The screen casts an eerie glow on your face. You can't tear your eyes away from the bad news. You feel depressed and angry, but you just can't stop scrolling.

Welcome back to Savvy Psychologist. I'm your host Dr. Jade Wu.

Every week, I'll help you meet life's challenges with evidence-based research,

a sympathetic ear and zero judgment. Today we talk about doom scrolling. Why do we do this

to ourselves and how can we stop?

Chances are you've already heard the term doom scrolling. Even if you haven't, I bet you found yourself

a victim of its morbid seduction.

Your thumb hovers over that infinite scroll of your news feed, the glare from your phone lighting

up your face with that eerie glow, and a sense of despair settles in your belly.

After all, it's 2020. Zoom scrolling has become a global pastime.

We can't seem to tear ourselves away from the bad news. We read headline after headline,

tweet after tweet, comment after comment, and even though it makes us feel depressed and sleepless, we scroll on with the morbid curiosity of people

driving by a car crash. And lately, there seem to be never-ending social, political, and economic

car crashes every day.

So it's no surprise that this is taking a toll on our mental health.

A hot-off-the-press study on American college students

found something interesting, but not too surprising.

As news on the coronavirus ramped up in March, so did students phone use and anxiety levels. In Russia there was a similar pattern. Almost 24,000 people

responded to a survey on news consumption about COVID-19. Turns out, the more time people spent reading the news,

the more anxious they were,

even when their usual anxiety levels were taken into account.

Thousands of German study participants too had more anxiety and depression with increased news consumption.

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