What a tragedy. One reel leads to another, then another and another. Before you know it, you find yourself stuck in an endless loop of scrolling before bed. But it does not have to be this way.
“Doomscrolling,” a term coined in 2020, means “the activity of spending a lot of time looking at your phone or computer and reading bad or negative news stories,” according to the Cambridge Dictionary. The term is commonly used when discussing smartphone addictions and problematic internet use, as more people find themselves stuck in consuming endless amounts of short-form content.
According to a 2024 survey conducted by the Morning Consult, roughly 31% of American adults who use social media reported doomscrolling “a lot” or “some,” with Generation Z averaging 53% and Millennials averaging 46%, respectively. With this being such a common phenomenon, many researchers have become determined to figure out the bigger picture and try to find a correlation between problematic internet use and mental health.
Jon Elhai, a distinguished university professor in clinical psychology at the University of Toledo, studies problematic internet use and its relationship with psychological well-being.
“I’m interested in internet addictions, and specifically I’m interested in which kinds of psychological constructs and mental health variables might drive some people to overuse the internet, social media, smartphone, and that sort of thing,” Elhai said.
In his research, Elhai has found a correlation between mental health and smartphone use that may challenge common assumptions about the effects of technology.
“Mostly what we think based on literature is that it’s mental health that drives excessive smartphone use,” Elhai said. “It’s not likely that excessive use or prolonged use of the smartphone causes mental health problems.”
Elhai said that this perspective differs from what many commonly believe. He pointed to social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s book, “The Anxious Generation,” which argues the spread of smartphones and social media in the late 2000s contributed to a youth mental health crisis.
“Yeah, I think the big [point of misinformation] is that the idea that smartphones and social media are bad and cause mental health problems, and that really also got popularized a few years ago when Jonathan Haidt came out with his book, ‘The Anxious Generation,’” Elhai said.
Elhai also questioned Haidt’s claim on technology, arguing that other factors play a bigger role.
“He dismisses in the book another cause of the youth mental health crisis that I think is a much more legitimate cause of the youth mental health crisis, which is the late 2000s major world economic crisis that caused poverty and people to lose their jobs,” Elhai said.
Elhai shared how several of his colleagues and other experts in the clinical psychological field have expressed similar feelings.
“Most of the experts that I have read and I have talked to personally at conferences and things like that, they think that [Haidt] has it backwards,” Elhai said.
While Elhai may have found there to be a lack of evidence for excessive smartphone use fueling mental health issues, he has found a common emotion leading to such use: fear of missing out, commonly known as FOMO.
“FOMO is probably most consistently, robustly related to problematic smartphone use, problematic social media use,” Elhai said.
He explained that poor mental health may contribute to feelings of exclusion, prompting people to check their phones frequently.
“We think probably that poor mental health drives some people to have this craving, this FOMO where they just feel bad about being left out and are constantly checking what their social network is doing,” Elhai said.
Elhai has also found that depressive emotions are sometimes inversely correlated with smartphone use, and not the opposite.
In his research, Elhai asks participants about their current emotions, their self-reported screen time and then their objective screen time. The self-reported screen time is what participants presume their screen time is, while the objective screen time is definitive in number. Elhai found that those who presumed their screen time was higher correlated with reporting depressive emotions, while their actual objective screen time was inversely correlated with reporting depressive emotions.
“We’ve often found that the more depressed that the college students feel, the less they’re using their phone,” Elhai said. “Which also makes sense, because in order to actively use your phone, you’d have to be not depressed, not too depressed such that you can still get out of bed, you can engage with your phone, you know, that sort of thing.”
Elhai’s findings suggest that mental health is the trigger factor for problematic smartphone use, and not the reverse. Rather than assuming that reducing screen time alone addresses problematic use, he said interventions should consider underlying mental health concerns.
“There are technological fixes, but because mental health — poor mental health — is such a trigger or a risk factor, then if we only intervene with the technology, it doesn’t really get to the root of the problem,” Elhai said.
