doesn't happen. Instagram and Facebook. Actually, I remember at one stage I read an article about how they had literal neuroscientists on their payroll on their teams. They were paid employees, and their job was b basically like tell us how we can keep people hooked. And one of the ways that they were like, hey, this is a way you can do this, it's called the infinite scroll. And this plays a really important part in why we doom scroll. So the infinite scroll means that we are never going to run out of content to see. I remember, like back in the day, in like the early like twenty tens, when Instagram was first released, like twenty thirteen, twenty fourteen, you would go on Instagram and when everybody, when you'd seen everything, when basically everyone that you followed had posted within the last five days and you'd seen it, it would just be the end of the screen, like you couldn't go any further. You would hit like a wall. And nowadays, no, no, no, that is not happening. That is not happening. They do not want you to exit the app. They want you to stay on the app. And so you'll start seeing recommended content, You'll start seeing all this other stuff that you're not necessarily following, but you stay hooked because it's just like all this dopamine flooding into your brain. It's junk food for the mind. And I say this metaphor quite literally. The information that we feed our brains just like what we feed our body. It really matters. You become a product of what your brain is receiving, and that really influences your worldview. And if you are a doom scroller, I'm included in that, so there is no criticism here. But if you are a doom scroller, what you're receiving is going to be pessimistic and it's going to be bleak, and that results in a lot of anxiety, a lot of like apathy, like oh my god, who cares? Like the world is just so terrible. It results in a lot of existential anxiety, which is like a sense that like the world is just there's no point, what does life even mean? It can also give us something that we call popcorn brain. I don't know if you've heard about this recently, you will be hearing about it more in the future. But I read another article I think either in Yale or Harvard Magazine. Can't remember. I'll keep you updated if I find it, But basically this article is like popcorn brain happens when you spend too much time online and your brain is actually so overstimulated with information that it almost feels like it's popping. It feels so overstimulated that you're like pop pop, like you're moving from one thing to another, and like it's just fast and fast and fast. That is not normal, and that makes it really hard to engage with the real world, and it makes us feel really anxious. And feeling anxious and numb about the world is not normal, and it's not something that I think we should normalize, and it's not something that I think should define our life. Luckily, though, the same way that we get trapped in a doom scrolling cycle, we can also get out of it, and we can find a way to have a healthy relationship with our news, with our content, with our phones, whatever it is. So I want to talk about how we can find our way out and the kind of behavioral and mental shifts that can get us there. After this short break, I'm just going to quickly repeat what I said before, because I think it's a really important point. You can still be informed and know what's going on and not be addicted to the negative news cycle. Or you can have both. You can still acknowledge that the world is harsh and cruel at times and feel happy, joyful, grateful, not despite of it, but in spite of it. Everything might say more ful. Well, you are going to be the reason that someone doesn't think that today. You are going to pour a little bit more harmony, a little bit more peace, a little bit more kindness into the world. And this is something that really helped me a few months back, maybe like six months ago, and I discussed it on the podcast at the time, but I got into a pretty heavy, dark headspace around my social media consumption, and I was just convinced, based on what I was seeing in the comments that I was receiving, that everyone was just me, Everyone was just judgmental. It was everywhere, and I know now I was selectively paying attention to what was confirming my bias. But one of the ways that I got out of this was really starting to leave positivity where I saw negativity. If I saw a bunch of trolls, you know, I'd make sure to comment something nice, that kind of thing. It's all about diluting the bad, sad, downright depressing stuff with a little bit of light like drop by drop. You know, imagine that you have a full glass of wine and it's red, and you know it's very hard to see through murky, and then you put it under a tap and you keep the tap on slowly that wine glass is diluted and the water going into that wine glass. That is your kindness when it seems really really gloomy. Part of it seems so is because we feel like we can't do anything about it. We feel like we can't fix the world's problems. And at times that's true. You can't fix the whole world, but you can fix your circle. You can fix your part of the universe, your little corner of the world, by doing it kind to people, doing it really really rough, by donating to charity, by donating your time, by cooking for your elderly neighbors, by planting native plants in your garden or on your balcony. That is the most beautiful way, in my mind, to counteract a mindset that says the world is fucked based on doom scrolling. It's to say, yeah, the world is fucked, but where I am, what I choose to do, I'm not going to be a representation of that. Just because the news is bad doesn't mean that I'm going to take that and mean that I'm going to make it worse. You know, I have a friend who has her garden like filled with flowers just for her honeybees, And it's just one of the first things I do when I go over to her house, Like, she has these poppies that are like specifically for honey bees, bumblebees, whatever you call them, And I love checking on her bees. It's just like so pretty and it's just like, oh, there is something that's alive. There is something that's good. My friend has honey bees in her backyard, Like yay, that's a great news story in my life. You can also really help yourself break the toxic negative cycle that contributes to doom scrolling by rethinking the content that you see. You know, make a conscious decision to start following positive news sites or newsletters or pages that is, like you diluting the negative news. I love, for example, the good News movement, which started during the pandemic to kind of counteract the very thing that we are talking about today, which is doom scrolling. I also like the Dodo It's it's not really news, it's just animal stories. That's it. It's just really cute animal stories. And you know what, it's really delightful to see. The Good News Network is also another really really good one positivenews dot com. You know, you're not limiting yourself, you are diluting it. You have to start showing your mind, giving your mind healthy examples that it's not all bad, even if that remains your prevailing emotion for a while. Part of getting out of that headspace is really offering alternative information and evidence to our brain, feeding it well, feeding it with nutritious information, making sure that your diet isn't just rich your media diet isn't just rich in all of this really intense information, and that's the only thing that you're giving your brain. It's also really important to have balance there. And I'm going to carry on the metaphor of food and eating and feeding, but having a balanced informational diet. And this was something that was introduced to me by someone I interviewed recently who's coming on for our December twelve Days of Guests. I won't spoil who it is, but she was talking about how you can't just give yourself one source of news or information that is what gets us stuck in informational bubbles. That's what gets us stuck in only seeing the world in a certain way, not being able to think about other people opinions. And it also means that we're only going to see a negative perspective from one side of things. So having a few newspapers that you read, having your news podcast, but then also including something bright, something less serious, having some fiction, having like a fun book that you're reading on the side something less serious. That is a really important way to diversify what you are consuming so that it doesn't just all become stale and all become one way. Now, I also want to turn to kind of like curtailing or rethinking our social media habits, because I think this is a huge culprit in passive doom scrolling. This is one we really need to zoom zoom in on. You know, if we're going to talk about how to stop doom scrolling, we can't talk about that without talking about how to be have a healthier usage of social media. And I'll start with one of my favorite reminders for how to do this. If you want to change anything, you have to start by changing how that thing shows up in your routine. You cannot just think your way into a happier mental state. You can't say, you know, yeah, it'd be nice to control my social media. I really wish I would get to that, and then not do that because it's just I've tried it, it doesn't work, You're not going to do it. I think one of the big reasons that we have a negative relationship with social media and the news is because we let it be in control rather than having good mental hygiene habits. And yes, I did say hygiene, because that is how I like to see it. You know, you wash your face every night, You brush your teeth hopefully please do that. You know, you wash your towels, you shower, You take care of yourself physically. Now it's time to apply those same hygiene routines to taking care of yourself mentally, specifically in terms of your relationship with your phone. So here are some tried and tested measures for having better social media hygiene better mental hygiene. Right off the phone off before bed. Your phone cannot be the last thing you see before you sleep, and it definitely cannot be the first thing that you see when you wake up in the morning, because that just means that you are literally plugged in day and night. There is never a break. The moment you are conscious, you are consuming content. The moment before you are unconscious, you're consuming content. So sleep with it in a separate room and just buy an alarm clock, because I know that's a big reason why a lot of people are like, oh, I have to have my phone in my room because my alarm. Go to your local reject shop, go to your local A two dollars store, go to go on Facebook marketplace, find an alarm clock, like a good old fashioned alarm clock, and start using that instead. You will just see amazing changes. I didn't realize how anxious I was by having my phone just right next to my bedside. And the other thing that I did was I started doing one thing in the morning before I went on my phone. Obviously, I work for myself, so there is like big tendency, and it's like the most toxic habit, bad habit that I need to break. I'm very bad at it, but I'm getting there slowly. And it's that before I go on my phone, I do something else. I do something else so that I don't check my emails. And of course once I check my emails, I check my social media, and of course once I check my social media, suddenly there is something that has happened overnight, like in the US or in the UK, or across the world. Because I live in Australia, that is like completely you know, torn the world apart. So that is really really important. Social media tim is. I don't think they always work because you can just just kind of dismiss them. How I get around that is that I actually delete my social media from my phone between ten am to four pm during the week. I definitely have the urge, and I even notice that, like I go to pick up my phone to like check my social media, to like aimlessly scroll or to like check like a new site. But because there is that additional level of difficulty, like I would have to read download those apps onto my phone, I'm like, I'm just not going to do that, and I stop myself. It's like I have created this point of questioning, this point of inflection where I have to be like, oh, do I actually want to do that? Probably not. I made a conscious decision earlier in the day to not let myself do this today. I don't want to go against her, go for a walk instead. That's a great way as well, just to feel a little bit less way down as being outside and returning to the environments that we are meant to be, and so we feel more human and we experience the sensations that make us human and make us natural creatures of this environment. You know, fresh air, the smell of the trees, seeing nature, seeing other people. That is so important when you are feeling crippled by anxiety and frustration and angst to do with the news. You've got to clock out. You've got to take us to back. You've got to go into nature. You've got to go into an outdoor environment, leave the space and just breathe, experience your senses and disconnect for a while. You know, this is not just a U issue. This is the result of some serious rapid societal shifts and just like changing life of just the whole world is changing very quickly in the past few years. You know, our parents never had to worry about dooms growing. Maybe they had to worry about watching the news for too long, but you know only went for two hours that they had to watch Brady Bunch. I don't know what was on back then. Brady Bunch that we're going to go with that. So you know, it is an increasing problem for us. We are the first generation that has had to find a healthier relationship with it. Who doesn't know life without it. I will say, also, get a newspaper. I did this for a while when I was like living in Melbourne. I would get my newspaper delivered super super strange to think that we could do that still, but they do still offer that service. And it meant that my news wasn't only selective and it wasn't only coming from my phone. There are ways around this, and there are ways to be aware but not overwhelmed and not fearful all the time and not just quite frankly depressed and I think doom scrolling. If you want to manage it, you have to manage the scrolling part, and you have to manage your relationship with your phone and that anxious need to seek out more information because it's not helping you and it's not leading to a better outcome. So hope this has been the encouragement you need to rethink those practices. I most certainly hope that you feel less alone. I'm there with you a lot of you know, what was the statistic fifty one percent of people in gen Z, so people in their twenties are experiencing the effects of doom scrolling. So there is no shame if your digital habits and you'll need to be informed and are getting out of hand. You know, I hate to say, it's better than not being informed at all, even if it feels terrible, and you've already got that down pat You've already got the empathy to want to know more. Now it is time to have the empathy for yourself to have some space in your day to actually just be able to process it all and to be able to experience life. So if you enjoyed this episode, as always, please feel free to leave a five star review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, wherever you are listening right now, make sure you are following along. Twelve Days of Guests is coming up. That is our December period where we just do twelve days of guest episodes with like some of my favorite people who I get the privileged interviews, so you don't want to miss any of those. Make sure that you are following us on Instagram at that Psychology podcast. And until next time, stay safe, stay kind, be gentle with yourself, please and thank you and we will talk very very soon. One