How to Stop Doomscrolling: The Common Advice, Ranked by Evidence

Short answer: the advice with the best experimental support is to make the feed harder to open, not to try harder to resist it. In a six-week field experiment analysing 280 people, a short delay with a cancel button before chosen apps opened led users to back out of 36% of attempts and cut actual opens by 57%. Switching the screen to grayscale removed about 20 minutes of daily screen time in a one-week trial. Keeping the phone out of the bedroom for a week produced small gains in happiness and quality of life. A full four-week Facebook break improved wellbeing by 0.09 standard deviations, which is real and small. On-screen reminders to reflect on your use did nothing measurable.

None of these trials measured doomscrolling itself. They measured phone and social media use, which is the nearest thing that has been tested, and that gap is worth keeping in mind through everything below.

The advice, ranked

Each row is a piece of advice that appears on most lists, set against the study that actually tested it.

The ranking is by how much the behaviour changed and how sure one can be that the intervention caused it, not by how much better people felt.

What doomscrolling is, as researchers define it

The word arrived before the research. The first attempt to pin it down was by Sharma, Lee and Johnson in 2022, who built a questionnaire for it in three stages: focus groups, a scale-development survey of 401 people and a validation survey of 502. They define doomscrolling as "habitual, immersive scanning for timely negative information on social media newsfeeds", and describe it as a pattern in which looking for information on purpose turns into repetitive, automatic browsing. The final scale has 15 items, with a four-item short form.

Three things separate it from heavy phone use in general: the content is negative, it is current, and the behaviour has become a habit and not a decision.

The validation survey also shows what doomscrolling travels with.

The link with hours of social media use is weak, at 0.14, so doomscrolling is not simply spending a long time on a phone. It is closer to a style of use: vigilant and compulsive. Men and younger people scored slightly higher, and both differences were small.

A second research group, Satici and colleagues, tested the scale in three further samples of 378, 419 and 460 people. They also found doomscrolling associated with social media addiction, fear of missing out and personality traits, and their model suggested that its link with lower life satisfaction and mental wellbeing ran through psychological distress.

Is doomscrolling bad for you?

The fair summary is that it is consistently associated with feeling worse, and that nobody has shown which way the arrow points.

Every figure in the previous section comes from a survey taken at one point in time. A correlation of 0.31 between doomscrolling and anxiety means the two share roughly a tenth of their variance. It does not show that scrolling produces the anxiety. Anxious people may seek out threatening news more, the scrolling may raise the anxiety, or both may happen in a loop.

The two studies also disagree in a way that is worth noticing. Satici and colleagues reported a path from doomscrolling to lower wellbeing through distress. Sharma and colleagues found essentially no correlation, −0.005, between doomscrolling and a standard wellbeing index. Both can be true if the harm is specific to distress and anxiety and does not spread to overall life satisfaction, but two cross-sectional studies cannot decide that.

The closest thing to evidence on dose comes from a different literature. After the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings, Holman, Garfin and Silver surveyed 4,675 US adults within two to four weeks. Six or more daily hours of bombing-related media in the week after the attack were associated with higher acute stress than having been at or near the bombing. That is still a survey, and people who were already distressed may have watched more.

What is missing is an experiment in which people are randomly assigned to cut their negative-news intake and are then followed. Until one exists, "doomscrolling causes anxiety" is a reasonable suspicion and not a finding.

Why "just stop" does not work

The usual explanation is that feeds are built like slot machines and flood the brain with dopamine. None of the studies used for this article tested that account, so it is left out. What the trials show is narrower.

The behaviour is automatic by the time it is a problem. The Sharma definition has habit built into it, and in their data doomscrolling correlated negatively with self-control, at −0.18. Low self-control is a small part of the picture, which is an awkward fact for advice that consists of exercising more of it.

The reach for the phone survives interventions that shorten the session. In the grayscale trial, daily screen time fell by 20 minutes but the number of times people unlocked their phones did not change at all. A less appealing screen shortened what happened after the unlock and did nothing to the unlock.

Being asked to think about it does not help. The online experiment that accompanied the friction-app study took the intervention apart into its three pieces: a message prompting reflection, a time delay, and the option to dismiss the attempt. The dismiss option had the strongest effect, the delay was also effective, and the message was not effective on its own. An intervention aimed at conscious intention failed where two aimed at the mechanics of opening the app succeeded.

People value the feed less after time away from it. In the Facebook deactivation trial, the amount of money participants demanded to stay off for a further four weeks fell by up to 14% after they had done it once, and their use was still lower weeks after the experiment ended. That is what one would expect if part of the original use was habit and not preference.

Doomscrolling is mostly not a decision made in the moment, so techniques that work on decisions do little, and techniques that interrupt the automatic sequence do more. The same reasoning applies to attention problems generally, where the environment tends to matter more than resolve.

The trials in detail

Friction: the strongest result

Grüning, Riedel and Lorenz-Spreen studied an app that intercepts attempts to open apps the user has chosen. It shows a pop-up with a short delay, then offers a choice between continuing and closing. Of 719 users recruited, 280 used it for all six weeks and were analysed. Among them, people closed the target app after the pause in 36% of attempts. Attempts themselves dropped by 37% between the first and sixth week, and the two effects combined into a 57% reduction in actual opens.

The limits are that these were people who had already chosen to install the app, that the 280 are the ones who stuck with it, and that the paper's competing-interest statement names one author as the originator of the app.

The bedroom: small, cheap, and liked

Hughes and Burke randomly assigned 49 adults not to use their phone in the bedroom for a week, with 46 others carrying on as usual. In the restricted group, subjective happiness rose from 18.0 to 19.3 on the scale used, quality of life from 82.8 to 86.6, and a short smartphone-addiction score fell from 14.5 to 12.9. The comparison group did not change. A fourth measure, of positive emotions, did not move significantly.

The effects are small. The detail that carries more weight is that 93.6% of those in the restricted group who answered (44 of 47) said they would or might keep the rule. Sleep was not measured with any scale, although better sleep was the most common theme in participants’ written comments.

Grayscale: a real effect on minutes

Dekker and Baumgartner tracked 84 people's phone use for two weeks, with colours turned off in the second. Daily screen time fell by 20 minutes. Participants reported more control over their use and less overuse, online vigilance and stress. Productivity and sleep quality were unaffected, and unlocks did not change.

There was no control group, so some of the drop may be due to people knowing they were being studied. The setting costs nothing to try.

Time limits: helpful, with an odd detail

Hunt and colleagues randomly assigned 143 University of Pennsylvania undergraduates to limit Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat to 10 minutes each per day for three weeks, or to continue as normal. The limited group showed significant reductions in loneliness and depression compared with controls.

The odd detail is that anxiety and fear of missing out fell in both groups, including the one that changed nothing. The authors attribute this to self-monitoring: both groups had their use tracked. If that is right, simply watching the number may account for part of what a limit achieves, and how much screen time is too much matters less than whether anyone is looking at it.

Quitting outright: the largest trial

Allcott and colleagues paid 580 US adults $102 each to deactivate Facebook for the four weeks before the 2018 midterm elections and compared them with 1,081 controls. Deactivation freed about 60 minutes a day. A combined wellbeing index rose by 0.09 standard deviations. Political polarisation fell by about 0.16 standard deviations.

The cost was that factual news knowledge fell by about 0.19 standard deviations. People who left were calmer and slightly less informed. After the experiment, the treatment group's use of the Facebook mobile app was about 12 minutes a day lower, 23% below the control group's 53 minutes; among iPhone users whose use was recorded by the phone, the gap was smaller and not statistically significant.

What each intervention changed, and what it left alone

Behaviour was easier to move than mood: every intervention changed use, and the improvements in how people felt were small where they were measured at all.

What is not worth doing

Relying on a reminder or a lock-screen note. The one component that was tested in isolation and failed was the message asking people to reflect.

Expecting grayscale to stop the checking. It shortened sessions and left unlocks exactly where they were. It is a tool for reducing time, not for breaking the reach for the phone.

Quitting the news. The deactivation trial found a measurable drop in factual knowledge. The problem the research describes is habitual scanning of a feed, not being informed. A fixed time and a finite source, such as a morning bulletin or a printed paper, keep the knowledge and remove the infinite part.

Treating it as a clinical condition. Doomscrolling is a questionnaire score, not a diagnosis. The correlations with anxiety are moderate, and the direction is unknown. Persistent anxiety or low mood is a matter for a clinician whatever the phone is doing.

Assuming meditation fixes it. None of the studies here tested a meditation or mindfulness programme against doomscrolling. There are separate reasons someone might sit for a few minutes a day, but this is not an evidenced one.

What to actually do

In order of how well each step is supported.

Put a delay in front of the two or three apps where it happens. The tool tested was a dedicated app that adds a pause with a cancel button. The experiment suggests the cancel option matters most and the wording of any message matters least. Expect to override it often at first; the trial's users continued in roughly two out of three attempts (100% minus 36%) and still opened the apps far less.

Charge the phone outside the bedroom. This is the direct answer to doomscrolling at night, since it removes the phone from the place and time where the scrolling happens. The measured benefit is small and almost everyone in the trial wanted to keep doing it.

Turn on grayscale for a week and look at the screen-time figure. A 20-minute daily reduction is the expected order of magnitude. If the number does not move, it has cost nothing.

Set a limit and, more to the point, look at the tracker. The Hunt trial hints that monitoring does some of the work. A weekly glance at the built-in screen-time report is the low-effort version.

Cap crisis coverage by time, not by willpower. There is no trial showing that cutting news reduces stress, only the association at very heavy exposure. A fixed slot once or twice a day is a low-risk response to a plausible harm.

Give it weeks. In the friction study, attempts to open the apps were 37% lower in week six than in week one. That fits what is known about how long habits take to break, which is longer than most people allow.

Anyone who wants to go further than these steps, towards restructuring phone use as a whole, is in the territory of digital minimalism, which has its own and thinner evidence base. Switching back to a task after a feed may also carry attention residue.

Questions people ask

What is doomscrolling? Researchers define it as habitual, immersive scanning for timely negative information on social media newsfeeds. The defining features are negative and current content, and behaviour that has shifted from deliberate information-seeking to automatic, repetitive browsing. It is measured with a 15-item questionnaire and is not a medical diagnosis.

Why do I doomscroll? Survey research links it most strongly to compulsive social media use, online vigilance and fear of missing out, and only weakly to low self-control. It appears to start as a deliberate wish to stay informed during bad news and then become a habit that runs without a decision.

Is doomscrolling bad for you? It is associated with higher anxiety and psychological distress in surveys, with a correlation of about 0.31 for anxiety in one validation study. No experiment has shown that it causes them, and one study found no link with a general wellbeing index. The direction of effect is unresolved.

How do I stop doom scrolling at night? Charge the phone outside the bedroom. In a one-week randomised study of 95 adults, those who kept phones out of the bedroom reported small improvements in happiness and quality of life, and 93.6% of those who answered said they would or might continue.

Does doomscrolling cause anxiety? Unknown. Doomscrolling and anxiety are moderately correlated, and six or more daily hours of crisis coverage were associated with higher acute stress after the Boston Marathon bombings. All of that evidence is from surveys, so anxious people seeking out more news is an equally plausible reading.

How do I stop scrolling on my phone? Add friction before the app opens. A six-week field experiment analysing 280 users found that a short pause with an option to cancel led people to back out of 36% of attempts and reduced actual opens of the chosen apps by 57%. A reflective message on its own was not effective.

Does grayscale reduce phone use? Yes, modestly. In a two-week tracked study of 84 people, switching to grayscale reduced daily screen time by 20 minutes and improved perceived control. It did not change how often people unlocked their phones, and the study had no control group.

Do screen time limits work? A randomised three-week trial of 143 students found that limiting three social apps to 10 minutes each per day reduced loneliness and depression compared with controls. Anxiety fell in both groups, which suggests that having use tracked accounts for part of the benefit.

How long does it take to break a phone habit? No study gives a single figure. In the longest behavioural trial here, attempts to open the target apps were 37% lower in week six than in week one, so a reasonable expectation is several weeks of consistent friction and not several days.

Should I delete social media to stop doomscrolling? It helps a little. Four weeks off Facebook in a randomised trial of 1,661 US adults freed about an hour a day and raised wellbeing by 0.09 standard deviations, a small effect, while lowering factual news knowledge. Use remained lower after the trial ended.

This article summarises published research on phone and social media use for general information and is not medical or psychological advice. Doomscrolling is not a clinical diagnosis; anyone experiencing persistent anxiety, low mood or sleep problems should speak to a qualified health professional.