Falling into a spiral of negative articles and information is bad for your health, and the science says so!
A recent study from the Texas University of Technology linked what its authors call “doomscrolling” to poor health for those who practice it. While this isn’t the first study to link excessive news consumption and mental health, it also highlights the significant link it can have with physical health.
What is doomscrolling ?
Doomscrolling, which could be translated as ” morbid scroll », refers to reading and scrolling through bad news on the various social networks without stopping.
According to the authors of the survey, 16.5% of those questioned would suffer from it “ at a problematic level “. According to them, the trend exploded with the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting confinement. And if the subject is now less interesting, it has since been replaced by others, just as uncertain and dramatic, starting with the war in Ukraine or climate change.
Doomscrolling, as bad for the body as for the mind
For these researchers, the fact of voluntarily continuing to scroll through sad, atrocious or depressing information only has harmful effects on health.
On the mental level first, you should know that a large and continuous consumption of information causes stress and anxiety. The study even shows that after a day of doomscrolling, some people could find themselves on constant high alert and seeing the world only as “ dark and dangerous place “. This behavior is likely to create a vicious circle, because such an attitude has a consequence: an even greater obsession with information, and especially negative ones.
But stress, anxiety and even depression are not the only consequences. A survey shows that of those most prone to doomscrolling, 74% had mental health issues, and 61% had physical health issues. Among the other respondents, mental and physical problems affected 8 and 6.1% respectively. If the link is perhaps more difficult to establish in the case of physical health, such figures leave no room for doubt.
One of the researchers concludes by explaining that if ” being stressed and anxious is a legitimate reaction when looking at the world around us, people need to learn to recognize when news consumption becomes problematic “.
Sources: The Guardian, texas university of technology
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