08/25/25
❛ The Doom in Doomscrolling ❜
I've been quite the habitual doomscroller since the creation of reels on Instagram. What's even worse is that I don't only stick to one platform — I alternate between TikTok and Instagram Reels. It's a combined screentime of over 5 hours, sometimes. However, I recently stumbled upon a TikTok. It talked about the dangers of doomscrolling and how it shapes our lifestyles and brains for the worse; now, I've seen my fair share of studies and content about phone addiction, and how social media is designed to keep us lured in. This time though was different. I felt an immense fear at every word the man in the TikTok video said. You may think, "yeah, that's how persuasion WORKS, Joanne", but let me elaborate. I was afraid because I felt his words in my bones. Every side effect he described was happening to me in full-time, and I had exactly experienced everything he said.
Allow me to share with you what he said, and how I experienced everything he said.
Firstly, he mentioned that frequent viewers will feel their prospective memory being destroyed, and the words used couldn't have been more accurate. I've been noticing this past half-year that my memory has been getting significantly more vague. What reel or TikTok I saw a second ago was nada to me; if I had a secondary task I assigned earlier in the day was soon nonexistent in my brain; I would have to run up and down the stairs 4 times before going out, realizing that I forgot one item before exiting the door. I started doing an activity awhile ago: every night, before I put my night contact lenses on, I would check if the lens I was holding are green or blue (green meant it was for my right eye, and blue for my left). Then, I would ask myself if I remember checking the lenses a minute before, as I put the lens in my respective eye. The thing is, I would always check, but the amount of times I would remember I checked would halve in the span of the half-year. I constantly berated myself out of fear at this realization. It seemed that there was always some other fluff clouding my brain. When I felt this extreme fear, or simply the lack of memory of what to do, I gravitated towards my frequent short-form media apps.
His second point was that the brain is atrophied after extensive scrolling. This essentially means that it wastes away. Grey matter, which is an essential part of your brain, contains neurons that store and process new information. It lets us control movement, memory, and emotions. Also, grey matter atrophy is famously linked with dementia. This was another point that really hit home. I've been feeling a lot more sluggish, not only in memory, but also in desire to move, my actual movement, and my emotional stability. I would often feel an extreme of an emotion, or be suddenly hit by a wave of sadness. I only fully realized with this TikTok that this wasn't a normal phenomenon. Wow. No wonder I've been feeling so limited.
Next up is negative info breaking into the mind. I just talked about that, but to expand, I definitely see how I felt a lot worse as a whole. Not only was I a lot more susceptible to feeling abnormally sad in a very short time span, but I also just very mundane usually as well. If I had nothing to do, I would often feel slightly unhappier than apathetic. One positive thing that I did notice, though, if there's anything, it's that I often felt happier during walks. I enjoy going on walks, and even when I was in my doomscrolling clouds, the urge to go outside would prevail. The negative emotions I felt while scrolling (and anytime, really) would gradually dissipate with the feel of the brisk air and scenery. That serene mood would stick for awhile after as well, until I would go back to scrolling by habit, of course. I would feel inevitable FOMO from missing out on a new trend, or brainrot words that made me seem "relatable" and "with the wave". The issue is also with the fact that everyone else seems to use Reels and Tiktoks, and I was not brave enough to counter the collective madness.
His next point was on stress reshaping the brain. Though I am not actually able to reach into my head and track my brain in real time, I agree with his point about stress. It's not the same high smellable amount of cortisol as my Grade 11 IB Exams, per se; rather, it's more consistent and constant. Instead of a spike in stress, it's a constant line above the norm. I felt myself more susceptible to paranoia from the Reels or TikToks, which aligned with the increase of brain activity I needed to process each video. Honestly, I really haven't been able to truly relax and sleep like a log in a long, long time. Moreover, he talked about a positive feedback loop, where this stress leads to even more doomscrolling to "calm down", just to not resolve the stress at all, but rather amplify it.
Lastly, he discussed the brain not cleaning itself during sleep. This magnitude of truth really metaphorically impaled me. I often found myself going to sleep with thoughts of social media and TikToks I saw, or simply just the vague fluff I mentioned before. I would wake up often in a groggy state, and in an overall grouchy mood, which would go back to his third point, about having a lower baseline of happiness. I would physically and mentally feel unfit and strained — I felt my lifespan getting shorter and shorter.
I want to connect this with one more thing: usage of AI. There was a particular low for me; when I doubled up using ChatGPT and doomscrolling. Now this might start to sound ridiculous; you might even be saying, "Joanne! Now you're just a paranoid boomer afraid of new technology". Don't get me wrong — I am amazed at humanity's advances; we went from digging rocks to creating wifi to creating phenomenal generative AI. But I noticed a fatal combination. Catching myself ask the most trivial questions on ChatGPT for schoolwork to lessen my brain's workload, and then going on TikTok or Reels to "calm" myself. It was unhealthy and I felt a genuinely blow to my brain and lifestyle. I was no longer relying on my brain. Tasks like mental math started to feel painful and tiresome to me, and I started slacking in conversations and socializing with friends, since I couldn't find the words and felt the overwhelming sensation of the vague fluff in my head. As an avid extrovert, I was shocked to hear my friends tell me I became more closed off; I hadn't noticed it at all, being too caught up in the lasting digital noise.
Doomscrolling is a silent danger. It's not a materialistic drug like metamphetamine or nicotine, but it's pretty damn bad. It may be arguably worse, since the risks are not as widely known, and since it is so absolutely normalized. I worry for myself, my family, and my friends. I worry that our generation is collectively falling into an awake slumber, and that we're witnessing each other's brains gradually enter decay. I'm left with one question: how will humanity solve this one — and even before that: how will I?
________________________________
Thanks for reading! ࣪ 𖦹 ˖彡 ₊˚ 🫧 :
──────── ⟢ ・⸝⸝
